Boosting office productivity

Ever lost an important file or tried to take a phone message and you couldn’t find a pen that worked?

According to organisational consultant Peter Walsh – a regular on the Oprah show and in Australia in September for Dymo National Organising Week – most business people don’t realise how much they can increase their productivity by re-organising their office.

“One of the big problems, whether it is your home or your office, is that the first thing people ask is ‘what do I need for my office – do I need a fax machine, or a big desk, or a certain chair?’ – but it’s the wrong question,” Walsh explained.

“The first question you have to ask yourself is ‘what do I want from my office?’ or ‘what do I want from my job?’, because that becomes the starting point for how you set up your career and your office and what you commit time and money and energy and space to.

“You might want a space where you can work quietly, or a space where you can do research, a place to store files, a space to bring in creative collaborators. “Similarly, you need to look at your job from a higher level. You will want money, you might want reward, satisfaction or a balance between home and your job.”

The next step is to look at your office and work out how you can best achieve what you want from it.

“If you want a place where you can work quietly, that will determine where you place your office desk,” he added.

“If you want somewhere where you can bring in collaborators then it means you need to have a room that is large enough for a big desk or desks. You will also need the mechanical stuff of your job at hand – your computer, pens and files, for example – so you can do the job you want.”

While you are organising your office, make sure your career is organised as well, Walsh advised.

“If you want money and satisfaction and challenge, then you need to make sure that the job you pursue has a strong career path, that you have a strong mentor, that there is passion for you in the job rather than just the daily grind,” he explained.

“If you don’t find those things in the job you seek, you will never get from your job what you want.”

Walsh said most of his advice was plain common sense.

“If you have a clear, open and well functioning workspace, you will do better than the bloke down the road who is struggling in crap and can’t find a piece of paper to save his life,” he said.

The main reason for a poorly designed office is often that people will leave their desk the way it was set up when they started work.

“We usually inherit our workspace,” Walsh explained.

“It’s like if you ask people why their dinner plates are in a particular cupboard in the kitchen and most people will say that they don’t have a clue – they just remember putting them in the only open space they could find on the day they moved in.

“It’s kind of like that with your office. Most people inherit an office and think about what they need to make a space look great rather than stopping and thinking about how the space will work best for them. It is very easy to get into styles of work without reassessing your work style on a regular basis.”

But will re-organising your office actually help you generate wealth?

“Anyone who has ever had an assistant, or has brought in an intern, knows that moment when you think ‘I could do this quicker if I just did it myself’ rather than delegating,” Walsh responded.

“But you do delegate, because over time it means that you will have to do less work. [You should have] a day taken at the start of a quarter to re-arrange your office, 10 minutes at the end of the day to organise tomorrow and a day once a year when the whole office purges their files and clears all the waste out of the office.

“It is very much a point of physical and mental wellbeing – if your staff are feeling like they are on top of their jobs makes them feel far more motivated and proud of doing it.

“I think taking that amount of time, which some would say is a hit in productivity, returns investment multiple times, because it means that you have invested in the organisation of the office and the better functioning of the office.”

How to do it

Divide your office into zones. Set up some really clear zones in your office so that the functions you go through each day are clearly defined. That may be filing, emailing, researching, assembling projects, meetings or whatever. The objective is then to make sure that the stuff you need for that particular activity is located in that area. For example, the stuff you need for your research is in a bookcase, or the files you need are in a specific area. It sounds lame, but it really helps you delineate space in your office and assign space for each function.

It’s really important to avoid paper clutter. I don’t know who coined the term a ‘paperless office’, but it is total rubbish as far as I am concerned. The management of paper continues to be critical, so you need to have on your desk clearly labelled and obvious areas for specific projects or papers. It is as simple as an in-out tray, an area for mail and a clear area for files - one close at hand with all the active files that you work on and then one not so close with files that are archived.

Think of your desk in terms of driving your car. Your desk is like the dashboard. If you imagine yourself sitting in the car, at arms length is everything that you need – steering wheel, indicators, radio, lights, window controls. Slightly outside of your reach are things that you need regularly but less often – for example you have to reach to get to the glovebox. Think of your desk in the same way as you think of driving your car – if you sit at your desk and put your arm out in front of you, the arc of the length of your arm should cover everything that you need on a regular basis. It is as simple as that. Your phone, your keyboard, major files, whatever it is that you need constantly should be there, and then one reach outside that arc should have things that you use regularly but less frequently; staplers, sticky tape, files that you only access once a week. It is up to you to customise your desk so it is like the dashboard of your car.

Every day, set aside non-interruptible work time. You need to define a specific period of the day when you absolutely cannot be disturbed. Set aside an hour or two. At one of the companies I ran, on everybody’s desk there was a stick painted half-red and half-green. If you went up to someone’s desk and the red end was pointing out of their pencil cup, you knew that you could not interrupt that person. If you do this it gives you an uninterrupted amount of time when your attention is completely undivided and you will power through stuff really easily.

The single most important time of the day is the 10 minutes before you go home. If you spend that last 10 minutes clearing your desktop and making a list of things to do the next day, setting up stuff for first thing tomorrow morning, you will find that when you come in the following morning you will hit the ground already running. To save 10 minutes for clean up at the end of the day increases productivity amazingly.