Friday, February 09, 2007

Keeping Our Work Environment Clean and Organized

I was reading an article in USA Today (http://www.usatoday.com/money/2006-01-22-clean-desk-usat_x.htm) related to organized work environment. This article is simple but effective one.

I am definitely sure my work place is so chaos and more disorganized than my teammates. Oh probably this explains why I got very less pay hike in this appraisal :-).

This article and couple of article which I read today, definitely gave an insight and briefs advantage of keeping our work environment clean and organized. It is not keeping work place clean is important, but what is more important is that keeping work place clean and organized. By following this mantra we can ensure that we (at lest I) spent less time in searching documents.

One of the important and simple way to keep our work place clean and organized is to apply 5S principle. This is indeed more effective also. 5S is one of the Japanese concept for keeping our work environment clean and safety. This is basically applied in machine shop. Many of the big corporation (primarily in manufacturing industry) follow this simple technique to keep their machine shop clean and safe. In web we can see many testimonials from actual person who benefited by following this 5S technique. Good reading for 5s are wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5S) and quality training portal (http://www.qualitytrainingportal.com/resources/5S/index.htm). Definitely if we browse we will get lot of links for 5S related to learning.

OK coming back to our topic of Keeping Our Work Environment Clean. It is mandatory for us to keep our work place clean and organized by doing this definitely we gain lot of productivity in spending less time in retrieving document when needed. Not only gaining productivity we just avoid frustration of loosing some important documents.

Habit of keeping 'clean and organized' should not just stop in our work environment it should broadly applied to our wardrobe, mail-box and more. By following this it will definitely help us to be more effective and to achieve excellence in what we do.