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Moving an office from location to location can be a big milestone in the life of your firm, but it can also be quite the logistical effort to manage. After all, it takes time and effort to complete a move, but you’re trying to run your business at the same time.
Extended downtime can cause issues, reduce goodwill, inconvenience customers and clients, and in general limit your productivity. Of course, to a certain extent this is inevitable. You might warn customers, suppliers and other essential contacts about your move months in advance so they know what to expect.
But it’s much better to implement contingencies to try and reduce the impact on those who want to support you. In this post, then, we’ll discuss a smarter guide to moving your offices, how to avoid productivity pauses, and some secrets for planning this logistical effort to begin with.
Without further ado, let’s get started:
A Full Cost Analysis
It’s important to project some of the costs of moving your business. This might involve the major costs such as using the best removalists, or the smaller costs such as the packaging for moving in the best manner.
You can also plan for certain investments that need to be made when situating yourself in the new office, such as branding the exterior, paying for parking maintenance and security duties, and outfitting the new staff kitchen with refreshments and kitchen utilities anew.
Through this method, you’ll be able to identify areas for improvement or cost savings. For example, you might have a full suite of aging office furniture which could really do with an upgrade. Instead of moving them to the new office, you might decide to place them in storage units and sell them as part of a job lot, then purchase a new ergonomic set at the new office.
Employee Communication & Planning
It’s essential to make sure your employees are fully aware of the move, where it will be, your timeline of moving, and what that will look like for their department. If you’re moving sufficiently far enough away (even five or ten miles), then it’s fair to say that some employees may not be able to adjust their commute into their schedule and may need to move on. Here you can consider helping them move on to pastures anew by providing a glowing reference, help them alternate to remote work, or having those frank discussions to begin with.
This way, you can also better develop schemes that start at the new office, like a bike-to-work scheme or negotiating parking space discounts in the local lot area.
Another simple but worthwhile point to consider – give your employees enough time to adjust and make that move. You may give them two weeks or so to transition everything from one place to another, offer support schemes for those that are moving house to come with you, and work with temporary replacements in the meantime.
Minimizing Downtime Strategies
Depending on the kind of office you run, we’re willing to bet that a great deal of your work is increasingly online and possibly even remote. Transitioning to a reduced capacity uptime can be very helpful as you move, then.
It might be that you allow your customer support team to work from home as you move, and then transition them slowly bit by bit to the office anew. When you think about it, an office move is in no way as intensive, worrying and demanding as the Covid-19 pandemic was on many businesses worldwide, and so a couple of weeks of reduced capacity, while you schedule your move and inform your customers, is hardly going to be a terrible outcome to deal with.
Your Moving Timeline
Setting your moving timeline is intrinsic to how you plan this entire affair, and you can even set several timelines at once to make sure that everything runs in sync. So for example, your first moving process might be to bring your entire IT and HR department to the new premises, so you can easily slot in with your remaining staff exactly when you need to.
You can also add contingencies here, such as time for your removalist to set up, for your infrastructure to be installed, and for your new furniture to arrive. Of course, it’s wise to leave at least a few days before your wider team comes to the office with you because then you can learn more about the local area, the parking situation throughout the day, the best place to go for lunch outside of the office, and integrate the security measures important to your firm such as printing ID tags for door entry.
Set Up Each Workstation
It’s so much easier to welcome everyone back into the office if you have their workstations set up, assigned, and ready to go. You could even implement a provisional seating plan for departments to sit together or decide which floor they’ll be situated in.
Having all of this set up for their first day can help them get right back into the swing of things. You might even make sure additional functionalities are present like appropriate cable routing, laptop docks, monitors, ergonomic chairs (enough for everyone), and enough space within the staff fridge or whatever other amenities you have for them to use.
Draft A Welcome Document Or Letter
It’s nice to let people know what to expect when moving into the new office. Perhaps you’ll give some information about the local area, where is best to go for lunch, the restroom protocols if the space is difference to your last office, or even about the other businesses sharing office space on other floors of your building. A welcome document of this nature allows for calm consideration or planning in the best possible context.
With this advice, you’re certain to implement an even smarter guide to moving your offices, and will no doubt benefit as a result. We hope this transition goes smoothly for you, and allows a fantastic new chapter of your company.
