An untidy office or a cluttered workplace can be unhealthy, unsafe, and distracting. Besides diverting your focus from the targets and goals to be achieved, cluttered spaces can trigger stress when you cannot find the tool or material you need quickly to do your work. International surveys have shown that a cluttered workplace can make you anxious and affect your mood. While clutter or disorder can have an impetus for creative thinking, it significantly hinders doing focused, meticulous, urgent, and important work.
Some studies also claim that orderly environments promote healthy choices, generosity, and conventionality, three key positive elements of a constructive organization. In industrial settings, clutter or disorder in the placement of things can create an unsafe workplace and increase the risk of shop floor accidents and injuries from trips, falls, and collisions. In any office or even industrial production line, clutter can create unwelcome issues wherever people need to concentrate on their work. It is due to an attribute called the ‘bottom-up’ mechanism in our visual cortex.
Stimuli, like irrelevant objects, drive ‘Bottom-up,’ and it continually competes with goal-directed mechanisms like attention in our brain. The resulting break in concentration can seriously harm productivity. Research shows that if your attention breaks or gets disturbed during work, it takes around 23 minutes to get your attention back on what you were doing. If your attention breaks four times during an 8-hour workday, you’d actually be able to contribute only around six hours of work, as you would lose two hours just in fixing the challenge of attention residue.
An article published by the Harvard Business Review in March 2019 highlighted how clutter adversely affects our cognition, emotions, and behavior. For instance, cluttered spaces can negatively influence our stress levels, bringing down our productivity. A study report published in 2015 revealed that businesses in the US were losing around US$190 billion every year in terms of healthcare costs emanating from workplace stress. If that research is done today, the losses found will be much higher.
From the angle of stress, health and productivity, an uncluttered workspace is thus very much essential for ensuring that human beings can live and function effectively. The effects of clutter, or its absence, are significant in the lives of individuals and on the overall productivity in a commercial environment. Hence, de-cluttering the workspace can generate or boost the feel-good hormones amongst the employees and enable them to become more productive.
