Spring is traditionally a time of rebirth and renewal, which has inspired the tradition of spring cleaning - starting fresh and organized after long months of darkness and cold. While the home is the traditional target of spring cleaning, people spend enough time at the office to make some cleaning worth it. In this blog, we’ll go over the benefits of a clean office, as well as how to achieve one.
Why Your Office Should Be Clean
In today’s day and age, it is extremely rare for a business to operate completely without technology of any kind. This means that, if the technology was to suddenly to stop working, the business would have a large organizational problem. The end results: downtime and lost productivity.
However, the cleaner your solutions are kept in a well-cleaned environment, the better they will function. If your environment isn’t maintained, your technology will suffer, and your business will feel the effects. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to avoid these consequences through best practices, diligent cleaning, and organization.
Organizing Your Solutions
How well organized are your organization’s documents and files? A document organization solution can help keep these critical files in a cohesive and usable state, organized in an intuitive hierarchy with integrated access controls. Compare this option to the tired, old filing cabinets that took up valuable space, offering minimal security and no protection against disaster for your critical files. The benefits of abandoning physical documents and going paperless can save your business capital, as well as do some good for the environment.
Keeping Your Network and Workstations Shipshape
Don’t forget to check the state of your technology and the files and data they hold. There are plenty of things that could be cluttered and disorganized there that can be resolved fairly easily. This includes your email inbox.
It’s remarkably easy to let your email inbox just pile up and become disorganized. However, thanks to the existence of automated filters, organizing your inbox can become just as easy.
If your desktop is cluttered and filled with files that don’t belong in your company’s shared filing system, you can emulate that hierarchy for these files as well. Creating a system of folders allows you to organize any files that you have, while moving any that should be shared to the appropriate spot.
Good, Old-Fashioned Cleaning Up
Of course, if you’re spring cleaning your office, you should probably involve some physical cleaning, so you can enjoy the benefits discussed above. Try going over your workstation with some canned air and have an IT resource open up your computing device and do the same to the interior. IT should do the same to the rest of your network infrastructure. Check your cable management for dust as well, making any revisions to cut down on dust accumulation and the risk of causing a fall.
There’s also the opportunity to participate in some old-fashioned spring cleaning as well. Give the floors of the office a good polish, scrub out the bathroom, and dispose of anything in the break room refrigerator that is no longer recognizable. As a result, your office will be a healthier and more pleasant place to work, boosting your employees’ satisfaction and productivity.
Have any cleaning tips to share? Toss them in the comments and discuss!
