Daniel’s Guide to a Declutter Campaign.

My name's Daniel. I'm from Warp It. This is a very quick presentation about how to deliver a Declutter Campaign within organisations (video at the bottom!). We are going to cover what it is and why it’s important, and because we’re so helpful, we are going to give you the approach that we've used in the past, as well as a few resources that will make your Declutter Campaign a lot easier (these are FREE for you to download at the end!).

What is a Declutter Campaign?

Very simply, it’s a way of giving staff within your organisation an easy facility to declutter their offices.

Why would you want to do it?

Let's start at the bottom. If you declutter your room or your office, you get a feeling of well being, which ultimately translates into better productivity. Decluttering your workspace is proven to improve the health and wellbeing of your employees.

Let’s talk about the term ‘keystone habit’. The decluttering of an office can be used as a keystone habit to lead to more (and better) reuse behaviour, more (and better) reuse of assets and it can also lead to a better disposal of waste (or an improved waste disposal policy). It's a gateway habit into more sustainable behaviours.

Decluttering boosts reuse. Improves procurement. Improves estates management and is an action towards reducing waste and zero waste.

Excellent guidance

The approach we use at Warp It to deliver Declutter Campaigns is to create an intranet guide for all of the wastes, or at least the popular or relevant wastes within an office. We provide the best method for the staff member to dispose of that waste. We break down the actions into bite-sized pieces so that the staff members can incorporate decluttering into their work life. This is a passive campaign, so it's there all the time in the background. Then we monitor the effectiveness of it. We illustrate the benefit of the Declutter Campaign and we repeat it the next year.

How to take action.

Somebody has to lead on this campaign, right? How do you take action on it?

You break down the project into milestones, you set short deadlines that all contribute on the journey towards achieving those goals.

Some milestones you might want to consider:

• Who can help you with this activity?
• What materials do you want to decide staff are going to dispose of during the Declutter Campaign?
• What are the disposable items? The waste streams you are going to tackle.
• What are reusable items?
• Who's going to communicate?
• How are you going to do it?

You'll also need to decide what the intranet content is going to look like and what sort of support you're going to give this campaign. One issue that may crop up is that you need to make staff, support staff and the stakeholders that are involved in this realise that it doesn’t mean extra work. All the stuff would have to get cleared at some point, the only change here is you're going to have more volume within a specific timeframe in one moment of time, and you’re going to clear it in a more sustainable way!

Who's in the team? Who are the stakeholders you want to consider?

All of the people you want to put together in your team will come from the within the organisation, facility, or estate, and are (ideally) interested in a Declutter Campaign. You may even want to consider porters and the postal system, because this is a great way to dispose of light materials. Those in a portering role are generally used for moving things around, so it’s wise to get them involved.

Case Study Example

Newcastle University have an awesome website. This page gives you a perfect example of how we propose you would deliver Declutter Campaigns. Please see this wonderful example right here. You need to copy this!

As you can see, where you're really emphasising this being done is with normal staff items. For example, paper products, batteries, mobile phones, electrical items, books, cassettes, lever arch files...

You should put this sort of thing on your intranet site where staff can passively access it, and let it break things down for them. We suggest you do a big launch campaign, and then let staff dip in and out of this over time.

What you also might want to consider is that a large proportion of the Declutter Campaign might be old furniture, stationery, and reusable assets. It could be lever arch files, or binders, as they're called in the US. If you've got a reuse system, make sure that you use your reuse system to redistribute these surplus assets around the estate. You definitely don't want to move these assets out into storage or out into a yard. You want to find new homes for them from the point of disposal, straight from the old point of use to the point of new use. Utilise your reuse system.

Financial and Environmental Benefits

If you can, as part of the campaign, track the financial and environmental benefits of the programme because collecting that data and presenting it to the committees and senior management will show them what a good activity this is, and will allow you to continue doing it.

If you use Warp It, we will track the savings for you. See here.

It doesn't actually have to be as detailed as this. In fact, you could just do a survey of the staff and ask them how many people took part in this? What did they dispose of? How did they feel afterwards? You can get and make us of all that qualitative and quantitative data.

Before we finish, we'd like to say that we can send you some support materials (for FREE!). We've put together a really useful branded Declutter Campaign around this image and this typeface, where we've got a leaflet, a poster, a banner, an email signature, and other communication media built so that you can use it and stick your own logo on, as well as your own instructions. Use this to publicise your declutter campaign.

And here's a video explaining how to do it:

Download the materials by clicking the guys face below!

Good luck and let us know how you get on!