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While people seem to have a lot of different reactions to the phrase “social distancing”, the one thing we can all agree on is that it’s caused a lot of changes to our daily routines.

Whether it’s being mindful of the distance between ourselves and other people in the grocery line, giving a lot more space to other people while walking down the street, or just being mindful of the distance between you and your co-workers, it’s had a massive impact on all of our lives whether we’ve noticed it or not.

One of the parts of our daily routines that have been impacted by social distancing is where we keep our stuff, particularly at work. While many offices are still working from home, a great deal of businesses have brought their staff back to work with a number of new safety precautions, including increased space between employees during their daily tasks.

This space applies to both employees and their belongings. Especially as winter rolls around, workers will be bringing things from home like coats, purses, laptop bags, and other personal belongings. And while the reports tend to go back and forth on how COVID-19 can transmit via surfaces, many offices have turned to increasing their storage space and creating safe, distanced ways to store personal belongings, needed office supplies, and more.

 

Storage for Offices During Social Distancing

Increased personal storage

One of the fastest ways to encourage social distancing at your office is through personal storage, instead of communal storage. Whereas most offices in a pre-COVID environment would’ve had larger shared areas with coat hooks and office storage lockers, these areas should be discouraged to prevent workers from getting too close to one another. Instead, try to provide storage closer to each worker’s individual desk, allowing them to keep their personal belongings closer to where they work instead of spreading out throughout the office.

 

Use the space between desks

Experts recommend a space of at least one desk between workers, especially in more open-plan offices or open seating areas. While this space shouldn’t be used for seating, it can very easily be made into convenient storage for your office staff in order to help them keep their personal belongings closer. Replace these desks with shorter wire shelving or metal shelving to provide extra table space in these newly-unused areas for your workers to keep things like backpacks and laptop chargers when not in use.

 

Create partitions

To really help enforce the needed distance between workers in the newly-social distanced office, these storage solutions can also become needed partitions between desks. By repurposing taller office shelving racks or office storage cabinets, you can place them between individual desks or work areas to help reinforce the needed distance between workers and help support your current office layout better.

 

Storage for touchdown areas

If your office still supports ‘touchdown areas’ for visitors or impromptu visits from clients, it’s important to keep these areas separate from the main work space, and provide whatever storage you can. Use desk organizers to keep needed work supplies organized and accessible even when your teams are away from their desk, and set up mobile walls or filing cabinets to work as partitions that can add additional storage space where needed.

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