Introduction
A messy office isn’t great for anyone. It isn’t great for the employees, the business, or the clients. A messy office also rings off alarm bells for investors and clients since it’s a reflection of how the business is run. To get your office cleaned, you can hire professionals by searching for “cleaning services near me”. Let’s check out the key factors leading to a mess in your office.
The Factors
- Sick employees – Sickness is a great factor that contributes to office untidiness. Sick employees can increase the unhygienic conditions in your office drastically. Even if one person has the flu, more will catch the contagious airborne disease within a day. The next day you may have 4 employees with the same sickness and within a week everyone may be affected.
Sick employees will fill up the bin with used tissues and then clutter their desks with the same. Since they are already having a hard time working, cleanliness will not be a priority and their surrounding space would become messy very quickly. Moreover, they also leave invisible germs and bacteria everywhere. So even if you have just one sick employee, it’s best to cut your losses short and give them some time off instead of allowing for a messy workspace and an office full of sick employees within a few days.
- Food – Spilt food is another large contributor to a messy office. It can render the office very unhygienic. Whether you use a canteen, kitchen, or grab your lunch at the desk, it’s important to keep the workspace free from food crumbs and beverage spills. Most businesses don’t see a significant portion of their employees leaving the workspace for the most part of the day.
When those employees have a culture of eating and drinking at their desks, it’s bound to create a messy desk with a greasy mouse and keyboard and smudges everywhere. Things get filthier with time since food crumbs can get into the crevices of mice and keyboards and accumulate there with disease-spreading bacteria. Even research shows that the average office keyboard has a lot more germs than the toilet seat.
To avoid a messy office due to spilled beverages and drinks, it’s important to allocate a separate space for lunch, snacks, and coffee breaks. While it keeps employees away from work for a while, it’s better than having a messy office. You need to actively discourage eating or drinking at desks or create a culture of employees cleaning their workspaces after their lunch.
You also need to make sure that communal fridges in the office pantry are cleared and items are arranged optimally to keep items with a shorter shelf-life at the front. This can help you reduce waste and avoid spoiled food from being consumed.
- Meetings – Meetings are very important in any office. Whether it’s a client meeting, a meeting to come up with new ideas, or a meeting to come up with new strategies. Meetings are certainly “in” and have everyone from regular team members, to managers, and people higher up the food chain. So, meeting rooms are generally cleaned thoroughly and kept in good condition since they always receive high traffic.
However, meeting rooms can become a very unhygienic space very quickly. For instance, there may be a group lunch during the meeting, paper waste, models, and other things that may contribute to clutter. You can’t afford to have the meeting or conference room looking messy since it’s the space that gets a lot of attention from clients and external parties. A messy meeting room may be viewed as a sign of unprofessionalism and poor hygiene standards of the place.
To keep your meeting room tidy and mess-free you have a few options. You can set up protocols to have the office staff clean up after themselves when the meeting is over. That means they can’t leave paper clutter, plates, or cups in the meeting room. You also need to get the meeting room professionally cleaned at least once a week to keep it in top condition.
- Paper – Paper is a big part of office life even when most things are done on the computer or some other digital platform. From notes to files, you have to deal with a large stack of papers on a regular basis. If left unchecked, paper can become the primary source of clutter in any office. They can make your space messy and if they pile up, you won’t even know what’s in the middle or at the bottom of the pile. However, you may need it.
When there’s so much paper clutter, it can cut down the efficiency and productivity of your employees by half. They’ll be left sorting out the mess whenever they need an important document and waste a lot of time when the space is messy. Moreover, a lot of paper trash adds innumerable distractions all around you and keeps you from focusing on your work. It also creates a very stressful and demotivating environment.
To keep your office space as clean as possible, research and invest in a filing system that works for your business. An efficient filing system keeps everything in order since it has extensive sections for the documents and encourages everyone to keep the documents and files in their place after it has been used.
You also need to motivate your employees to take a couple of minutes every day to sort through their paper clutter. They should be able to identify what’s necessary and need to be at the desk and what needs to go to the trash. This also allows for easy cleanups.
Conclusion
No one likes a messy office. It creates a demotivating and negative environment and can contribute to more stress when you and your employees are trying to pull through urgent tasks, meetings, and assignments. You can get rid of a messy office by searching for “cleaning services near me” and hiring professionals fit for the job.
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