Is your desk under stress?
By Nick Easen for CNN
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Some firms will not clean offices unless there is tidy desk policy.
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LONDON, England (CNN) -- To clutter or not to clutter that is the question.
If you cannot see 80 percent of your workspace you are probably suffering from desk stress.
Some psychologists say clutter is the sign of inefficency; others call it creativity. Either way, it may soon be a thing of the past.
"The rise of the open plan office appears to be matched by an increase in clean desk policies," Louisa Smith of Avery office products told CNN.
"For many organizations naturally cluttered desks are just not viable."
However, more than half of workers recently surveyed in the UK were unable to remember the last time they saw their desk due to clutter. Less than a third said they cleared their desk daily.
Any boss who has tried to implement a policy of paraphernalia-free cubicles knows that workers can be fiercely defensive and emotionally attached to their paper-based assets.
"Eight out of 10 companies have no clean desk policy in place," said work psychologist Dr David Lewis.
"Less than one in a hundred take tidiness into account when awarding a pay rise or putting someone forward for promotion."
Some employees argue that a clean desk makes it harder to remember what is on the morning agenda, especially when all your work has been put neatly away the night before.
And earlier this year an article in The Economist newspaper said that many employees believed clutter was actually essential to their jobs -- even though they were made to feel guilty about it.
"Work psychologists have conducted research dispelling the myth that the desk reflects the way we are and that somehow it reflects the human condition," says Smith.
"The average office worker in the UK is spending up to an entire working day looking for misplaced documents every year."
As the debate over desk clutter continues, advocates for a cleaner environment say it is more about combating bad health than bad habits.
Research by Dr Charles Gerba of Arizona University found that the average desk is home to 20,961 germs per square inch (3,249 germs per square centimeter).
And these days some cleaning companies will not sign up to contracts in offices where there is desk clutter.
"We only clean desks if the company operates a clean-desk policy," Robert Legge of EcoCleen told The Guardian newspaper -- his company sanitizes over 800 UK offices.
