Why does clutter in your
office matter?
Because it’s costing you money and credibility with
your clients
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| Before... | ...and After. |
See how do you score on the following scenarios
You’ve got your work appraisal coming up. As you review your objectives from last year (no one actually reads them in-between, do they?!), you realise that one of your objectives was to ‘be tidier and more organised.’ You look at your desk and;
a) try to think of an excuse as to why you haven’t improved - a big project you’ve been involved in, a big change in the office, or blame someone else who’s been using your desk
b) realise that although your desk is tidier, you‚re not more organised because it's all hidden in your drawers, out of sight, and in truth you still can't find anything.
c) think ‘that’s one objective I can tick off the list to do’
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You’re in an interview for a job which would involve setting up an office at home. You are asked how you would manage the demands of running all the administration yourself without office support, and what steps you would take to ensure your procedures linked in with the head office. Do you:
a) Pretend you’re the most organised person that they could ever meet – it’s not like they’re ever going to see that you can’t even get in your spare room which you loosely call the ‘office’. You’ll just clear a space on the dining room table instead and work from there
b) You know which room you’ll have as your ‘office’, but you’ll just concentrate on the important thing of doing the job and then deal with any administration issues as and when the ‘moaning e-mail’ comes round.
c) You’re so confident of getting the job you’ve already put up shelves, ordered the desk and chair, and thought about how you’ll make time to do a little bit of admin each week to keep on top of it.
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At Christmas your office is open between Christmas and New Year, and you are one of very few people who choose to go into the office and work. Is this because:
a) It’s so quiet you can get loads of work done unlike the rest of the year
b) In theory so you can have a sort out, but as you begin to sort through my ‘in tray’ you find things that need dealing with so end up doing work instead of sorting things.
c) It’s a great time to have a clear out of your desk and files because the phone’s aren’t going, there are no meetings, and you can use other people’s desks to have a good sort out of paperwork
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SCORE:
Mainly A’s You’ve got clutter – and it’s taking over your life because you don’t want anyone to see it. You definitely need to sort out the clutter!
Mainly B’s You’re good at hiding the clutter from people, but confining it to one room or area isn’t going to help sort it out – clutter clearing might just help.
Mainly C’s Sounds like you already know how to clear your clutter and keep it under control – congratulations! Maybe you know, or live with some ‘mainly A’s and mainly B’s’ who could do with some help!
Why does clutter in our office matter?
……. because it’s costing you money and losing you credibility with your clients
There are 8 key effects your cluttered offices are having on you are your business:
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What do you think every morning as you get into work and enter your office? What do you see? How does it make you feel? What would it do for you if you could clear your clutter in just a week?
You’ve probably become so used to seeing the clutter that you don’t really see it any more, it’s just how it is. But be aware that your clients and, more importantly, prospective clients who you’re trying to impress, see the clutter more clearly than you do. They don’t have to live with it every day, or work around it. It’s not part of their ‘normal’ environment. If you have clutter on your desk it’s causing a physical barrier between you and the other person. How might that make the other person feel?
1) Your clients
Imagine one of your clients calls to say that they were going to be in your area this-afternoon and would like to drop into the office to discuss a project with you.
Would you feel confident about that
client coming to, and seeing your office?
Would you make sure that the conference room was available
so that the client wouldn’t have to sit in your
own office?
Imagine that client arrived and you had booked a conference room.
What would that client see on the way
from reception to the conference room?
What might that client think about your company’s
attitude to doing a perfect job with attention to detail
on his project?
What could that client feel about how seriously you take
your work?
What would you think if you walked into a major clients company and it looked like your office? Would your opinion of them change?
What do your employees think about the
clutter in your office?
Is it possible that it is having a negative effect on
their creativity?
As a professional company you know how important first impressions and image are – it’s hard to sell a product or service without a clear and professional image, and you never get a second chance to make a first impression. You spend a lot of time thinking about your clients image, but do you spend enough time on your image?
2) Your Insurance
It’s not just clients who may be making judgements about you because of your clutter. When your building insurance inspector comes to assess your building each year, his decision about the premium you pay will be affected by the clutter.
Why?
The amount of paper you have in your office is a fire risk – fire would spread very quickly. If your paper was just organised and sorted so that it could be stored in fire resistant or lockable plastic filing cabinets, fire wouldn’t be able to travel as quickly through the building. Furthermore, if the fire spread to other offices in the building and the fire report identified your office as the place where the fire spread the quickest, this could lead to claims from other companies against you because you did not take reasonable preventative action to reduce the risk of a fire spreading throughout the building.
Insurance inspectors, both buildings and other, will be asking themselves questions like:
- how much of the building could be destroyed by fire before the fire brigade arrive?’ i.e. the more than can be destroyed, the higher the insurance claim.
- Would an employee be able to quickly and easily find the fire extinguisher?
- Would an employee be able to quickly and safely get out of the building without tripping up?
- How much damage could be done between identifying the fire and getting to it with a fire extinguisher?
- If there was a fire, how much of the company’s business would be lost? Therefore what is the risk of the business being unable to operate for a given period of time and what’s the level of risk of it going bust?
3) Health and Safety
You are required to provide your staff with a safe working environment, minimising any health and safety issues.
Piles of paper are a trip hazard, block out light to desks and may cause injury by falling off cupboards and shelving units. Boxes and clutter kept under desks are a potential trip hazard. Regulations state that a given amount of clear space should be provided on and around desks to enable a safe and comfortable working environment.
4) Inefficient Use of Space
If you cleared your clutter you may be able to rent out the spare space. Did you know that:
- People determine the value of a space by the floor space that is visible.
- People pay more for clean, bright, airy space than cluttered, dark, stuffy space.
- Your spare space will be more valuable if those you sub-let it to have to walk through a clear, bright, professional looking office to get to their space.
- Remember, any tenants may bring clients into their space which they have to access through you space. Could their clients potentially be your clients? If they’ve seen your offices, would they seriously consider commissioning you?
It’s not just the space you could sub-let which is being used inefficiently.
- How many places are there where stationary is kept?
- Where are samples kept? In more than one place?
- Where are client files kept?
- If I wanted to find some information on products, or a book on a particular topic, could I easily find it?
- If I joined your company, would another employee be able to tell me easily and quickly how jobs are filed, where to find reference material, how things are updated?
5) Time
How much time to you spend, on average, looking for a given document before you give up and print off another copy, or phone up for another to be sent in the post? What reasons do you have for not having the original? Do you have to tell clients who call up that you’ll call them back, because you can’t find the right paperwork or items to be able to discuss the project at that time?
All of the above will be increasing your time spent on a project, AND your costs, both in terms of your time and phone bills, paper (if you have to print another copy off because you can’t find the original), printer cartridges, electricity etc. It may only be a very small cost each time, but multiplied by the number of times that you have to do this, it all adds up. Can you afford to waste this money?
The longer it takes to find something, the more inefficient you are. What’s the opportunity cost to your business?
6) Efficiency
How much of your clutter is multiple copies of the same thing? You probably keep all the copies because you don’t know where the other copies are. How much did you spend last year on paper and printer cartridges?
If you could cut stationary costs, or more specifically paper costs and printer cartridge costs by 20%, how much would you save?
7) Off Site Storage
Do you have off-site storage? Do you know what’s in it? How regularly do you go through it? If you cleared out your offices, could you store things in your office instead of off-site? If you could reduce your off-site storage by 10%, how much would you save in costs?
8) Your staff
Do your staff ever comment on the office? Maybe they just accept that that’s the way you’re office is. Is the clutter affecting their creativity? What impact might that be having on your quality of service?
By enabling your staff to clear their clutter AND learn how to keep it under control in the future, you are providing them with tools and knowledge that can empower and encourage them. When people feel in control of their environment, they feel more comfortable being in that environment and have the space to concentrate on the important issues – like your clients and business. What would that do for your company?
Why get a Specialist Clutter Consultant?
Do you have the time to try to clear the clutter yourself? Do you know how, or where, to start? Can you do it on your own or do you need someone to show and help you clear it? Do you want to get it done as soon as possible because you don’t want this to be an ongoing issue?
A Specialist Clutter Consultant will;
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I believe that you already have all the resources and storage space you need in you office. All you need is to know HOW to clear the clutter.
What else could you do to clear your clutter?
1) Get a temp in to sort it?
The disadvantages of a temp
A temp would:
- cost approximately £500 per week for a basic admin/filing temp
- take at least 3 weeks to clear the clutter without assistance
- not remove rubbish from site
- not return to follow up for half a day 3 months later to see how things are going
- not have a clear process which they could then pass on to you
- be constantly asking the directors whether or not a given document was important or not
- not know what documents are important to you
- be unlikely to stay motivated, other than to make as much money as possible by staying as long as possible
Additional costs resulting from hiring a temp would include skip hire; returning temp help in the future when it gets out of control again; additional stationary costs resulting from having to print off documents that the temp has ‘thrown away’ thinking them not important; time wasted trying to find your documents because you don’t know if the temp has kept them; and if so where the temp has filed or stored them.
You don’t want a temp to throw away important documents – how would that make you look in front of the client?
2) ……..find the time yourself?
If it were that simple, wouldn’t you have done that already?
3) …….get someone in the office to address the issue?
Does anyone in the office realistically have enough time or know how to formulate a method and then ‘try’ it out on everyone? And would the rest of the office be willing to work with this person who was telling them what to do?
What the Clutter Clearing Consultancy
can do for you.
Clutter Clearing Consultancy can
provide whatever level of service is required and most
appropriate for your needs.
There are 3 options of service;
From option 1
- hands on one-to-one help with a clear improvement by
the end of day 3
to option 3
- enabling individuals to learn the process and clear
the clutter themselves.
Each option has different levels of requirements from
in terms of staff time – from one and a half hours
a day for 4 consecutive days per person on option 1, to
2 consecutive full days per person on option 3.
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here to find out more
The Clutter Clearing Consultancy can also provide in-house
training as part of CPD, or home visits to staff who work
from home. Whatever the need for your company, the Clutter
Clearing Consultancy can provide a tailor made service.
How Clutter Clearing Consultancy
can help you by providing:
1)
One-to-one Clutter Clearing Consultations for individuals
2) On-site Clutter Clearing assistance for offices
3) Relocation Cost Reduction Clutter Clearing Consulations
4) CPD training for staff
5) Home workers Clutter Clearing Consultations - help
in establishing an efficient and effective office at home
6) Office Management Processes and Procedure Review and
Recommendation consultations
The office
Maybe it’s your office that’s in chaos……
Do you work in a busy office? Maybe it’s open plan, or you have an office to yourself. Maybe your PA or secretary can’t sort through your personal files for you, or is always telling you to tidy up or follow a simple system so she can find things. Maybe you don’t have the luxury of a secretary to do it for you and you have to try to keep it all under control yourself.
Maybe you work from home, and because you’re so busy you don’t have time to do filing, sort out your expenses, deal with mundane day-to-day paperwork because you’re too busy ‘getting on with work’. You leave it until you have to do it – maybe it’s the VAT, tax return, audit’s or deadline e-mails sent by the finance department that are your time for sorting these things.
Imagine………
- if you knew exactly where a
particular piece of paper was
- Expenses were always completed
on time
- When your boss asks you for
your monthly report you know exactly where it is, you
don’t have to put in extra hours to write it because
you just haven’t had time
- An existing or potential client asks for information about your company you can send it out immediately instead of having to put it off until later.
Would it save you time? Would it reduce your stress levels? Would it make you look good in front of the boss or client and give you a better chance of promotion or winning new clients and work?
Sorting through the clutter at work, whether it’s a busy office or an office at home can help you become more efficient, which can save you time, help you spend more time on the ‘important’ things, and maybe even give you a reputation as the ‘organised’ one. In some cases it can even help your prospects of promotion.
Not just you who has a problem with clutter at work?
Maybe your whole office needs clutter clearing. Maybe you’ve tried to get your colleagues to see the importance of being tidy and organised, but they’re just not listening. Maybe independent advice may make all the difference.
Clutter Clearing Consultancy offers advice on office clutter clearing and organising. Special rates apply depending on the size of the office, number of people involved and time required.
Interested? Wonder what’s involved? Want to find out more?
WHATS INVOLVED? WHAT IS A CLUTTER CLEARING CONSULTATION?
Do you have someone in the office ‘responsible’ for doing all the filing? It probably doesn’t work. You become reliant on that one person finding files again when you can’t find it, even though they claim it’s a ‘simple and easy to use system’.
Even having time dedicated to clearing the office clutter doesn’t work in practice because the phone and e-mail always interrupt or distract you.
Having a ‘clear desk’ policy is often impractical and unrealistic, in part because of the new habit rule. A ‘clear desk policy’ usually means ‘hide all your unsightly papers and files in your drawers and filing cabinets at the end of the day’.
How many times has your company or office had a ‘working group’ to look at finding a solution to a particular problem, but been unable to implement the findings because no one else in the company or on the project agrees with your recommendations, or has the time to implement and learn them?
Maybe enabling people to
find their own reason and solutions to keeping their desks
and offices clutter free
would make a difference…………
