Why You Need To Keep Your Office Clean and How

5 years ago | Posted in: Business | 876 Views

Office hygiene plays a huge role in the productivity of your staff. Cleanliness gives your workplace a positive work environment and makes a good impression to anyone who walks in. While this is the goal of every business, sometimes the importance of office hygiene gets overlooked. Below are some of the direct ways in which cleanliness impacts your business.

Health and safety

Health and safety are critical, and office hygiene contributes a lot to this. Employees spend an average of 8 hours at the office every single day. As such, phrases such as “I picked up a bug at the office” or “there is a flu going around the office” are quite common.

Get this; workplace equipment can be 400 times dirtier than the average toilet seat. These provide the optimal conditions for microbes. When you factor in the dusty files from ten years ago, trinkets, old corporate giveaways that are long forgotten about, there’s a lot of dirt and germs floating around the office. This may result in regular illnesses which may lead to increased absenteeism affecting productivity.

Aesthetics and professionalism

Your office hosts a significant number of visitors in terms of clients, candidates coming in for job interviews, suppliers, and business associates. The impression they have of you will be partially pegged on our office. And this goes beyond expensive furniture and modern office design.

Anyone walking into your office will notice dusty surfaces, hanging wires as well as files and equipment busting out of overly full shelves. This shows a degree of disorganization and may be translated as incompetence.

An untidy cluttered space communicates negatively about you. A clean office and workspace convey professionalism and reliability. Whatever line of business you are in, these are two qualities you want to be known for.

Again, employees today are also looking for more than just salaries and benefits. For this reason, entrenching cleanliness and order as a workplace culture can add a few points to your employee retention rate.

Productivity

77% of Americans believe that clutter affects their efficiency. When you think about, it does ring true. Focusing on tasks on a cluttered desk is difficult. Again, the time wasted in looking for this document, or a file can add up at the end of the year.

According to a study by the International Data Corporation, businesses lose $2.5 million a year searching for lost documents alone. These are astounding figures. Think about how much of this is lost within your company.

That is not all. Each time you interrupt activity to find something, you lose concentration and more time is wasted trying to readjust and get back your train of thought.

A clean, organized workspace facilitates concentration and enhances creativity, which in turn positively affects your bottom line.

How do to get organized

Declutter regularly

You will be surprised at the number of items kept in offices that add no value. These include old files, broken equipment, old furniture, old promotional items and so on.

For these, consider looking into a storage space close to your office. You might ask yourself “why is it important to find storage units near me?” The main reason is that you need to be able to access your items quickly and cheaply when the need arises.

Engrain it in your culture

Make cleanliness a culture at your workplace. Include it in your employee handbook, mention it during induction and in-house training and so on. This should be geared towards encouraging each person to take responsibility for their workspace. Each effort goes a long way into ensuring a clean workplace.

Cleaning services

Having professional cleaning services come in from time to time. This can cover the common and hard to reach areas of your office. They will also include the more complex cleaning tasks like vacuuming and fumigation services which employees cannot manage.

Now that the link between a clean work environment and profitability is clear, implement some of these suggestions, and you just might improve your bottom line.

 

Bio:  Jeremy is a tech and business writer from Simi Valley, CA. He’s worked for Adobe, Google, and himself. He lives for success stories, and hopes to be one someday.

Share it.

Leave a Reply

Related Posts