Having an office that is consistently both clean and neat is incredibly important, and the effects that it will have are far more than purely aesthetic.
Our working environment contributes to our productivity (or lack thereof) in ways that we may struggle to understand; however, just because something is difficult to analytically quantify doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pay attention to it.
One way that a dirty and chaotic office will detrimentally affect productivity is simple – it wastes time. Our working days are a combination of searching for things, and then working on that thing.
The longer each search takes, whether you’re looking for a file or stapler, the less time there is to spend doing the actual brainwork, the analytical part of your job! A messy environment can make it incredibly difficult to find what you’re looking for, and can be immensely frustrating.
Workplaces often get messier the heavier the workload is, which leads to the workload becoming heavier, and the mess getting worse.
You can see where this is going, workload and mess can combine to create a rapidly deteriorating downwards spiral, from which there is seemingly no escape! In times like these, like in the lead-up to a big deadline, it’s important that the extra work of keeping the workplace clean isn’t heaped on top of the already significant job-specific tasks!
Outsourcing to a team of cleaning professionals makes your team feel like their needs are cared for, and will help them focus on the task at hand.
In addition to saving time, as stated in this article by the Harvard Business Review, research is starting to show that a dirty and untidy working environment has significant negative effects on our cognitive functions and behaviour! So, it’s not just office hygiene that is at stake!
It can be hard to put a number on the severity of the issue, but stress in the workplace cost businesses in America $190 billion in healthcare costs last year, and seeing as it has been shown that cluttered environments trigger stress, that statistic goes to show the significance of the issue.
The cleanliness of the workplace can have short and long-term effects on workers’ health! A lot of focus lately has been on the transmission of viral pathogens, specifically COVID-19. This is an ongoing issue, and will remain so for some time to come it seems. Another way that a messy working environment affects the health of workers is through stress!
The hormone responsible for stress, cortisol, is shown to cause mental health issues such as depression and anxiety when present over prolonged periods of time.
Having a consistently messy workplace can thus affect more than ‘just’ the physical health of its occupants! Now we’ve looked at how important a clean and neat office is, let’s look at our 25 steps to keeping it that way.
This may sound overly simple, but if you want people to clean up after themselves, you need to make it easier for them! It’s no good having one tiny bin per floor, as it’ll fill up too quickly, and if someone works on the other side of the office, they won’t bother using it.
Have well-designed, discreet yet functional recycling and rubbish disposal points spread out at easily accessible points across the office, and it’ll encourage people to clear up as they go along, rather than letting wrappers and apple cores build up throughout the day!
It may be a good idea to put up posters to remind people to stay clean, but if you put one up and just leave it, the effect may not be sustained.
People stop noticing things which are there in front of them all the time, so if you want the posters to remain effective, try changing the design once a month; to engage the whole office and cut design costs, you could even do a competition each month for the best or funniest design! People ignore boring repetitive messages, so make it fun.
To make sustainable change, you need to make it part of the company culture. To keep the office clean should be a group effort, and it shouldn’t be something that has to be coerced through rewards and punishment.
Changing company culture takes time, but is incredibly effective when done well. Changing the office culture to keep it clean is more than just about cleanliness, it’s about promoting respect for the working environment; that respect goes beyond cleaning up crumbs, and fits into a bigger picture of company values.
While you can ask your employees to throw away their own rubbish, it’s not appropriate in most office settings to ask them to do more in depth cleaning. Your staff should be focused on the work that you’ve hired them to do – asking them to mop often won’t be part of their role description!
Outsourcing to trained teams of professionals will also be more efficient, and save you money; cleaning professionals after all clean for a living, and will get the job done both quicker and more effectively than any non-professional cleaner could manage.
The easiest way of staying on top of messiness and dirt is through not allowing it to develop to a bad state in the first place. Cleaning once a week often isn’t enough; as well as encouraging your workers to clean up after themselves as they go along, you should have a cleaning team go through the office at the end of each working day.
That way, grime and bacteria don’t have the chance to build up, and when it comes to your fortnightly or monthly deep clean, there really isn’t that much to do! The saying that prevention is better than cure clearly stands true with office cleaning.
A lot of the ‘stuff’ that builds up around the office is essentially stacks of unnecessary paperwork. That’s not to say that what’s written isn’t needed, just that it doesn’t necessarily have to be disseminated on paper.
Where you can, send messages out via email or whichever communication software your office uses; not only will you end up with less piles hanging around everywhere, you’ll be saving the planet and saving money on printers, printer ink, and paper! The paper that you do use should be recycled in those easily accessible recycling points we mentioned earlier.
In addition to regular cleaning, you’ll want to make sure that deep cleans are carried out every fortnight or once a month.
For desk spaces, you may want to ask the user of each desk to clean their area; if an external cleaning team does it, they could accidentally throw away important paperwork, or otherwise misplace precious personal items.
Communal areas like the kitchen, toilets, and conference rooms however can be tackled by cleaning teams; they can make sure to empty cupboards, get into all the corners, and leave everything spotless. With the regular cleaning we mentioned before, there shouldn’t be an awful lot to do!
One often overlooked aspect of keeping a clean office is designing it well in the first place. If a desk has a dense jungle of wires behind the monitor, and little dead spaces which are hard or impossible to reach, those areas will likely go uncleaned for a long long time – staff won’t be bothered, and outsourced cleaners won’t want to unplug computers and risk damaging them!
When designing and planning your office, keep this in mind – it’s all part of the functionality of your desk spaces, and certainly shouldn’t be ignored.
This can be done much less regularly than even deep cleans, but it needs to be done nonetheless. Make sure that you go through your inventory and check that you’re not storing anything that you will no longer need.
That could be ink for printers that you’ve since replaced, or stacks of outdated posters for last year’s Christmas party. These things easily and quickly build-up, so it’s important to keep on top of them – just because they were once useful, doesn’t mean that they don’t contribute to office clutter and mess!
Another interesting collection of items that can rapidly build up are piles of pens! No one quite knows how they appear, but one second you have none, and the next thing you know there are 20 or 30 spread over your desk, like a weird stationary javelin competition.
The chances are, approximately none of the pens work, but you’ve grown accustomed to them being there, and can’t be bothered to go through them all. The simplest solution here is to get rid of anything that wasn’t bought or given to you as a gift – obviously don’t throw away a nice Mont Blanc, but a biro from the Hilton? You know what to do.
It can be easy to treat your desk surface as just another storage space, but that’s not really what it’s for. The purpose of your desk is to have a clean and effective space to work on – to spread out your tasks for that day, and work through them.
You should only have the things that are directly relevant to the task at hand in front of you, everything else should be in an appropriate storage space like a drawer! To keep this up requires a slight change in mentality, but the positive effect that it will have on your ability to concentrate will be significant.
This is something that both staff and the cleaning team need to keep on top of. In the desk areas, each person will probably want to dust their own things, making sure to be really careful with places like their computer keyboards.
Dust is the silent enemy, and you might not notice it until it’s gotten quite bad; as with all cleaning, keeping on top of it is key, you should definitely be dusting before you can actually see the dust!
If you cycle or run to work, or if there are shower facilities available, you may be one of those people who ends up leaving several wardrobes worth of clothes laying around the office. In a few words, please don’t be that person!
If you know of another culprit who’s prone to leaving their clothes all over the place, have a word with them – the office is a workplace, not somewhere to store your gym wear. It’s all part of treating the office with respect, and respecting the people that have to share the space with you.
While this may not go down well with some companies, it is a good way to minimise mess in the office! It’s a slightly more European approach, but if you can encourage people to take a proper lunch break, and either eat in a dining area or go out to eat, several benefits will follow.
By dedicating a set time for food, while you lose an hour or so of working time, you make the rest of the day completely dedicated to work. It also means that all the mess created by eating and making food is kept out of the office, which makes cleaning significantly easier!
Keeping the office tidy is one thing, but keeping it clean and safe is another story. While keeping everything tidy and in its place is a prerequisite to cleaning properly, it’s not an alternative; once all the pens are in their place and the stacks of paper are gone, you need to make sure that you disinfect, and to do it regularly!
It’s always important to keep on top of germs, but it’s especially important during the current COVID-19 situation! Be vigilant with your spray, you might not be able to see the viruses, but the health impact is far more significant than some crumbs.
One great way to encourage people to be clean is to hold fun competitions. You could do this weekly, and have the prize as something fun like a meal out! To win the prize, your staff would have to have the cleanest desk in the office.
Sure, some people wouldn’t participate, but a lot would, especially when they realise that they’re the ones who are really benefiting by having a clean workspace! Plus, I don’t know many people who aren’t incentivised by free food.
This plays into the digitisation theme. Most paper documents can be scanned and then organised efficiently online, which then means the original (unless it needs to be kept for legal reasons) can be safely disposed of!
Not only does this save space and neaten up the office, it makes it far easier to find and share documents. Wading your way through company archives is never a fun task, it’s so much easier to be able to tap some keys, and it saves time and energy.
In addition to having plenty of communal waste disposal points, make sure that each desk has its own little rubbish bin. This way, there’s literally no excuse not to dispose of your rubbish immediately; what’s important with these personal bins is making sure that they’re emptied regularly, preferably once a day.
They can be easily forgotten, kicked far back under the desk, and only pulled back into the daylight when the smell gets unbearable. Don’t let that happen, no one wants to have to scrape banana peels out from the bottom of your bin!
This plays into the point about having well-designed desk spaces.
The only electrical items that should be visible should be the ones you’re using every day – your monitor, keyboard, and maybe a phone. Everything else is not only distracting, but also essentially clutter! Having a bunch of hard drives and that disk reader you use once a year at Easter all laying on your desk 24/7 isn’t necessary.
You should have appropriate storage options so that they’re both out of the way and accessible – out of sight, out of mind, and out of reach of dust!
This can be a tricky one, as if it’s not managed well, it can create more problems than it solves. However, a great way to keep the main office area cleaner and neater is by giving employees lockers to put their things in.
That means that there won’t be bags and coats hanging off of every single chair in sight, and there will be far fewer distractions! You’ll need to make sure that lockers are regularly cleaned out though, which is hard to enforce. We were all at school once, and I’m sure most of us can remember the incredible messes that can accrue in cubby holes, so be warned!
Nowadays more than ever before, we have countless items we use each day that need charging. Kindles, headphones, phones, laptops, the list is endless, and each device often requires a different cable to charge it.
If this isn’t organised well it can quickly develop into a tangled jungle all of its own! Having a dedicated charging station is a must, and a great way to do that is to have it all contained in its own drawer.
Little organisation trays may seem gimmicky, but like a lot of things, if they’re used properly, they can also be incredibly effective.
You can have one on your desk for coins, keys, and pens, and can also put them into one or two of your draws if you’re feeling particularly inspired.
However, just like lockers and cubby holes, they can quickly become pits of all the things you don’t want to sort out. Make sure you empty each tray every couple of weeks and get rid of everything that isn’t valuable or useful!
If you don’t outsource your cleaning, you’ll need to make sure that no one sidesteps their responsibilities.
There’s nothing worse than having some people take on the whole weight of all the cleaning tasks, in time it will breed resentment and lead to arguments. Make sure that everyone is pulling their weight with a good rota system that everyone has agreed to, and you’ll be on your way to having a clean, tidy, and happy workplace.
If you don’t want to print a new one each month, you can laminate the rota so that you can erase and remark it each week!
As with everything else in this world, not all cleaners are equally good at their job, and you want to get a team which suits your needs. It’s often better to pay a little more for a team that’s great at their job rather than just ok; you want them to respect the workplace, and to care for it a little, rather than just go through the motions of wiping and scrubbing.
Your workers will notice when the pictures on their desks are cleaned and the coffee tub is refilled in the kitchen – it’s the little things that stand out!
One space that often gets slightly neglected during office cleaning planning is the bathroom. Having a clean bathroom is important for several reasons.
Of course, a dirty toilet is disgusting and a health hazard, but the importance of keeping it clean extends beyond that. A nice, clean bathroom is perhaps equally nice to use as a dirty one is unpleasant to use; people remember that experience, and keeping them fresh and clean will lead to greater employee satisfaction, and greater retention rates.
It may sound silly, but it’s the little things that come together to create an overall positive experience!
If you’re interested in office cleaning services, we’d love to talk. Our team of expert cleaners provide deep office cleans, COVID cleaning and bespoke services to businesses of all sizes.
Contact our team today on 0161 282 6444 at your earliest convenience.
SMC Premier Group Ltd
117 – 119a Stockport Road
Stockport
SK3 0JE
0161 282 6444
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