Reviewing and Renovating Office Premises And Some Changes.

If your office is turning into a dusty and tangled nest of cables, cords, wires, and plugs, it is time to review and renovate. Not to sound like your mom, but cleaning up costs nothing and radically improves the look of your office.

Neatness

• It’s amazing how quickly a neat and tidy office can turn into hurricane zone.
• Ban bins at desks to avoid the inevitable pile up of rubbish at workstations.
• Have a ‘no eating at desks’ policy. It keeps crumbs off the floor and rubbish in its proper place.
• Label each wire behind your computer with tags, wrap with Velcro strips, and run cords along the backside of a desk using eye hooks or clips, to tidy up the back of the computer.
• You may also explore other methods to control the web of wires.

Limit Hard-Copies

Paper piles occupy a lot of useful space and hold dust. If you want to substantially reduce paper usage, there’s no running away from re-architecting certain business process to identify procedures that make needless use of paper.

• Generate reports directly in PDF format, which can be reviewed on a laptop, tablet or even smartphone.
• Do away with physical signing printed documents, particularly internal ones.
• Completely discard fax from the business process and replace paper forms with fillable PDF forms that are submitted via email or a Web browser.
• Reproduce internal documents on Wikis or online notebooks such as Google Docs or Evernote instead.
• The latter supports the sharing of entire notebooks or individual notes, which is handy for disseminating both static and dynamic materials such as an employee handbook or meeting notes.
• In the United States, the ESIGN Act of 2000 gives validity to electronic signatures, making an electronic signature contract as legally valid as signed hard-copy contracts.
• Even for external contracts, the need for a signature has roots more in historical precedence than actual legal requirement.

Enable Paperless Office

• Getting the right infrastructure can go a long way going paperless office.
• One common reason that workers print documents is the need to cross-reference them with another document.
• Consider a dual or multi-monitor setup to avoid this.
• You can reduce wasteful printing by setting up a multi-monitor workstation.

• Giving employees two screens provides more digital real estate and offers a productivity boost at the same time.
• LCD monitors typically outlast computer upgrades, too, so this is one cost you’ll only need to pay once.
• In order to work with vendors and clients that insist on using the fax machine, sign up for an online fax provider that will email an incoming fax direct to your inbox.
• This mature market includes various free and paid options that essentially eliminate the need for a physical fax machine.

Renovate to Earn

• All too often we waste space, not really using every spare foot to its maximum capacity.
• If renovation helps you get a few desks to spare, renting some of your space can actually make you money.
• When you expect renewing your office to cost you money, this radical idea will flip the situation.
• If you have an office, the chances are you have lots of extra room, even if you don’t realize it yet.
• Review the premise and notice how full your office really is.
• Suddenly an office upgrade might even be able to pay for itself.

Personalization

• Make sure that once you have the bare bones of your design in place, you also splash out on a couple of quirky touches.
• The best office spaces aren’t just functional, clean, and not ugly; they also capture something of the spirit of the company.
• The touches need not be expensive. A feature wall with your company logo is one place to start.
• Milk-bottle crates converted into lights, doors made into coffee tables etc are some amazing things, cheaper than buying a piece of art, that reinforce not only a brand but also its green credentials.

The day you stop evolving, you start stagnating. Your strategy, your marketing plan, your target market, nothing is set in stone. The world is changing rapidly each day. Your industry will likely experience a shift, whether slight or monumental, at some point. Contact us for our free one-hour consultation on latest ideas to make your business grow in today’s world. The best way to remain relevant is keeping your eyes open for changing tides, your mind open to new ideas and staying flexible.

Don’t be too afraid of making your own mistakes!