Category: Efficiency & Organization

How to Create a New Paper Filing System

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There has been much written and said in the media lately about this country becoming a paperless culture. We take this to be the truth, simply because it’s hammered into our heads day after day. But what if we actually slow down and examine this?

Yes, you may pay your bills online, thus cutting way back on the amount of mail you send out. What else? Did you ever really write that many personal letters that have now been replaced by email? Well, maybe you did. Hmm. . .well that seems to be about it. We are still reading books, we are still printing documents, and we are still signing contracts the old fashioned way. Yes, there are online equivalents of all of these things, and yes, there will probably be a time in the future when paper is as rare as gold, but that time is certainly not here now. Paper surrounds us and we use it all the time.

With all of this paper, in fact, it can be easy to lose track of it all. Papers get stuffed in a desk here, shoved in a filing cabinet there, and we can never find anything when we need it. Our office is a mess because we failed to have a system for filing all of our important documents. Well, if it needs fixing, there’s no time like the present. Let’s go through and look at what you can do to create a new paper filing system for your office.

Filing Cabinets

If you think the remark above was meant to disparage the filing cabinet, think again. Filing cabinets are a
wonderful resource, and should be the centerpiece for any large scale filing system. On the other hand, they 2 Drawer File Cabinethave to be used correctly in order to be efficient. And so many of them are not used correctly. Papers are flung into this folder or that folder, until there is no sense of order left. At that point, you may as well be tossing them on the floor. True, they’re out of the way and out of sight, but they won’t be any easier to locate when you need that all-important document.

When starting your new filing system, take a look around the office and see what you have before buying new supplies. You may or may not already have what you need, and a penny saved is a penny earned. However, now is not the time to be stingy, either. If you do not have what you need, don’t just make do. Filing supplies are amazingly inexpensive, so don’t cling to every penny as if it were your last. Besides, what does a penny buy in today’s society, anyway?

File Folders

Start your new filing system by labeling all of your folders with the appropriate headings, and then go from there. Smead makes a good folder for office use, as does Pendaflex. If you don’t have a filing cabinet yet, get out there and purchase one. It doesn’t have to be the best one on the market, but you should choose one that Colored File Folderswill get the job done and fits with your office decor. Once that is squared away, you can begin to put your folders inside in a manner that makes sense and will be easily accessed.

Make sure you follow a filing system that is simple and, more importantly, uniform throughout the cabinet. This is where many filing systems go astray. People tend to start off well, alphabetizing everything, and getting their filing cabinet in a proper order. Then the train starts to fall off the tracks. They start putting things in the cabinet by order of importance, or by date, and at the end of the day, there’s no telling where anything is. Choose one method of filing and follow it throughout the cabinet. That way everyone will be able to easily follow the system and won’t mess up a good thing.

A Separate Guide

This is something that can be invaluable, but it is rarely used by anyone. You could make your filing system this much better, if you create a separate guide to your filing system and place it on top of the filing cabinet. That way, no one will have any doubt as to where things can be found. It may sound like a lot of extra work, but it will save an incalculable amount of time in the long run.

Appointment Juggling: Planners & Calendars are Critical

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Appointment Juggling: Planners & Calendars are Critical

It’s Tuesday night. The clock says it’s four-thirty, but it feels as though it has been saying that for the last half hour. You were supposed to be finishing up some payroll busywork, but have instead found yourself fiddling with the contrast on your monitor. Perhaps making it brighter would make it more pleasant to look at. Darker? Mainly, you’re just trying to kill the last half hour before its time to go home. True, you could just leave now and no one would think the worse of you, but you like to set a good example for your employees. Besides, you like to leave your early escapes for Friday.

Then the phone rings. It’s your boss, and he wants to know why you aren’t at the meeting downtown! Oh no! You completely forgot about it. You scramble to make up an excuse, but he doesn’t sound happy. He advises you to meet him first thing in the morning so he can catch you up on what you missed. You hang up and lose interest in the contrast of your monitor and decide you have to do something about your appointments. But what is the answer? Is there one, or are you simply doomed to a poor memory and an inability to juggle time?

The Planning Calendar

There is an answer, and it is found in the planning calendar. At-a-Glance is but one company that makes a fine planning calendar. These calendars make it easy for you to keep track of all of your appointments, meetings, and special events that you have a tendency to forget. And you’re not alone. If everyone could simply remember everywhere they were supposed to be, planning calendars wouldn’t be one of the biggest selling office supply items on the market. You just need to take the time to get one, and get organized.

Of course, having a planning calendar will not do you much good if you do not use it the right way. You have to make sure you right everything in that calendar, no matter how small and insignificant. You then need to make it a point to look at the calendar every morning and plan your day accordingly. Take the time to thumb through the next few days as well, just to make sure there isn’t something on the horizon you need to be planning for today.

Overall Time Management

While a planning calendar is important, it’s not the only aspect of your overall strategy. You can do many other things to help you start controlling your time, rather than have it be the other way around. One of these ways is to start each day by creating a to do list. Granted, this isn’t a revolutionary idea, but are you doing it? Or do you easily get sidetracked even when you know there are things to get done. Having a to do list, and writing it up in the order in which the tasks need to be completed is an excellent way to start managing your time better. Encourage your employees to do the same. Just the act of creating the list can make you feel better and more in control.

Get Help with Time

Don’t hesitate to bring others in to your time management strategies. This particularly includes your employees. Make sure you use these people in such a way that they can contribute to getting tasks done and appointments kept. After all, that’s part of why you’re paying them. If need be, incorporate your family into the mix as well. If you have important tasks that can be delegated to anyone else, make sure you do so if you won’t have time to manage the project by yourself. Of course, when it comes to friends and family, this only works if you’re willing to do the same for them should the opportunity come up.

Time management doesn’t have to be the bane of your existence. If you take some simple steps to get it under control, you’ll find that you had much more time in your day than you originally thought, and you won’t feel that constant weight of stress crushing down on you throughout your days. Isn’t that reason enough to get things in hand?

How-To: Keep Your Inbox from Taking Over Your Life

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The computer age is great. Tasks that used to take days now take seconds, information is always there at the touch of a button, and businesses can extend their realm of marketability beyond their local walls and into the annals of cyberspace. With all of these positives, though, it must be said that there are some negatives that come with it.


If you are an office manager, you may consider email to be one of those negatives. Perhaps you treat going to your inbox as if it were a life sentence. How many spam messages will I get today, you think with a sigh. Then there is the matter of simply sorting through the good ones. Which ones demand your immediate attention and which ones can be ignored until later? Which ones are just the latest forward from one of your coworkers? If you are finding that you are spending too much of every day sifting through your email, this article is for you. We’ve devised a simple set of ways for you to get your inbox organized and turn your email back into a positive.


Folder Creation


The first step toward making your inbox a place of calm and peace is to create some folders. If you have ever done this with your internet bookmarks, you may already know how much easier they can make finding something (especially if you’re a bookmark packrat). Why not try the same thing with your email? A lot of people are not even aware of the many things their Outlook can do. This is a shame, because while Microsoft may not be the perfect company, they really have loaded their email program with a lot of features that probably go unused by ninety percent of their users. If you’re one of them–do one thing before go any further. Take an hour or so and just explore your email. Just play around with it. See what it can do. Chances are, you’ll be surprised by what you find.


Ok, time to get back on track with folder creation. Let’s say you want all of your client’s emails in one folder, all of your employee’s emails to go to another folder, and then your boss’s emails to go in a third folder. You can of course go on and on, but we will stop there for the sake of brevity, and since we have little way of knowing how you specifically want to separate your email categories. To do this, just go under File and click the New Folder icon. Label it something easy like “Clients” or “Boss”. No sense getting creative here and then creating an extra level of confusion for yourself when you go to retrieve your mail. Do this again and again for each of the various categories you want to make.


Directing Email Traffic


Once you have your folders in place, you may be wondering if you are going to have to copy and paste each email into the correct folder when they are received. Of course not, that would just be adding several extra steps and creating even more inbox confusion. What we want is to make your email life a little easier. So here’s the next step. You are going to create rules for each of your folders. This is done through the Outlook program and it can easily be set up to distribute your emails to the appropriate folders. You can set it up to go by subject line, or by the sender. This way, if your boss sends you an urgent message, it will go straight to the Boss folder you created, and you’ll know you need to take a look at that email and address it before getting to your other folders and any new messages you have in there. You’ll still have an alert in the main system itself that will tell you when you’ve received new emails and to what folder you should look to find them.


The Real Inbox


Now that you have sorted out your email inbox, what to do about the one on your desk, piling up with papers from every which way? Well, there are some simple steps you can take to clear that out and make it less of a burden as well. 3M and Rolodex offer a variety of products you may never have heard of that can help you get organized in a hurry. Take the time to find a good online office supply shop and browse their selection of merchandise to find excellent tools you can use to clean up the clutter.

Making Your Database Work for You

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For reasons unkown, decades after this information has been possible to collate by computer, many offices refuse to make use of a simple databases to effectively manage their business. Perhaps you are one of these people. Maybe you see other companies figure out complicated results from surveys they take, from sales promotions they did, and you’re not quite sure how they did it. Maybe you think it was through some superior technology that you do not have access to. But nothing could be further from the truth.


The fact is, they are just taking advantage of this decades old technology called the computer database and then crunching the numbers they find inside. Running a successful office means keeping track of information. If you are not doing so, you are not living up to your full potential. A database can keep all of your business contacts together, so that you can access them at the click of a button. A database can hold all of the information about your last advertising campaign and reveal to you how effective it was in obtaining new business. A database can tell you which of the items you sell is the most profitable for your company.


Advertising Campaigns


One of the best uses of a database is for your multiple advertising campaigns. With an efficient and well put together database, you can access, collate, and compare information in ways you might never have thought of. Only then will you truly be able to get a sense of what has been working for your company and what hasn’t.


You don’t want to spend your time and money running an unsuccessful ad campaign over again, that part is self evident. However, what may be just as important: you don’t want to cut off an ad campaign that might have worked if it were not for other factors. That is why it is so important to keep and store information about every aspect of your campaigns. It is amazing sometimes how one little change or variance in wording can completely turn your ad campaign around. If your ad campaigns are more in the direction of marketing and referrals, you can do the same sort of thing with a database. You will be able to research what works and what has not. What sort of variables might you be able to implement that would increase your referral rate, and so on.


Contacts and Customers


There are too many great ways to keep all of your contact information in today’s digital world to still be trudging along the old way. Is there anything inherently wrong with the old way. No, but when there’s a quantifiably better way, why not put it to use? A lot of people are hesitant to bring new technologies (no matter how basic) into their lives or their workplace. And it’s true, there usually will be a learning curve.

Often there will be a period of a week or a month where you wonder why you switched. After that, it will be smooth sailing. You just have to force yourself to accept the changes and get over that little hump. Soon enough, you will be wondering how you ever got along without it. By stuffing all of your contacts and customers into a clean database, you’ll be able to organize them in any fashion you want, create hyperlinks between related contacts, easily duplicate contact information that falls under more than one category, and much more.


Accounting


Though the uses for a good database are practically endless, we will just take a quick look at accounting management and leave it at that. A database can do wonders in the area of your office finances. Keep track of all of your billing and receiving information, organize your debts and credits, keep your payroll together, and plenty of other things. The limitations are strictly with your own imagination.


Like we said, there are a hundred more ways to use a database, if not more. If you take a look around your office, you can probably come up with more ways without even blinking an eye. Keep in mind that not all of these databases need be electronically based. A good notebook by Universal or Ampad can give you same results in a more portable fashion. Give a try in one area of your office management, and it’s very possible you’ll find it wise to implement it in many others.

How-To: Use Spreadsheets to Organize Your Office

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Let’s make this as simple as possible: if you are not using a spreadsheet to help manage your office or business, you are making a huge mistake. We understand that the thought of a spreadsheet–the thought of even turning on Microsoft Excel–makes you want to curl up in a ball in the corner and start gently sucking on your thumb. Well, enough of that crying! Spreadsheets are nothing to be afraid of! In fact, after you are initiated into all the power they possess, you will wonder why you didn’t make friends with the green monster long ago! Without further ado, let’s talk a bit about all the things a spreadsheet system can do to make your office more organized and your life happier.

Organizing Your Tasks


And here you thought spreadsheets were only good for crunching numbers! Absolutely not. Spreadsheets can be used for a variety of functions that have nothing to do with accounting or budgets. Making a “to-do” list is just one of the great things a spreadsheet can help you with. You might still be stuck in the old ways of making a “things to do” list. Sticking little post-it notes all over the place, or filling a notebook up with items to be done.

There is a better way. All you have to do is use the first row to make headings that spell out all the tasks you need to get done. You can then use the columns to organize and separate these tasks into categories, orders of importance, and so on. In this way, the list becomes interactive and gives you a lot more freedom to manage things in an efficient way. Of course, if you still want some handy ways to keep little notes for yourself, Fellowes makes some very interesting monitor organizers that can help keep you from swamping your computer area with notes.

Keep Track of Your Passwords

Are you one of those people who has a hundred different passwords for different sites on the internet, and various programs you use on your desktop? If so, a spreadsheet can be an easy way to keep track of all those passwords. Even if you are a person that tries to basically use the same username and password for everything, you will likely run into problems with trying to implement this.

Certain sites require certain combinations of numbers and letters, some have length requirements, and with all of these variations, you are likely to have at least a few different passwords and usernames out there. Create a spreadsheet and use the headings to write Website (or software program title), Username, and Password and then your information will be there for you when you need it.

You can even password protect your spreadsheet, so that prying eyes won’t have access to all of your sensitive information. Of course, then the catch-22 arrives. Where will you store the password for your spreadsheet? But that opens up a field of paradox we are not quite ready to delve into, so let’s just move on, shall we?

Marketing

A spreadsheet can also be a great way for you to keep track of customer data. Perhaps you have been thinking about sending out a mailing list, either through snail mail or through email. These lists can be a superb way to drive traffic to your website, and increase business for your office. Using a spreadsheet, you can keep easy track of all of your customers’ information, such as their mailing address, the type of product they’ve bought from you in the past, and their email info. With modern spreadsheets, you can even create hyperlinks, so that it will be possible for you to open up and send email directly from a click of your spreadsheet!

If you have been afraid to open up your spreadsheet program because of the mathematical connotations, be afraid no more. What we have talked about is only a small sample of the things you can do with these powerful processors. Take the time to play with your spreadsheet program today, and you’ll find that they aren’t as complicated as you might have thought. If you have trouble, there are plenty of tutorials on the web that will help you get the basics down pat. Once you’ve achieved this, you’ll be able to use your spreadsheet program to do just about anything you can think of. Don’t let it sit there and collect virtual dust any longer!


How-To: Take Control of Your Office Scheduling

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It can happen to the best of us. Maybe it was the holiday season, or the dog days of summer. Maybe there was a rash of employee absences. Whatever the reason, the office schedule has slipped off track. Possibly that was acceptable for a while, but now it is threatening to careen off the side of a mountain to a fiery demise two hundred feet below. You have to get your office schedule under control, but you feel as though it may be too far gone. Perish the thought!

 

It is never too late. It will take some hard work, cooperation, and determination, but you can have the well oiled office machine you once had. The tools are right here. All you have to do is put them to use. Here are some things you can do to get things started today.

 

Start With Your Desk

 

One of the things you may have noticed slipping under the radar is your own backlog of to do items. If this is the case, then you need to start with yourself and your own desk. Start clearing out all of the things that you have been putting off for one reason or another. This serves a dual purpose. For one, it is much easier to get organized and start a new plan if you take care of yesterday’s garbage. That means taking a look at every sheet of paper in your inbox and cluttering your desk and getting rid of it one way or another. And no, this doesn’t mean just slipping it into a bottom drawer. If there are things that need to be done, now is the time to do them. Secondly, producing a clear desk gives you a clear head and helps your office start to get back on schedule. Most likely, your delays in getting things done has put someone else behind schedule as well.

 

Create a Resource Folder

 

You can do this not only on your computer, but encourage your employees to do the same on theirs. A resource folder is something that you set up that you keep all your important resources within (who would have guessed!). You can even go beyond making a simple folder, and create folders within that. Then you can really get down to the nitty gritty. Separate your documents, internet bookmarks, and programs according to your needs. You can also save articles and interesting pages you come across on the web or through email in one of those folders. This way when you want to share it with someone else (as you inevitably will), you won’t have to spend half your morning trying to find it again.

 

Do not overlook the power of creating a folder like this in the real world, either. Computers are great, but sometimes you come across resources and files that aren’t electronic. This is why it’s great to duplicate your resource folder with the real thing. Smead and Universal both make quality folders that can be used for just such a purpose. If you come across magazine articles or newspapers clippings you want to save, this is the place to do it. This would also be a great place to store memorandums you’ve sent out or received about company policies.

 

Schedule Weekly Efficiency Meetings

 

No one likes to go to boring meetings, this is for certain. But if you can make your employees understand the importance of staying on a schedule, perhaps they will come to the meetings with ideas under their belts, ready to help out. If you notice that certain employees don’t like to participate, then you know which ones to keep a close eye on when it comes to keeping on schedule and increasing productivity. It might be time to trim some of the fat.

 

Enact Some Customer Relations

 

In the time that your office schedule has begun slipping, so might have your contact with your most important asset: your clients and customers. Take the time to give a shout to all of your important customers and make sure they still know you’re around and still appreciate your business. Find some nice, but inexpensive trinket or token of appreciation to send to all of them. The important thing is just to keep your business in their minds. The next time they need a product or service that you sell, they’ll be sure to come back around rather than go to the competition.

 

 

 

Efficient Time and Billing Management

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Far too many offices and business fail to recognize the importance of strict time and billing management. This is especially true for small businesses, sometimes made up of only one person, selling a service. If you take a look at your office and see that billing has become lax, now is the time to get it back on track. Lost billing time is lost money, pure and simple. You need to implement changes right away, and watch how much more efficient and profitable your office becomes. Stress the importance of proper billing to all of your employees, and most of all, learn it for yourself. If you are not sure of the best way to go about changing or improving your billing system, read on for some tips. These strategies and programs have been used by some of the most efficient companies in the world to turn their time into money.

 

By The Hour

 

Different companies use different methods of billing for their time. If you are the type of office or self contained company that charges by the hour, billing should not be much of a problem. It is just a matter of keeping strict control over the amount of time that is being worked, and then collating that into a format in which you can charge correctly for that time.

 

There is robust software that can do this for you, and the best programs are not that expensive, so you should not hesitate to pick them up and install them. After all, the amount of money you will save being free from billing errors will undoubtedly pay for the software many times over. There is even some web based software that is free and does a pretty good job of handling hours billed. Once you get to the end of the month, you only have to transfer your billing information into your invoice program and everything else will take care of itself. You do have an invoicing program, right?

 

Charging by the Day

 

The software we discussed before can also help you out if you are charging by the day, or the half day rather than by the hour. Some companies find this a much more efficient way of billing, and even offer their clients discounts for accepting this type of billing system. The great thing about billing by the day or half day is that you can keep track of it using a spreadsheet program that is most likely already installed on your computer. If that program has been gathering dust for some time, now is the time to bring it out of the mothballs and put it to use. All you need to do is set up a spreadsheet for each client and keep track of the days worked, and how much this should bring to bear in the billing cycle. You can use this same spreadsheet to keep track of any expenses you’ve incurred for each client as well.

 

Outsourcing

 

If you find it would be less efficient or wise for you to handle your own billing, there is good news! There are many freelance billing specialists that can help you collate your billing system, and will not cost you an arm and a leg in the process. In addition to individual freelancers, there are established companies that do the same thing. These companies will likely charge you more, but you may have more peace of mind as to who you’re handing your records over to and entrusting the proper billing be done.

 

In order to choose the best company to do your billing, take the time to research and find out a bit about their practices. Make sure they have handled billing of your type in the past. If possible, get some references. In fact, if you have friends in the industry, it might be better to get a recommendation than to try to pick a company out of the phone book. If you decide to go with a freelancer, references are doubly essential. Talk to people and find out what the median pay is for these types of services so that you don’t wind up getting taken for a ride. On the other hand, you don’t want to hire someone who will do it for dirt cheap. There’s always a reason why someone is undervaluing themselves.

 

Whether you choose to do it yourself or outsource, billing and time management does not have to be an impossible mission. If you’re having trouble keeping everything tidy and on schedule, At-A-Glance makes quality desk and wall calendars you can use to get organized. Follow the steps above, and you’ll find that your company will soon be making the money it deserves.

3 Foolproof Ways to Clean Up Your Bookkeeping

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Bookkeeping, properly done, is one of the most often overlooked aspects of a new business or office manager. It always seems like a task that can be put off, or perhaps never completed at all. After all, what’s really wrong with the way you are doing things now, right? Sure, it may be a little messy, and yes, you can’t always find what you need when you need it, but that’s still preferable to spending all day and night trying to organize all the clutter.

 

You may want to re-think this perspective on organization. You could be spending a large amount of manpower and time on chasing down receipts and paperwork, and you may not even realize it. Think about how much time has been wasted in the last month, for instance, looking for paperwork that should have been easy to find in seconds. Now multiply that by the amount of time you have been in business and see how this kind of wasted time can add up. And the worst part is that with a situation that you have now, paperwork and receipts can become easily lost. This paper trail is essential for a business. Imagine if you get audited by the IRS. It only makes sense to organize your bookkeeping, which is why we have devised a simple plan for you to do so.

 

Time is a Critical First Step

 

The first thing you need to do is set aside a chunk of time in order to accomplish this task. How long it will take will depend on how disorganized your bookkeeping is. No matter how messy your system has become, however, there is no reason it should take more than a day or two to set things right. If you need to, have one of your assistants come in on a Saturday and see if you can work as a team to get things in order in one day without interruptions. Grab a large three ring binder, such as those made by Cardinal, and get a hold of some divider cards to help make the transition smooth. Get some letter sized paper, a stapler, and some plastic folders. The only other thing you’ll need is your business receipts and paperwork. All of your invoices, scrap pieces of paper that important things are written on, and anything else you think needs to be better organized than it is. Head out to the coffee shop, grab a big cup, and set to the task of making your office run more smoothly, and making your life a lot easier.

 

Getting Organized

 

Okay, you’ve got your coffee, you’ve got your assistant, and you’re bravely taking time on a weekend to make things right. Trust us, it will be worth it in the long run (although your assistant may never see it that way, so hopefully you’ve bought him/her a coffee, too.) The first thing you need to do is organize your binder into separate sections. The first section will be for invoices that have not yet been paid. This will most likely be invoices from your suppliers or vendors. Write at the top of the invoices the date on which they are due and then organize them in such a way that the one that needs to be paid first is on top. The second section will be for your paid invoices. Receipts, in other words. Since many receipts and invoices don’t come in a handy letter size format, staple those that don’t to a sheet of paper for easier storage. Write at the top of each of the invoices the method you used to pay them. The next section is for unpaid invoices that you have sent out–money that is owed to you. Then a section for invoices you’ve sent out that have been paid. Finally, make a section for bank statements.

 

Keep It Organized

 

After you have accomplished this wonderful task, you do not want things getting back into disarray. This can happen more quickly than you might expect. You’ll want to set aside a day each month (or even more frequently if you feel it needs it) that you revisit your bookkeeping binder and make sure that things are still working in the way you set up. In fact, you may find it easier to simply gather your invoices and receipts in a folder and then add them to the binder on that scheduled day each month. Either way is acceptable, and the latter way may save you some time on a day to day basis.

 

Bookkeeping Basics

 

Now that you have everything nice and tidy and neat, you have two options at the end of the year. You can either take out that binder and use your own savvy and some accounting software to see where you are at, or you can just hand the whole folder off to your accountant. Either way, your new bookkeeping system should make things a lot easier to deal with come the end of the year, and come tax time.

 

 

 

How to Ensure the Safety of Your Mailroom

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In a day not that far removed from the anthrax attacks of 2001, people are genuinely concerned about the safety of their office mailroom. After all, businesses, perhaps even more so than people, have a way of attracting attention, and not all of it will be positive. Of course, dangers can not only come through the mail, but internally as well. This is true not only of the mailroom, but of all aspects of the office or business you work in. As workplace safety should be a paramount concern of any office manager or executive, we have devised an article which will help you to ensure the safety of your workers, and particularly that of your mailroom.

 

Make Sure Your Security Procedures Are Current

 

One thing that tends to fall by the wayside in any office or business is security and safety procedures. Put someone in charge of making sure the handbook is up to date, and make sure all employees have a copy. Observe the employees and make sure they are following all securities procedures to the letter. With time, this is one of the areas that tends to get lax. Make sure that if this is the case, that it is remedied. If necessary, put someone in charge of specifically maintaining all security and safety procedures. In addition to this, it is always a good idea to make sure your mailroom is using up to date equipment to ensure safety as well as efficiency. Safco and Fellowes, among others, make high quality mailroom equipment that can be used in conjunction with a well oiled mailroom.

 

Give Proper OSHA Training

 

Ensure that your employees are well versed in the procedures to follow in case of fire, waste spillage, or the encounter of chemicals in the mail they sort. It is better to be prepared for the worst then to assume that nothing will ever happen. In all likelihood, of course, nothing ever will. But at the same time, it pays to be alert and careful, and know what to do should a bad situation arise. This includes following OSHA guidelines, which can not only keep your office mailroom within the letter of the law, but contribute to a safe working environment and produce less risk of having a workman’s comp claim down the road.

 

Communication Is Vital

 

It should be standard to issue all of your mailroom employees either walkie talkies or cell phones (or both) in order to maintain communication in the event of an emergency. These employees need to be in constant contact with their superiors, even if they do not have a supervisor overlooking them at all times. If an emergency does arise, it should be easy to contact someone through the use of these devices.

 

Enforce Access Restrictions

 

All mailroom employees should be issued a badge or a security code in order to access the mailroom. You don’t want any part of your office or business open to intruders, but the mailroom is an especially vulnerable spot. Once your access system is in place, make sure it is followed without question. This is another area where companies tend to relax after a few years, but it’s a better idea to stay vigilant.

 

Be Wary of Suspicious Deliveries

 

Finally, make sure your employees know what to look out for when it comes to deliveries they handle. Do not accept deliveries from carriers that do not have proof of the organization they belong to. In addition, have them be aware of what constitutes a package or delivery that could be suspicious. This includes packages that have much more than the needed postage, and addresses that are sloppily written. Any packages or envelopes that are stained, or lacking a return address are also worthy of caution. None of these signs inherently mean there is something menacing about the package or delivery, but they are telltale signs that something could be wrong. On the other hand, any delivery from unknown origin is worthy of suspicion, and your employees should be aware of this as they work through the mail.

 

In all, mailroom safety is no different from safety in all aspects of the office. Making sure all procedures are followed and your employees are well educated will help to make your workplace run smoothly and reduce the risk of threat or danger.

Why a Safe Is Essential For Your Office

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The business of office management can leave even the most calm executive frazzled. So many details to manage, so many employees to worry about, and deadlines to make, it can leave one in dereliction of some very basic procedures and security measures that should be done. One of these measures is the procurement of a safe for your office. Do not let this important security step go undone any longer. If it is something you have been meaning to do but have put off because of money issues, you should know that a safe does not have to cost a fortune in this day and age.

 

A Sentry Safe, for example, can be available for under a hundred dollars. Money is no excuse, especially SentrySafewhen it comes to something as important as this. If you haven’t been planning on buying a safe, and see little reason to have one in the office, perhaps the following information will change your mind.

 

Employee Theft

 

A survey of office employees recently put out by Harris Interactive stated that 58% of said employees have admitted to committing some kind of office theft in their lifetimes. Think about that statistic for a moment. Now, granted, the details of the survey revealed that the vast majority of these items were low cost, expendable items such as pens, pencils, staples, and stamps, but some of them went far beyond that.

 

A few of those surveyed admitted to stealing plants, and even paintings off the walls and the furniture itself! You have to consider that employees who would feel comfortable stealing even the smallest thing from the office (which, according to this survey, over half of your employees likely do) would have it within themselves to steal something valuable should the opportunity arise. It may never happen, but it’s better to be prepared and not need it, than to be caught unaware. A safe may be your best answer.

 

Robbery

 

Let’s face it–we live in dangerous times. No matter if your office is located in downtown New York City, or a sleepy burg in northern Montana, you have to have your guard up against potential crime. It could happen anytime, anywhere. If your valuable office items and cash are not locked up in a safe, they are just waiting to be stolen. Now, we’re not talking about someone coming into the office with a gun, obviously, because a safe won’t do you much good in that instance. No, we’re talking about after-hours robbery, where a thief slips in under cover of darkness. Maybe he even got an inside tip as to where the money or valuables were hidden. Whatever the case, he will find them, and they will be his, if you don’t take the time to purchase a safe and lock those items away.

 

Prying Eyes

 

Of course, one of the most practical reasons to get a safe is simply to keep your important papers and documents out of the hands of snooping employees. This isn’t related to theft or protection, but simply privacy. Your company undoubtedly has documents in a filing cabinet (probably unlocked) that has information you don’t need your employees seeing. Well, why take the chances of something being seen and then discussed among the employees? Put those documents away in a safe and give the combination only to those you trust and those who have clearance, so to speak, to view those documents.

 

Insurance

 

Simply put, insurance premiums are more likely to be low when you can prove that your valuable office items are hidden away in a good safe. Also, insurance companies are more likely to pay out a full sum if it can be shown that you took reasonable measures to protect those items.

 

Disaster Protection

 

Fireproof SafeFires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes. Depending on where you work, any of these could happen, and your important documents and office valuables could be lost forever. By purchasing a fire proof safe, you’ll protect yourself against this possible occurrence, and have the peace of mind that comes with knowing you’ve done all you can to keep those things safe. Disaster doesn’t give you a warning before it strikes, so consider this the warning. Buy a safe for your office, and you’ll be protected for certain.