Are your offices feeling cramped? As your organization grows and you continue to add staff, workstations, and storage, it’s only natural that your once spacious branch or headquarters will quickly begin to feel less roomy than it did when you first moved in.
Before you consider relocating to a larger space, ask yourself this: have you really outgrown your office or could you make some strategic changes to utilize your square footage better? To help you decide, you’ll need to identify the elements that are taking up the most room.
Is it employees and employee workspaces that are taking up so much space? What about document storage like bulky file cabinets and storage boxes, or document-related technology like large printers and scanners? Auxiliary rooms like the mailroom or unused conference rooms are also common space-wasters.
Most likely, it’s a combination of all of the above! In this blog post are some helpful tips to help you make your current space work for you through clever reorganization or hiring business support services.
Create a new office arrangement
As you hire new employees to meet the demands of your growing business, you may find yourself running out of places to put them. Before you decide to move to a larger space, consider reorganizing to create a new, more efficient office arrangement instead. You could also save a significant amount of space by eliminating physical barriers like cubicles to create a more open office environment, or by selling bulky furniture and downsizing to sleeker, space-saving furniture. Officeworks, a creator of stunning office spaces, is a great resource for a wide range of furniture and wall solutions designed to bring you office space to life.
Another possibility is to promote remote work, allowing some or all of your employees to work remotely when needed. Then, designating just a few workstations as coworking spaces, employees can use them when they do come into the office, giving you the flexibility to reclaim the rest for other uses. Promoting remote work may also allow you to repurpose conference spaces in favor of hosting meetings by teleconference.
Go paperless
For many companies, finding the space to store paper is an ongoing challenge. Especially in large metropolitan areas like New York City, it’s very expensive to use real estate for storage when it could be better utilized for staff workspaces or revenue-generating activities. Instead of wasting space on file cabinets and file storage boxes, you could enlist the services of a document processing company to handle your document scanning and digitizing so you can eliminate physical file storage altogether.
With document scanning services, your documents are digitized and indexed and can be uploaded to cloud document management software that allows you to easily manage and access documents from any computer or mobile device. Having digital access to your files not only allows you to reclaim valuable office space, but also means employees can find and share documents in seconds, making it simple to collaborate with vendors, partners, and team members at other locations.
Eliminate oversized printers and scanners
Another great benefit of digitizing your business’ documents is that you won’t need to keep those oversized printers and scanners anymore. Commercial printers and scanners are very bulky, and when each department has one, their large footprints add up to quite a bit of square footage. You will also save money by not having to pay for leasing and maintenance costs related to the equipment.
Once you’ve gone paperless and implemented digital document management software, you’ll be able to get rid of some or all of your printers and scanners. Workflows like accounts payable processing can be handled entirely on the computer instead of by printing and sending around paper documents or scanning paper documents to email.
Consider mailroom outsourcing
So you’ve gotten rid of your paper document archives with document scanning, but what about the ones that you receive by mail on a daily basis? There’s a paperless solution for that, too: outsourcing your mailroom.
With mailroom outsourcing, your incoming mail is received at a dedicated PO box, then picked up by your document management partner to be scanned and indexed at their secure scanning facility. Once your mail has been digitized, you’ll be provided with digital images of each document as well as captured data – for instance, the information captured from an invoice during the indexing process. The data is ready to load into your ERP system, and the digitized documents can be uploaded into your document management software.
You can even outsource email management to free yourself from having to download and print email attachments. With a virtual mailroom, incoming email is directed to a monitored email inbox and goes through a quality-controlled data capture process. From there, the captured data is ready to be loaded into your business systems or kick off a workflow.
Digital mailroom services can reduce the time it takes to begin processing incoming documents. There’s no more waiting for mail to arrive, printing email attachments, or routing paper documents throughout your organization. Plus, without the need for a physical mailroom, you can reclaim that space!