Organisation is widely known to enhance productivity; if your workload is well-managed, office space remains structured, and personal development efforts allow you to grow, then you’ll be on track to succeed and flourish. However, this isn’t only the responsibility of individual employees; there are indeed lots of things that employers can do too.
From engaging with employees to help them better organise their workloads to soundly organising the physical structure of the office space, utilising forward-thinking tech, identifying common organisation blunders, and more, there are many effective ways by which employers can ensure employees remain productive and happy. Kimberley Hutchinson, Brand Manager at Your Workspace, shares her insights and tips.
To help employees become more organised, they need to understand exactly how they can more effectively organise their workloads, with specific tools and strategies to hand. As organisation isn’t always simple, this can be achieved through training; explore popular organisation techniques, including categorisation, diarising, time estimation, group delegation, and more, to ensure everyone has the essential building blocks they need.
The first step to organising any space is reducing clutter. Desks inevitably collect unnecessary pieces of paper, files, and stationary, whilst your wider office space might be filled with furniture, décor, and other pieces of office ‘junk’ that leave the space feeling more enclosed. To be organised and productive, employees need a clean, clear working environment.
After de-cluttering, think about how you can more effectively organise your space. Ask yourself, what are you already implementing? How is your office already organised? What can you do better? If employees keep their belongings with them throughout the day and have limited floor space, tech-savvy smart lockers which keep their items in a delegated, well-managed space, can help.
Why clutter your office with excess furniture when you can invest in savvy two-pronged alternatives? ‘Sit and stand’ desks for example allow staff to work and present via the same base.
Think upwards: staff needn’t have bulky drawers next to every desk; storage walls are contemporary and effective, whilst they also force employees to consider what they’re filing and where each cupboard has a distinct function.
It’s important that employers engage with employees to identify why they might be struggling with organisation, seeing if there are any common denominators in the office. If there are, they’ll be easily fixable. An office-wide questionnaire can better identify everyone’s strengths and how best they would prefer to become more organised; everyone has different learning styles, strengths, and preferences that should be considered.