Vinyl Chart Tape – Ways To Improve Your Workplace
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some cheap material that could simultaneously improve your board rooms, worker organization, and other meeting tools and spaces? Gee, sure sounds nice. Lucky for you, it also exists. It’s called vinyl chart tape , and it’s backless (meaning no paper backing), easy to use, and can be purchased in a variety of colors. Vinyl chart tape can be purchased in a number of widths, though the standard ½” thickness is perfect for nearly all general applications, especially at close to medium viewing distances.
Before you wonder how some pieces of tape are meant to drastically overhaul the functionality of some of your business’s most productive spaces, hear me out. In fact, you don’t just have to hear me tell you why, I’ll give you a few concrete examples of how vinyl chart tape can help you out. Sound fair? Let’s get started.
Vinyl Chart Tape for Worker Charts
In the days before digital clocking in and out of work, or even punching a time card, charts reigned supreme. While technology has come a long way, there are some other workplace tasks that you just can’t beat the raw visual ease of a wall chart for.
While hours might be tracked digitally for the purposes of management and payroll, sometimes employees might want to know where their co-workers are, when they’ll be back, when shift coverage will be especially heavy or light, etc. Using vinyl tape to construct a chart on a whiteboard can help keep comings and goings organized. Workers can simply check a box or write a note in the row next to their name to let others know where they’re at, and when they’ll return. These charts can also be extremely useful for delegating tasks between individuals and teams. Workers can see where or what someone else is working at a given time, so that they do not start on the same project or task and waste labor doubling up.
Furthermore, workers can post requests for help, requests for a shift change or days of upcoming vacation or time off. While company-wide email is common, a visual layout in a place that employees will be walking by and/or working around every day is much more likely to get noticed and to stick around in their heads.
The possibilities here are practically endless, but they are a great way for workers to communicate things with each other. A worker chart constructed using vinyl chart tape is also durable and low-maintenance, as good vinyl tape will withstand constant erasing – with a whiteboard chart that’s only been drawn on, you’ll have to constantly re-draw cells as they will likely be messed up while what’s written within them is being erased.
Vinyl Chart Tape for Boardroom/Meeting Improvements
In addition to enhancing communication at the employee level, vinyl chart tape can help to enhance the effectiveness of your own presentations and briefings. In a typical meeting room, attendees will likely be seated just 5 to 25 feet from your board, making a chart segmented with tape ideal for presenting. When going through new concepts or procedures during training, tape cells can help visually segment the elements or steps of a presentation into bits that are easier for workers to memorize and digest. Consider, for example, training employees on a new system for logging inventory. For this new system, let’s say there are seven stages that occur between the time that an item is checked in as a component and the time it is send out as a final product. In training, you can use to tape to easily separate out each step and make it simple to understand for your workers – consider also using different colors to indicate each stage. While this separating of steps visually may seem trivial at first, you have opportunity for an effective transition when bringing your training materials into the everyday workplace. If your seven step system will be handed out to workers as a chart or sheet for them to fill out as new inventory comes in, you might consider matching the colors, numbers, or sizes of the boxes on the sheet with the ones presented during training, to maximize the mental association between important steps.
Lean, six sigma, or continual improvement strategies are extremely common in today’s workplaces. Part of continual improvement is making ongoing changes to worker routines and behaviors in order to achieve higher efficiency, safety, waste reduction, etc. In this capacity, vinyl chart tape can help to keep workers accountable through a sort of “public” records system. Managers can keep a chart with each worker’s name up and fill in their individual cells with advice for improvements for the day, week, month, etc. These suggestions can help to keep workers moving in the right direction and be a somewhat subtle way to correct any problems you notice throughout the week.
Additionally, these charts can be kept private, and may just be a great tool for managers to use in privacy. You don’t want your worker charts to be seen as employee shaming,” and you may find that it works better to keep suggestions organized on your own and then to meet with workers about them later individually. If this is the case, a white board plus vinyl tape combination chart is still a great option as you can keep track of your own thoughts and ideas for as long as you need them, then erase them and move on to the next batch without a problem.
Whatever capacity you need to spice up your presentations or organize your workplace in, consider the use of vinyl chart tape as a viable option. While the application of such simple organizational materials are practically endless, it is usually fairly easy, with a bit of trial and error, to come up with a few applications that absolutely shine in your particular work environment. Ask your workers what they think, integrate feedback from your own management colleagues, and get creative to find the perfect solutions for you.
Additional Resources
- Creating a Visual Workplace– creativesafetysupply.com
- 6 Reasons Vinyl Chart Tape Should Be A Tool In Your Workplace– lean-news.com
- The Top 5 Ways To Implement & Improve Lean Efforts in the Workplace– blog.5stoday.com
- These Are The Best Ways To Improve Your Lean Efforts– 5snews.com
- Floor Tape and Vinyl Labels Whips Maintenance Room Into Shape– blog.creativesafetysupply.com
- The Benefits of Economy Vinyl Tape– heavydutyfloortape.com
- 5S Vinyl Floor Tape– aislemarking.com
- 9 Low-Tech Ways to Keep the Workplace Safe– realsafety.org
- 5 Ways to Use Floor Tape in Your Facility– floortape101.com
