When you first started, a tiny office may have been ideal but now your company is developing, your work team has expanded and it’s all beginning to feel a little too tight. A new member of the team arrives with more furniture, books, equipment and so on – where do you store it all?
The problem with a shortage of office space is that it gets cluttered and dirty and, as a result, is counterproductive to profitability and morale and can have a negative effect on the business’ success. Want more office space? Always tripping over the clutter?
Here’s how you can manage your business space.
Store your Paperwork Electronically
Paperwork takes up even more space than you may know.
Searching through unruly stacks of papers to find the form you need will chew into valuable working time as well. Even keeping papers in filing cabinets often endangers you when it comes to classified or highly valuable material because they can easily be missed or misplaced and are too easily available to prying eyes.
A better solution is to simply convert important paper documents into electronic versions by scanning them using a flatbed (or other) scanner and saving the scans electronically.
You can simply keep the e-copies of your important documents on your computer, in a removable device or in the cloud with appropriate security passwords and methods. However, cloud storage is best for businesses as your computer can crash, or flash drives can become unusable.
Invest in Rotary Storage
Rotary storage systems are ideal for confined spaces. They provide far more physical capacity than conventional filing systems.
Built with a two-sided revolving structure that enables users to access both sides of the filing system from one single position, it works by a foot pedal only and provides full control and is safe to use.
This device can house a variety of filing cabinets contents in roughly a quarter of the space it would otherwise have taken up.
Design solutions customized to your preferences provide the ability to build units to fit a range of different items. Each part of the section can be locked individually.
Buy Inventory more Strategically
In many offices, inventory takes up lots of room.
If your business buys and stores inventory, the key question is whether you are buying too much at once or if there is a way to buy more strategically so that you can prevent overcrowding and overstocking.
One storage technique you should use if you have this situation is just-in-time stock management.
This means planning for the product to come just at the time when you need it. This means you won’t find your office room cluttered with inventory items for long stretches of time.
Use Vertical Spaces
Another smart storage option is to purchase plain, transparent or labeled stacker boxes (you can also use them to brighten up your office space with a variety of colors.)
They not only keep your papers or other items neatly tidied away, but you can easily recognize which box contains everything you need because you can see the contents or the labels indicate what is contained. Then you build a vertical storage system by piling them on top of each other that uses up wasted wall space instead of the much-needed floor space.
Invest in a Storage Unit
When you have so much stuff and it is becoming a major problem that you need to store elsewhere, invest in a storage facility. You can get pretty cheap, old storage units. These can then be placed outside of the office on the property and you can lock them up and use them if and when you wish.
You can also contract these out to a storage provider. For example, you can get affordable storage units via Safe Store Containers so that you can keep non-essential inventory or other items away from the office until you need them.
The main bonus of that is that you can hire it only when you need it instead of paying long-term for storage you don’t use.
If All Else Fails, Declutter
While making the improvements mentioned above will definitely help you obtain more space in your workspace, you can as well go the full route and declutter your office space.
Do you actually have to keep 20 years of paperwork or your old business cards? You’ll be surprised by how much stuff you’ve collected that you don’t even use, but that takes up a huge amount of space.
Instead of having useless things lying all over the place, designate one day as the day to declutter. You will be glad you did.
