Have you ever been staring down your 15th hour on the job, your back aching and your lungs burning from all the heavy lifting just to say to yourself “man, this blog post can type itself!”

Well I have. Long before investing all this sweat equity into the taxing practice of construction waste blogging, I found myself on the following job-sites:

• Irrigation job-site

Uh, I guess that’s it. But whether your job-site is a living room renovation or the construction of a new upgrader facility in Fort McMurray, there are several unseen benefits of keeping your space organized and tidy. 

Now that I think about it, I might have spent more time on different manual labour job-sites had the irrigation job been a little easier on the ol’ brain. 

1. Mental Effects

The mental impact disorganized job-sites have on the morale of a team of workers is under-appreciated. When I worked on an irrigation crew during the summer while attending university, it wasn’t the equipment that was unclean, it was the work itself. As you can imagine, irrigation deals with a lot of dirt. Digging it up in the morning and filling it back up in the afternoon, to be precise. There was dirt everywhere. We did our best to keep the job-site clean, but it was a daunting task.

Whether your job-site is an industrial warehouse or a small shop, keeping your area clean and re-organizing at the end of every shift will pay huge mental dividends. In fact, people might actually show up to work the next day!

2. Safety

Are you hard on equipment? Well, perhaps you should take better care of where you store that equipment. 

A little scattered dirt might not be physically dangerous aside from its effects on the simple mind of a college student, but loose equipment, tools, and materials can be quite dangerous. Not just because these things take up space and represent hazards to staff, but because this encourages wear and tear. Safety issues are often caused by human error, but that doesn’t mean we should neglect the upkeep and maintenance of our equipment. 

3. Reputation

This is where we get into the real meat and potatoes of Perimeter’s construction waste management program. Normally, companies that respect the positive mental encouragement and safety management inherent in clean-as-a-whistle job-sites take great pride in disposing of construction materials safely and properly as well. A clean, waste-free site is easy to see, right? Sure it is. But reputation is invisible, unless it’s a bad one. If you look hard enough, you can see bad reputations because there are no paying customers obscuring the view. 

And if your reputation is bad from the perspective of a potential customer, then it will definitely struggle from the perspective of a potential staff member. 

4. Staff Retention & Development

Never before has the look and feel of an office been such a focal point for companies in the attraction of new talent. People want to work on a location they can be proud of. People want to be inspired. Motivated. 

The economy’s current turbulence means companies need to be smart about who they hire. From a financial perspective, it makes more sense to pay one skilled worker 50 grand to do an important job than it does to pay two less-talented workers 30 grand each to do the same thing.

A clean, tidy, safe job-site will present your business in a positive light when it comes to new recruits. The best part is you’re not covering anything up, either. You either value your company’s reputation or you don’t.

If you do, then that pride will be evident all over the job-site.