Teamwork makes the dream work, as the old saying goes, but how do you make the most of your office team when it comes to office clearances?

We’ve put together some awesome ideas to leverage the power of numbers, comradery, and competition.

Using your green champions and organisational wizards

When you’re going to perform an office clearance, you need to have someone to run the show, otherwise, it could be total chaos. We think it’s best to get a tag team together, perhaps the most relevant responsible person, like the office manager, and the person who goes out of their way to be resourceful, like the sustainability manager. Put them together, sit them down, and get them to design an office clearance strategy. Once they’ve made that strategy, get a second opinion, whether it’s from estates management, facilities management, or the waste officer.

You need a point of contact that people can go to and say things like ‘I know you’re looking to get rid of old furniture, but I love my old chair and I want to keep it’.

Clearing and decluttering is a team sport

Here’s an idea. Have you ever heard of a stationery amnesty? This is a great place to start. Essentially, staff must go through all of their drawers, cabinets, and whatever other storage mediums they have, and if they have duplicates of certain stationery, they have to hand the spares in. Got three staplers and two hole punches? Go and give two staplers and one hole punch to the amnesty organiser (no questions asked). Now you have a bank of stationery that stops stuff being thrown out or unnecessarily procured. Win-win.

Go through your old filing cabinets and get rid of old documents. Be sure to shred documents so that no information falls into the wrong hands. You can call a professional company (like us) to handle your paper waste and guarantee that it gets recycled. Pass a bin bag around the office until the paper waste is gone. If your business is super serious about reducing paper waste, have one person scan and save the paper documents, and get a tech company to assess your paper processes and see if they can be made into a tablet or mobile-based app.

Be careful about GDPR if you’re shredding data, see below:

Get together and agree on a new office layout

Feng shui is the Chinese art of using spatial arrangements to assist in the flow of energy and when it’s done well, it can have massive positive effects on the workplace. By getting your team together to discuss the new layout of your office post-clearance, it will help you know what must go and what must stay during the clearance itself. You don’t want to end the clearance and realise you have too much furniture and that you will have to pay for another office waste removal.

Get IT involved in your office clearance

Whilst it may be hard at first to see where the tech guys could come in and support an office clearance, bare with us because they can actually be pivotal. As well as the ideas mentioned before about using technology to reduce paper systems, by performing an office clearance and rearranging the office space to either accommodate more staff or to give more space to existing staff, you will need to rearrange your cabling so that all computers and socket-requiring objects can be integrated into the new layout. This requires the forethought of the IT department. When it comes to WEEE recycling, your IT department have the power to repair and refurbish electronic equipment in order to save it from going to a landfill or being considered rubbish.

Which department can recycle the most?

If your office clearance is on a large scale, and it involves multiple departments working together to help achieve it, you can do one of three things. You can let chaos take over through poor communication (terrible choice), you can get the departments to collaborate, or, you can create a competition with an incentive that makes people champion the performance of their department. During your office clearance, try creating a competition to see which departments engage the most, who presents the best solutions, who recycles the most, who looks at ideas for reuse, and who acts most sustainably.

Get third parties involved

It can be a sad product of our throwaway society that useful and valuable items end up going to landfill because it’s too time-consuming to find them new homes. This has to stop. One way to end that is to ask everybody in your organisation which charities they support or are involved with, if they have kids at schools that could use free office furniture, or whether they know of startups with a small budget who could use all the help they can get. You’d be surprised how many of these organisations would be over the moon to get some free chairs, desks, unwanted old computers and more.

Once you’ve got a list of organisations, draw up a template email for your staff to send to their connected organisations and see if they’d be interested in secondhand office assets.

The result of donating these items is that you will get some incredible PR, support your local community, and you’ve spared so much waste from going to landfill.

If all of that sounds like hard work, simply ask Enviro Waste to do it for you, as we already have partners in the form of charities, educational organisations and many more.

Better to need and not have, or to have and not need?

The final point of this article is to come together as a team and assess whether some of the things you have in your offices are superfluous. If you’ve had air conditioning installed, do you really need those fans that get used for one week of summer? If you clear out your cabinets and introduce paper-free processes, do you still need so many cabinets?

The important thing to ask is whether you will regret getting rid of stuff in the pursuit of space and whether the trade-off is worth it.

Conclusion

We’ve supported hundreds of businesses around London through their office moves. Our team are dedicated, experienced, and they get on well. We ourselves could not function without such a well-bonded and loyal team, and it’s from this experience that we can give good advice on teamwork for office clearances. Our operatives remove furniture, dispose of unwanted items, and recycle everything that can be recycled. Office clearances have never been easier.

At the end of the day, our goals and your goals align, and so for the duration of your office clearances, we are one big and happy team. That’s the Enviro Waste way.