The daily grind of a business owner or office manager likely involves juggling a number of competing priorities. This will range from scheduling staff rotas to determining where your next customer will come from. However, in the grand scheme of things (and with the recent surge toward flexible working hours), it’s easy to forget one crucial element that will keep your team happy, safe, and productive. What is that thing? Quite simply, it’s ensuring that your workplace is clean and organized. Not only is it often a legal requirement to keep a working environment sanitary, but numerous advantages lie beyond regulation. A clean, uncluttered workspace is more conducive to higher levels of productivity and efficiency, as well as resulting in dramatically reduced absenteeism due to sickness. You probably think that this all sounds amazing, but where exactly do you begin? This post will go over a few options you have at your disposal to ensure that your office cleanliness goes above and beyond what is required by law and makes your employees want to come into the office from home and reap the rewards of social interaction and collaboration that are severely lacking from the average Zoom call.
Conduct A Cleaning Audit
If you have your own office, it’s likely you understand the process of an audit! This task will help you to get to grips with just how bad things have reached (or how good they might be) and give you an outline of what needs to be done to get things in order. You have two choices when it comes to performing a cleanliness audit:
- Use your own team to go around the office
- Hire a professional company
If you have a particularly small office, are on a shoestring budget, and have a very close-knit team, you could opt for the first choice. However, in almost all other cases, hiring a professional cleaning agency to come in and take a look around will yield the best results. They will inform you of what’s required for removing the build-up of dust high up (a common occurrence in many open-plan offices), whether your HVAC system is up to code, how filthy your storage areas are, and much more. Furthermore, they can provide you with a comprehensive quote to complete all of the tasks they have advised you to complete. Once this audit is complete, you can move on to the following steps.
Hire A Cleaning Company To Perform The Initial Clean
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you get your report from the previous step and discover that your office is essentially an oversized petri dish waiting to affect your staff and cause all kinds of operational bottlenecks thanks to sick days. However, if you selected a reputable agency to perform the audit, you should also have received a quote to complete the cleaning tasks they recommend. You can either hire them immediately or get a couple of quotes to be sure. Just remember that, like any other business, the cheapest quote might not be the best option. This is a task that requires a high level of competency, knowledge, and equipment to complete appropriately. Nevertheless, a great cleaning company will ensure that no nook and cranny has been left uncleaned. For best results, it’s a good idea to hire them to clean your office regularly, which will keep things from degenerating a few weeks after they have left.
Implement A Recycling Program
Recycling should be part of your daily routine because it not only helps the environment but also keeps old paper from piling up. In order to achieve this, you need to encourage your team to use the correct bins for the suitable materials. This means investing in additional waste cans and hiring a company to pick up the recyclable materials, but it pays in the long run. You may also need to implement additional training to let your employees know what you expect of them and how to go about the job. If you are a medium-sized organization, it is also worthwhile including this training as part of your onboarding processes for new hires. If you and your staff have never recycled or disposed of waste correctly before, getting up to speed might take a while, but the results are entirely worth it. Your office will feel less clustered with paper, and it might even encourage staff to reduce the use of paper, saving you money in the process.
Assign Basic Cleaning Tasks To Employees
You should never expect your team to clean the office. It is your job as a business owner or manager to outsource this task to a professional agency in this industry. Your team should be laser-focused on doing the very best at their assigned tasks. However, that isn’t to say that you can’t tell them to perform basic cleaning functions. This could include keeping their workspaces tidy, washing up cups and mugs in the employee kitchen after use, providing them with antiseptic wet wipes to keep their keyboards grime-free, and so forth. Doing so will keep the office clean and create a much more manageable space to work in.
Organize Inventory And Supplies
An effective office is one that is organized, and by spending the time to get everything in order, you will massively enhance productivity. If you asked your employees how much time they spent looking for office supplies, stationery, and everything else they need to do their jobs, you would be surprised at how much time is often wasted on these mundane and non-productive tasks. Instead, you should treat your office like a well-oiled machine and ensure that you have designated spaces for everything and that everything is in its place. The more time you devote to getting this right (including training your staff to keep things organized), the more you will discover considerable gains in efficiency. The time saved on searching for stuff will be reinvested into productive, income-generating tasks, and you shouldn’t be surprised to see, at the end of the fiscal year, your bottom line looking far healthier than the previous year.
Although ensuring a clean and tidy office might be a regularity or contractual obligation, the more effort you put in, the more rewards you can reap. Following the tasks in this post will result in a significant increase in employee productivity and satisfaction for a relatively small investment.