Our office is a pigsty! Help!

Our office is a pigsty. We have “clean the office days” once a quarter where we play loud music and follow it up with lunch. But how do I get the staff – mostly Gen Ys – to clean up all the time instead of once a quarter?

Many businesses would not even have a “clean the office day” – it sounds like a fun teambuilding day.

To have a clean tidy office on a regular basis requires a strategic approach to making it part of the culture. And the person leading the approach, as well as the senior leaders, need to be great examples because if the behaviour is not role modeled from the top, it is unlikely to be something others will do.

Sometimes the tidiness of an office is often a reflection of the stress levels and consequently has an impact on the motivation of the people in that office.

If your office is on view to the public, or even if there are meetings that require outsiders to come into your business, it sends a very powerful message when they walk in seeing a pigsty.

So the first thing to do is work out the reasons for wanting it to be clean and organised. And these reasons will likely be:

• Professional appearance.
• Organised and therefore more efficient.
• Service oriented – things at fingertips.
• Relaxing atmosphere – not stressful.
• Safety – less hazardous.
• Protection of privacy when personal details/files are being used.
• Moving to a paperless office.

Create a vision or goal for the staff that this is the way we are going to operate. It may need some words, eg. “we are an efficient streamlined business and we want our appearance to reflect that”.

Then be specific about what this means for everyone – at a departmental level, team level and individual workspace level. It needs to be such that individuals can have some personalised aspects to their workspace, but that there are agreed standards, for example:

• The way in which things are affixed to walls and partitions – if at all.
• The use or prohibition of sticky notes all over walls, screens and desks.
• Type of folders, filing and storage at each workstation.
• Management of shared resources.
• Agreement about the way in which desks will be left at night (many businesses adopt a clean desk policy for the end of the day).
• Restricted printing and paper usage.
• Coffee cups and crockery management.

This may seem harsh but many years ago our office manager decreed these rules:

• No more paper lists stuck up on partitions.
• No more sticky notes around the office.
• No more storing of folders on top of cabinets.
• Clear desk at the end of each day.
• Standard black folders with typed spine labels of same sized font.

Those few rules created initial resistance and resentment among staff but the manager kept acknowledging how well people were doing with the new arrangement and told us to look around and see how nice the office looked, and especially to notice other workplaces and see how great ours was by comparison.

After a few days people accepted that this was the way it was going to be, and as the weeks went by, pride developed and it almost looked like a renovation had taken place. Those who were naturally tidy felt less stressed and people coming into the business would invariably comment on how wonderful our office appeared was “great office, must be fabulous to work here”.

That manager, Peter Walsh, then went off to America to run our LA office, which was always wonderfully ordered and tranquil! And now, not surprisingly, he is the guru of de-clutter on Oprah, working with hoarders to help them regain their lives, with many great books on how to de-clutter your life.

Eve Ash has a wide range of DVDs and books on managing stress and managing staff.