Spring Into A Better Work Environment
It’s been a particularly brutal winter for most of us, and we’ve been eager for Spring to arrive here at our home office in Lenexa, KS (just outside of Kansas City). The effects of the weather outside had a corresponding effect on our offices, with paperwork and other detritus seeming to pile up in accordance with the snow outside. However, with the weather turning from bleak to blooming, we found ourselves energized and eager to spruce up our work environments – and noticed a boost in our moods and productivity. Having experienced those benefits, we here at AccessDirect thought we’d share with you some of the ways we helped “spring clean” our office workspace and made our office a warmer, more welcoming environment.
Get Your Desk in Order
First things first: clear the space completely. The best way to get a clean start is to start with a clean slate. Remove everything that you can from your desktop surface and wipe it down to remove dust and any lingering bugs from cold and flu season. Now look at the items you’ve removed – what’s junk, what’s clutter, and what’s useful? Toss the junk and organize the clutter of your office into the necessary and unnecessary. Remove or store the unnecessary clutter somewhere other than your desk surface. Now consider what’s left and visualize the best places for those items. What supplies do you need close by? What can live in a drawer? As you begin to put everything in its new place, avoid just putting items somewhere for no reason – especially towards the end of this project, as your enthusiasm wanes.
Organize Your Inbox
It’s easy to neglect your email (even though you use it every day), but over time that can lead to an ever-expanding inbox, full of old items you’ve taken care of and some you may have missed due to the clutter. Organizing your inbox can do wonders for your productivity and your sense of accomplishment – after all, you feel better when you’re at Inbox Zero. Here’s a quick way to get your email account in better shape:
- Step 1: Toss out the junk. Start deleting or archiving messages you no longer need, like social media alerts, newsletters, old event invitations or notifications, and emails that don’t need to be saved. You can accelerate this task by taking advantage of the search option in your email client.
- Step 2: Get Organized. Start organizing the messages you need to keep and group them together. Once you’ve found some common themes or contact groups, make a folder to keep them all together – but out of your main inbox. If you’re feeling more adventurous, utilize labels or categories as well.
- Step 3: Update Your Settings. Now that you’ve done the hard work of organizing your emails, take it one step further and create settings to automatically filter new messages that belong to a specific folder or category to that area. This will save you time going forward and help ensure that you stay organized in the future.
Back Up Your Computer
This is a basic practice that we should all be doing more regularly, but rarely actively do. This is a perfect time to get yourself an external hard drive (which are more affordable than ever before) or use a cloud service to back up your data. Make sure that you’ll be prepared should catastrophe strike.
Clean Up Your Cables
An unavoidable byproduct of the modern office is excessive cabling. The cords are an eyesore, seemingly everywhere, and typically longer than you need. But if you’re willing to take a few minutes to practice good cord management, you can improve your situation. If you’ve got especially long cables, consider replacing them with a more appropriate length. Then utilize zip ties to keep them bound together, use a cable box or floor cable cover to hide them, or use another solution to get them out of your way and your view.
Update Your Phone Greetings
Your phone greetings are something that you can take for granted – once you’ve recorded them, you tend to forget about them. But this is a great time to take a listen to what your callers are hearing and consider sprucing them up or updating them with more relevant information. If you really want to know what’s working, ask a regular customer who uses your phone system often what their thoughts are.
If you’re an AccessDirect customer, you can update your greetings easily by emailing us the new script. Your updated greeting will be completed within a business day. Plus, when you let us take care of your greetings, you know you’re going to get a professional sounding product without spending any extra funds. We will record your greetings at no additional charge.
These are just a few quick and easy ways to spruce up your business with some easy spring cleaning. What do you do to smarten up your business? Be sure to let us know in the comments!
