A Clean Environment Offers Many Advantages

Spring seems to be the natural time to re-energize and stimulate your environment; why shouldn’t your organization also be included? Not only does it help your operations, a clean environment also offers many advantages for your employees.

Why You Should Keep Your Technology Clean, Inside and Out
If your organization is like most, you rely on technology to manage the business. While your specific operations may utilize different solutions than one in another industry will, your technology is a vital component of your business. Thus, you need ensure sure that it can meet two criteria.

First, it must remain in proper working order. Secondly, it must be organized so that the resources you rely on it for are not difficult to access and use.

In order for these requirements to be met, your office technology needs attention to its physical components, and the information those components give you the ability to store, access, and edit. Moreover, an unkempt technology strategy can have some harmful effects to your overall productivity and even your overall success as an organization.

Advantages of Digital Office Organization
First, contemplate the state of your digital file storage. Is it organized adequately, with documents and resources saved in the correct folders, with proper labelling and an intuitive, hierarchical system? If it's not, it will benefit you to take the time and organize these files so that they can be found for reference more easily when needed.

This organization will enable you and your employees to locate the things you need more easily, which means you and your employees will be able to find them more quickly. This creates time savings that, while apparently insignificant when considered individually, can add up to be fairly significant after all. Secondly, taking the time to implement a filing system will also give you the opportunity to audit your old materials as you organize them into it. Perhaps some of them are due to be revisited and updated, and others are outdated to the point where they can be archived away or deleted safely. Going through your materials and making this call can easily save you some irritations in the future, and help build beneficial habits going forward.

If your clutter problem is at least partially due to your reliance on physical files that are stored in big filing cabinets around the office, you might consider adopting a digital file storage solution and starting off with this hierarchical system in place. This make sense from a financial standpoint (less paper files means less paper and ink to buy), and is also environmentally responsible, allowing you greater control over who in your company has access to specific files.

Organizing Your Inbox
We’ve all learned the difficult way how easy it is for a mess to accumulate and grow, and few places make that accumulation more visible than your email inbox. While you know that there are imperative messages mixed and buried in there, there’s also going to be plenty of conversations that you were privy to, but not really involved in, or incidents that have long since been resolved and no longer merit your attention.

Nevertheless, while these messages may not currently seem critical, there is always a chance that they will be at some point down the road. It is better to take messages like these and, similarly to your business data and files, construct a filing system to organize them in a place where they won’t pile up and potentially bury important emails.

Another strategy to contemplate: If your preferred email solution offers it, is to have messages that meet predetermined criteria automatically sent to a particular folder. Maybe emails with a certain word or phrase in the subject line are moved to one folder, while emails from a few specific contacts are sent to another folder. As a result: you know where you can find these emails later to refer back to them, and it helps keep your inbox from becoming too overcrowded.

Optimizing Your Desktop and Browser
There are many ways that your computer’s desktop can become a disorganized, overstuffed mess, and an equal amount of ways that the same can happen to your browser. Luckily, the same strategy that applies to your filing system and your email can also be implemented to the stuff you have cluttering your desktop.

How much of it needs to be stored in the shared company resources? These documents should be the first to take care of, moving them over to the appropriate file location. Once you’ve done that, you can construct another folder hierarchy that cleans up your desktop and organizes the jumbled materials into a logical and navigable system that suits you.

The same applies to the shortcuts and extensions that you have saved in your chosen browser. Try running an audit of your installed extensions and uninstall any that you don’t really utilize. The same goes for your bookmarks, which can be arranged into a hierarchical system or removed.

Even your computer’s start-up process can be optimized. Have IT assist you audit the programs that your computer runs during start up and remove any that aren't needed.

Clear Your Computer
A big aspect of keeping your technology clean means maintaining your workstations and servers, clearing dangerous dust buildup and making them look nice.

Your workstation (whether it's a desktop or laptop) is filled with fragile components that can easily be damaged by the static build-up a vacuum produces. Instead, you should utilize simple tools that will permit you to gently cleanse the exterior as needed, such as a can of compressed air to remove dust from your keyboard. There are specialty wipes available for purchase that are made specifically for electronics that are effective for a fast wipe-down. As a precaution, ensure that your device is powered down during the cleaning process, and that it is only powered up when completely dry.

When cleaning your monitor, avoid using liquid as much as possible, electing instead to use a microfiber cloth to wipe the screen down in a gentle manner.

You also want to request that IT occasionally open your device and tidy up a bit on the inside as well, removing the dust that will collect on the inside.

Cable Management
Few things seem as overwhelming as cables that are left to just splay everywhere. Not only does this make it easier for dust and debris to collect around your critical components, it just looks awful, sloppy, and unimpressive. Some basic cable management can quickly make a mass of cords and wires more discrete and more aesthetically pleasing, while also reducing a safety hazard in the office.

Cleaning the Office
 The phrase ‘spring cleaning’ is usually associated with giving your environment a solid, refreshing clean, and less about tending to technology necessities. This is also a very imperative activity, as it provides assorted advantages that will be discussed below.

Thus, in addition to seeing to your technology, go through the office and clean up as you would any other place of business. Clean the floors, the bathrooms, and fix up the employee break room, including the fridge. This may also be a good opportunity to consider redecorating and giving your office a refreshed new look to match its newly cleaned state.

Advantages to a Clean Office
Above, itt was referenced that there were numerous advantages to having a clean and organized office. These advantages range from providing a better workplace for your employees to staying compliant with numerous regulations.

First, a clean workplace means that your employees are able to enjoy more productivity than they would in one that is filled with clutter and chaos, and morale is higher in a clean workplace than in one that is dusty, grimy, and messy. Stress has been shown to be limited, and morale is markedly higher, as is an employee’s ability to focus on their tasks. Also, a clean workplace is one with less germs, which means that employees will have an easier time staying healthy.

There are also other people that you have to impress. Any clients or customers that visit your business will have what can be honestly considered a second chance at a first impression every time they visit. A disheveled and unorganized office can quickly put them in a negative mindset that only makes your job more difficult. Further, there are laws and regulations that require workplaces to be maintained to a certain standard for the benefit of an employee’s health and safety.

Also,you feel more motivated to spend a day in a nice, clean office, utilizing equipment and solutions that work well, rather than one that looks and feels busy and cluttered and is filled with grimy workstations.

What You Can Do 
Once your office is cleaned, you will want to maintain that standard. That’s why it is imperative to establish cleanliness and order as a part of your expectations of office culture, and encourage your employees to consider themselves accountable for their own area. Remind them that they represent the business just as much as the business represents them, and should always present and conduct themselves accordingly.

To help you get to that point, Macro Systems is here to help as well. We can apply our expertise to make many of the activities described above much easier to accomplish, speeding up your spring cleaning and helping you get back to your improved operations that much quicker. Call 703-359-9211 for more information.