Organize your office with Jotform: Best spring cleaning practices

Spring cleaning is in the air, and Jotform’s here to help get your office spick and span.

Spearheading your office’s spring cleaning is never an easy task. It takes time and coordination. It’s one of those things that’s always at the bottom of the to-do list, about to fall into procrastination oblivion.

But as time passes, clutter accumulates, desks get messy, and bosses start asking questions. Cleaning becomes less of an afterthought and more of a necessity.

Believe it or not, online forms can make the spring cleaning process a whole lot easier. With online forms, you can collect teammates’ availability and schedule cleaning times — without doing any extra work. Better yet, all of the information is stored in your Jotform account, so you can say sayonara to long, complex email threads, and hello to saved time and a clean office.

Check out a few best spring cleaning practices, and how you can use online forms to achieve them.

1. Find out what your teammates love and hate doing

Whether it’s doing the dishes, vacuuming, dusting — the list goes on — there’s always at least one thing people hate cleaning. And it’s important you find that out and don’t make them do it. Otherwise, you may enter some dangerous territory.

With an online form, there are a couple of easy ways for you to do this. You can collect teammates’ answers through conditional logic, which allows you to show or hide form fields or sections. For example, you can ask, “Do you have a preference on what you clean?”

If someone answers, “no,” they will skip the next question completely. If someone answers, “yes,” then they will be directed to a follow-up question: “Which task do you dislike the most?” From there, they can enter their response, and you’ll receive it right away.

2. Make it fun

Cleaning can be tedious, so it’s important to make it as fun as possible.

One way to make cleaning interesting and boost productivity is to create a playlist. In your form, you can include a section that asks each teammate to submit three to five of their favorite songs.

To save you even more time, connect your form to Spotify, so each song submission will be automatically added to your Spotify playlist. That way, on the day of, everything is ready to go, and you don’t have to do any extra work.

Another way to make your cleaning extravaganza fun is to have a reward, such as a potluck, for your team after the cleaning ends. It’s easy to include a section in your form that asks people to enter the food and drink items they’d like to bring. After the cleaning is done, you’ll be able to celebrate all of your hard work.

3. Calendar it out

Creating a cleaning calendar is vital so you can plan the best days and times for your team to complete the cleaning tasks at hand.

But with busy schedules, it’s hard to coordinate when teammates will be free, especially when going back and forth on email threads.

The key to simplifying this is to get rid of email entirely. To do this, you can integrate your forms with our Google Calendar integration.

This integration makes it easy for colleagues to choose a day and time that works for them, and once the form is submitted, it will automatically create a calendar appointment on your (or a shared) Google calendar. Voila!

4. Assign tasks

After you have all the necessary information to schedule cleaning tasks, you can start assigning them.

In Jotform’s dashboard, check your submission inbox and see who responded and what their availability is.

From there, you can reply directly to your colleagues — letting them know you received their response and that they’re confirmed for a day and time. Your email will include their submission information, so both parties have a record of what was submitted.

5. Choose a cleanliness winner

After all your team’s hard work, it’s time to vote on a cleanliness winner!

A great way to measure cleanliness is to judge each person’s desk and have other colleagues vote via a nomination form.

Only a few questions are needed in this type of form, such a nominee’s name, a field to ask how clean the desk is, and a field to ask how you would rate this desk, just to be sure you know who the true winner is. Below is an example using Jotform Cards.

Jotform Cards is prime for contests because it adds an extra touch of engagement, especially with its emoji slider and five-star rating bars.

Once you receive all of your submissions, you can choose a winner!

Last, but not least, make sure to reward the winner with a prize. Our go-to is to have everyone on the team pitch in $1, so it adds up to a free lunch for the winner.

Happy spring cleaning!