5 Important Reasons to Work in a Clutter Free Office

Tidiness gives a good impression

Even if you don’t have a formal dress code, you still expect employees to turn up for work looking like they mean business. At a minimum, you expect them to pay attention to personal hygiene and grooming (at least from the waist up). The same logic should apply to your office and any related areas including (and especially) kitchens and bathrooms.

You may not plan to have clients over, let alone put your office on Instagram. You do, however, want to give a positive, professional, impression to anyone and everyone who walks through your door (or sees your background). This helps to ensure that you and your employees start the day on a good footing.

Clear surfaces create a feeling of calm

There is nothing mystical about this. It’s really basic common sense. If your surfaces are clean, that means there’s a place for everything and everything is in its place. That’s reassuring to know and helps people to feel calm at work.

For completeness, surfaces don’t have to be barren to be clear. In other words, there’s a significant difference between clutter and décor. What’s more, items can be both decorative and functional. This is particularly true in office environments.

Many businesses know that most office workers have limited space but still want to personalize it. That’s why you can find a huge range of desk accessories which are both practical and stylish. These items generally look their best on desks that are free of clutter. That way they get the attention they deserve.

Clutter can be a health and safety hazard

There are all kinds of ways in which clutter can become a health and safety hazard. For example, if items are left lying about, they can become a tripping hazard. If they are flammable (e.g. cardboard boxes), they can also become a fire hazard. Even if they’re not, they can become cover for other hazards including, and especially, vermin. Most pests have a strong preference for staying in hiding as much as they can.

Clutter on individual desks can make them difficult to clean. This is not just unpleasant, it can be dangerous. You don’t want to encourage any bacteria to lurk around, especially not COVID19. You also don’t want to encourage pests to visit a person’s desk for snacks.

Clutter can be a security hazard

All security is basically a combination of access control and monitoring. For this to work, you need to have clear oversight of exactly what is located exactly where. Then you can decide who needs access to these areas and monitor them to see if your access controls are breached.

If your office is full of clutter then you clearly don’t know exactly what is exactly where. You therefore can’t implement effective security. You’re also less likely to notice if something goes missing because you didn’t have an obvious place to look for it.

A clutter free office also includes good use of document storage, not just to prevent you from having to step over piles of paperwork but to also prevent unauthorised visitors from peeking at personal data or worse, stealing it. Secure document storage is highly recommended for any commercial office and should be implemented as soon as possible or at least when it comes to document retention time.

Clutter reduces efficiency

Last but definitely not least, clutter reduces efficiency. If an office is cluttered, everybody is likely to need to spend time looking for things instead of doing productive work. Even if only one desk is cluttered, that’s going to impact an employee’s productivity regardless of whether or not they’ll admit it.

In these situations, the key question is whether the employee’s desk is cluttered due to lack of storage or through their habits. When investigating this, remember to think about how easy or difficult it is to access storage. If storage is inconvenient, employees may come to see clutter as the lesser of two evils.