Working in an office can be chaotic. Contending with the demands of clients, your co-workers, and your bosses can be taxing to most people, but when you combine that with a workspace that is disorganized, you may feel like you’re facing absolute bedlam.
Improving your office workflow is often a multi-pronged effort. To that effect, we’ve got three ways you can improve your office’s workflow and organization below!
Get digitally organized
Having a physically disorganized office can be a nightmare (and an eyesore that can negatively affect your career), but things start to get really dodgy when you this disorganization becomes digital.
Most companies’ important files are now stored online and most transfers of documents are all done electronically. Not only is this method faster, more convenient and much cheaper than paper, it’s also often safer. Encryption of online documents is now incredibly robust and can provide with much more secure tracking, delivery and protection of sensitive documents than paper ever could.
However, none of that will help you if you lose the documents or don’t send them on time. If you deal with any kind of sensitive documents (as most companies now do) or legal documents, using a legal software that helps organize your contacts, files, deadlines, tasks and calendars all in one place will do wonders for helping your office achieve some much needed organization.
Clean up your office and your schedule
When you are organized, you will notice many benefits. Not only will the amount of time you spend looking for things decrease, your stress levels will as well. Organized spaces help control both physical and mental clutter and have been shown to lower cortisol (the stress hormone) and make your more efficient.
Speaking of efficiency, organizing your office by sorting old documents and taking out the recycling is only half the battle. It’s also important to schedule your time appropriately. Understanding how long certain tasks will take, when they’re expected of you, and what you will need to accomplish them will not only increase your productivity, but will also make you more trustworthy as en employee.
Analyze results
Any office looking to make drastic changes need to consider not only how they will implement the changes and train employees on the new expectations, but also how they will analyze the results of the change. Implementing change with no clear goal or way of understanding the benefits (or failings) of the changes will only result in more issues down the road.
Instead, evaluate the work processes or software put into place and discuss with users and employees what they feel was beneficial and what may have actually hampered them in completing their work.
There are many times that offices or companies implement changes to processes in the hopes of streamlining things, only to find months later that the affected employees loathe the change and find that it hinders their productivity. This is often seen with badly researched or quickly implemented software that may prove to have more negative than positive benefits.