Seven Tips for a Successful Office Move
Moving office can be very stressful and put a significant amount of strain on a business. That means to do is successfully you need to put in thorough preparation and planning. Here are seven great tips for how to organise a successful office move.
1. Assign moving roles
If you’re person who has been put in charge of dealing with the office move, you need to understand that you can do it all on your own. It’s time to learn how to delegate in order to get the work done as quickly and efficiently as you can. Choose one to deal with the details of moving vans, another to act as a liaison for employees, and so on. Spreading out the tasks helps to ensure that one person doesn’t become overwhelmed. If it’s all just left to an individual it is more likely that they will make a mistake or overlook something important.
2. Choose a quiet period for the move
Naturally, the best time to move office is during a low period – the last thing you want is to be dealing with the downtime of an office move during the busiest part of your schedule. For some business this low period is coming up to Christmas, for others this is the worst possible time, so make sure you know when is right for your business.
You need to really understand the timings involved in your move and stay on top of them. Work out how long it’s going to take to have everything installed in your new office before you even move in – do you need an internet connection? What about the wiring and phone cables? These things will need to be sorted before the move can go ahead so you will have to plan for this work to be carried out so that it’s completed during your low period.
3. Label everything and create an inventory
One of the most important things that you need to do is to clearly label every single piece of equipment and furniture. It might seem obvious at the time, but when it comes to unpacking and setting everything back up, things can be extremely confusing even for small offices. Once you have labelled everything you can easily create an inventory so that everything can be accounted for during the move. This will ensure that everything arrives and is placed where it is supposed to be on the moving day.
4. Keep your staff on track
One option that many businesses choose during an office move is giving their staff the chance to work on unusual schedules or from home. This can be very beneficial as it allows your team to stay on top of their workload. However, trying to organise this can be a huge task in itself. It’s a great idea to use staff rota software like Planday which can help you stay on top of all the organisational work.
5. Prioritise IT
For almost every modern business, it’s very difficult to get anything done if your IT services are down. That means that you really need to ensure that the IT system is a priority for the move. It’s a good idea to have all the IT work done before you start the rest of the move. This can also be a pertinent time to make upgrades to your system that would not be logistically possible during normal working practice.
6. Backup your data
Remember that with the best will in the world, things will go wrong – and this is especially true for your computer systems. Make sure that you thoroughly backup all of your data so that if the worst were to occur you would still have access to business-critical data and information.
6. Let everyone know
Finally, you need to ensure that everyone knows that your office is changing. This includes anyone from utility companies and internet providers to customers, clients and suppliers. Ask several people in the company to draw up a list of those who need to be informed of the move, this gives you the best chance of including everyone.
