Is your office’s productivity down? Is your level of clutter, dirt, and mess up? These two are most definitely correlated. A clean workspace is key in encouraging a productive environment. Let’s talk about three of the main ways a clean workplace can impact an employee’s motivation.

1. Helps Employees Stay Focused

I am sure almost everyone would agree that an organized workspace leads to more work in less time. A few would say “I work better in clutter” or “Mess doesn’t bother me” and though that may be true but when you work in an office, your workspace has an influence on others. Especially in offices with open offices, cubical, or desks – one must be cognoscente of the fact that their mess could be lowering the overall productivity of the office. The excess stimulus from clutter is too much for most to handle without causing distraction. However, this is not just limited to clutter or disorganization. An unclean workplace can also provide distractions through unsuspecting ways. For example, employees could be losing motivation due to lingering dust and germs influencing their energy levels or causing health issues that we will focus on next. Low air quality is extremely common in dirty workplaces and has a number of side effects on employees who spend about one third of their life in their place of work.

2. Creates An Attitude of Respecting the Workplace

A clean business creates a sense of quality that a dirty business can destroy. If employee’s are embarrassed of the level of cleanliness in their workplace the chances of turnover, unhappiness, and disrespect to the company are much higher. A workplace not only encourages staff retention, happiness, and respect to the company – it also encourages good treatment of company property and materials which can also save you money. When an employee takes pride in their workplace, they will take pride in their work. Making them more motivated and overall more productive.

 3. Employee Health and Safety 

As you can see from the ISSA chart above, employee health and safety actually saves you money! What’s better than that?

An increase in cleanliness leads to an 80% reduction in catching the common cold, a 2-8% productivity increase, happier customers!

An employee’s health is impacted by a dirty or messy office place in a few ways; illness, mental health, injury, and more. A messy office with items laid about carelessly can lead to trips and falls – not only leaving a business at risk of low productivity by being down a team member but also at risk of a lawsuit! An ill employee will most likely lead to sick days which puts the company behind and stresses out other employees. Another negative side effect of ill employees is that they will most likely spread their illness to other employees if the office place is not regularly cleaned. Making the stress of your other employees and the loss of office productivity event worse, which leads us to our last impact - employee’s mental health. Stress, depression, and anxiety can all stem from an employee’s frustration with or unrealized impacts of a dirty workplace.

To ensure your office is always clean and increasing productivity, we recommend teaming up with a Action Unlimited Resources who can point you in the right direction, help you stay on top of things and get the job done right.