Spring has arrived — at least officially — and the new season brings an opportunity to freshen up your office to create a pleasant working and client-service environment.
An additional benefit to tackling your cleaning project now is you’ll have more free time to enjoy your summer, says Andrea Josey, a professional organizer and owner of H2O Happy 2 Organize in Halifax.
Josey shares four tips on organizing your office space:
1. Develop a retrieval system
Anyone can file paper, Josey says. But the key to a good system is being able to find the documents when you need them.
Remembering how you’ve filed your work is critical, so you should use seven or fewer categories. If those categories require you to be more specific, you can develop subcategories within those groups.
Your categories might include a marketing plan, client communications, client accounts and continuing education (CE). Within your CE folder, you can work with sub-folders, which specify the various designations you are pursuing or how you plan on attaining your CE credits.
You also must ensure that your team understands and agrees with the categories you use. If you refer to your newsletter as “marketing” while your assistant sees it as “client communication,” then locating certain items may be difficult.
2. Limit personal items
While you and your team want to have comfortable work spaces that remind you of home, you should limit the number of photos, mugs, and plants because these items take up valuable space.
After all, Josey says, your desk is “prime real estate.”
“You need to have enough space,” she says, “in order to spread out your paperwork and to work efficiently.”
Excess items are visual clutter that can cause your eyes to bounce all over the room and make you lose your focus. These distractions affect not only you and your team, Josey says, but also your clients.
Clients should walk into your office and see you or your team members, not your collection of knick-knacks.
So, find the compromise between creating a personal space and a professional one.
3. Clear your desk every day
Even if you haven’t finished your current project at the end of the day, put it in a file and store it in a drawer until you return the next day.
We tend to leave our work out because we plan to resume the following day. But life doesn’t always go according to plan.
“There may be a client waiting in the office when you walk in the [next] morning, so you can’t just pick up where you left off,” Josey says. “Then you’re scrambling to put things away.”
4. Design an inviting environment
Have your office space reflect your personal connections with clients by making it visually appealing and cozy.
Try out your furniture. Does it look clean and is it comfortable? Does your wall colour look fresh?
The solution could even be as simple as laying out a welcome mat at your front door.
Make it so your clients don’t feel that they’re walking into a cold office to talk about money.