Relocating an office requires a much more careful planning process. Think logically and make a list of all the steps to follow. A successful office move requires the right amount of people, each of whom has to be responsible for an exact list of tasks.
Manage these people and their progress at every stage of the move. Spare no expense whenever you need advice or service from a professional in the fields of design, long-term storage, removals and relocation, real estate management, etc.
Taking the position of the “jack of all trades” in a situation like this may have an adverse effect on the office relocation process; better invest in hiring professionals if the office move manager cannot handle all tasks alone. Here is an office move checklist to ease and destress your business relocation process.
When planning your office removals, start with the most important stuff first:
Table of Contents
Determine motivations for moving the office
When planning your office move, your first step should be to clearly express why relocation is necessary. Anyone related to the business would expect a reasonable explanation of why the office move cannot be avoided and what are the pros and cons of the office move. These are some of the most common reasons for changing the office building address:
- Finding new talent easier
The young population is concentrated in bigger cities where opportunities for work and education are much more than in the less populated areas. - New Address is Closer to Your Target Audience
The majority of businesses prefer to be accessible with ease by their customers and business partners. - More Business Growth Options
Moving an office also has the potential to expand your business. Operating in a region with a high concentration of well-established companies will attract lots of attention to your company as well. Entrepreneurs and investors will contact you, providing original ideas and plans for mutually beneficial work. - Lower Renting Fees
Companies rarely buy a building that serves as their office. It’s a common practice to rent a property instead. What’s frustrating is that owners of rented buildings have a tendency to raise the price for the rent each year. When a landlord notices that the business who has hired their building is prosperous, they tend to raise the rent price. Moving your office is one of the ways to reduce the expenses for absurdly high monthly rents by hiring a new building or buying a place.
The pros of changing your office address are not limited to what we’ve listed above. Read more on why you should move and what are the positives of doing it when it’s a well-planned and professionally executed procedure.
Assign an office move coordinator
Assign a person in the office who will be fully responsible for the major tasks during the office move. If there’s an office manager, they are the most suitable person for the job. Create a workplace strategy for the moving process.
Build up a great moving and packing team
Build up a team for the office move project management that will create, optimise and track the progress of your top-notch office move plan.
The whole team will be managed by the office move coordinator, who will make all necessary changes to the process and will have to take additional actions whenever required.
Assign each member with specific responsibilities that best fit their personality.
Create a calendar for important office move events
Figure out all key dates of the office move. Mark these as important events on a digital calendar and send notifications to all interested parties. Examples of such key steps are any of the following actions:
- Lease termination at the current address
- Preparing all office goods for transportation
- Emptying the building of personal items
- Signing a lease contract with a new landlord
- Setting a final date of the office move
Feel free to assign in the calendar any additional tasks that seem important for your business relocation.
Estimate your office move costs
If you don’t know where to start, we recommend you start by establishing the moving costs. You can contact moving companies and get quotes. Most removal companies, such as ours, offer free video surveys to give you a quote for the service.
There are many elements that form the price of an office relocation service, including the day you want to move on.
Make a sheet with all tasks and delegate them
You can track the tasks from your office relocation plan more effectively with the help of a Google sheet. It offers much more benefits than any similar applications and tools:
- It’s a cloud service and anyone can access it from anywhere
- Offers plenty of functionalities, editing options and restrictions for viewing and editing documents
- People can easily share the document, multiply it, as well as add comments, visible to anyone the sheet is shared with
- It’s mobile-friendly and is usable while on the go
- You can even use it offline and then apply the changes to the main document on the cloud
Book a trustworthy moving company
Many shady moving companies will agree to sell you their services even though they don’t have all the required resources to do an office relocation job efficiently.
Such companies usually leave you with a terrible service experience, and getting your money back is always tedious.
To avoid this, research all established moving companies very well. We have a few tips for you that will help you distinguish a reputable office relocation company from one that offers poor services:
- Aim for companies that have well-designed websites
There you will be able to find all the information you’re looking for. - Search for businesses that have been operating in this field for at least a few years
A business that has just been established has a high chance of lacking trained staff and experience to get the job done according to your needs. - Check the reviews for the list of companies you’re choosing between
Some platforms offer spammy reviews and should be avoided, Google’s listings offer a high trust rate where the majority of reviews are organic. - Ask for insurance
If a moving company cannot offer insurance for your office items, it should be avoided at any cost. You must have a guarantee that if anything gets broken or damaged, your business will be well compensated for this. Our commercial moving services have public liability insurance. - Discuss the packaging process
A professional moving company wouldn’t mind if you do the packing. It may only affect the terms and conditions of the insurance but this is to be negotiated between the office move project manager and the moving company’s representative. For a stress-free moving process, we recommend you get the packing supplies from your moving company and you let them do the packing. - Fixed quotes
Reputable removals service provides will give you an exact price for the removals service you want to book with them.
Keep in mind that when you work with a moving company, you need to arrange the on-site parking in your old and new office locations.
Put your office move communication plan into use
Time for the office move to be announced officially to all who are concerned with it. Employees go first, send a notification to everyone in the company. Stick to the tips (described in details) we’ve listed previously in our office move announcement post.
Make a Google Form with all the FAQs you may receive. Share it with anyone, process the feedback and apply to take all necessary actions to ensure everyone is well informed of the office move process.
Make meetings for face-to-face contact with the company’s staff. Some might find it as a more suitable way of sharing their feedback, concerns and ideas on the office relocation process.
First thing to do is have everyone remove their personal belongings a few days prior to the moving date. This will ease the packing and moving process.
Plan the new interior design for the office
An office relocation goes hand in hand with changing the interior design. A business may benefit drastically from an interior design refurbishment.
Have the following things in mind when planning the new design of the office building:
- Are you planning to grow?
If the answer is yes, then you should create more free space. - What do you want to do in each area of the office?
- How do you imagine the new workspace?
Any additional features you want to include will affect the interior design plan as well. - Discuss furnishing carefully
Operation requirements and space are crucial. Take the time to create a well thought-out plan for the use of space. - Precisely measure the new office’s dimensions
- Contact professional interior designers to make a plan for the new office.
But most importantly, make sure you don’t have a gap between your move-out and moving-in dates. Create a proper office move timeline. Your new office space should be ready to move in and set up the workstations so you don’t lose business operations.
Discuss IT hardware and software changes
Contact your IT department and discuss changes in the IT equipment at the new address after the office move. Think about things such as:
- Will you buy/sell office equipment?
- Does your current hardware require any excessive maintenance?
- Is any of the software you use linked to the physical address of the office? If so, changes should be made.
- Make a survey if office employees need any additional IT appliances. If they do, consider if you can fit it into the office move budget and purchase what they need.
- Discuss if outdated and old files and papers can be destroyed instead of transported to the new office.
- Talk to the moving company if they will be able to move IT hardware, specifically servers. Take all necessary measures to avoid data loss. It’s one of the most common errors during the relocation of IT hardware that can also affect the company’s finances negatively.
These might be the most important steps for your office relocation checklist. You may even want to create a separate checklist just for IT-related chores.
Find a proper place to move to
When you research the cheapest areas in London to rent and move to, pick several suitable addresses and discuss these with the management. When they approve a few of them, notify employees of your choices and see if there will be people who will find it hard to get to the new office building.
If only a few employees find the new place inconvenient, you can discuss personal compensation for them. Any of the following would look like a reasonable compensation:
- Additional income for transportation/fuel
- Free public transport license
- A preferential price for accommodation in the area
- Working from home position, etc
- Pay attention to the office layout, will it suffice your business needs?
Hire a broker if no one in the company has enough experience in the real estate market. This will generate additional costs for your company but, in the long term, will most certainly prove as an investment. Do not forget to change your new office address on all your business documentation.
Determine your budget
Plan your office move budget precisely. Leave no place for mistakes, otherwise, it may cost you a lot in terms of human resources, finances and time. The office move communication within the company has a great impact on calculating the costs properly.
Research everything that may affect your moving costs and talk to all employees with anything in common. These are some of the major factors to take in mind when determining an office relocation budget:
- Costs on moving supplies.
- Removals service costs.
- Removals insurance costs.
- Financial losses during the time when a business does not operate. This is the time period from starting the office move until fully completing it. Any company should make a close calculation of the consequences from the downtime period while it’s moving.
If you calculate a price that doesn’t fit your budget, consider things like selling some office furniture or tech equipment. Especially if they won’t fit in your new office space.
Here is our downloadable ultimate office move checklist.
Ready to move office?
At Fantastic Removals, we deal with relocation jobs of all sizes. We make commercial and office moves and provide business storage and document storage service to our corporate clients. You can get in touch with us for a quote and ask about the many supplementary services that we offer. You deal with the office warming party, and we’ll organise the office relocation.
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