Moving your business is often a major milestone. It means you’ve grown enough to need bigger premises, it means you’ve lasted long enough and have enough confidence in the future to commit to longer term premises. It also means a lot of extra work and risk that you need to put in the time to manage. Moving office is a chance for equipment to be lost or broken, and for sensitive business information to go astray.
Fortunately there are some simple steps you can take to reduce the risks and make life a little easier for your employees. Today we’re taking a look at some of them, so when you move office you can do so safely and with the minimum of stress.
Planning
You can’t begin planning soon enough. As soon as you begin to consider moving office, you need to start pencilling in dates and researching movers and getting quotes. As more details are confirmed these plans can get more concrete.
One of the things you may want to look into are storage facilities. This reduces stress on moving day, as you can store away excess furniture and equipment in advance, and move it in at your leisure. If you’re moving into a bigger office, you’ll need to source more desks for your new staff, for example. Buying them in advance and transferring them from storage as you need them is far less liable to go wrong than arranging for a delivery the day you move into a new office and trying to sync it with your movers and existing staff settling in! If you look for storage London has plenty of possibilities so you should be able to find a solution that fits your needs.
It’s also important to take the time to find the right mover: moving firms that work with businesses are specialists and much in demand but worth the extra time and money. They’re trained to deal with the expensive equipment and sensitive documents safely, so you can relax and place everything in their hands.
Communication
Getting your planning done well in advance means you can communicate about the move confidently and accurately. Making sure your employees are kept up to date is vital to moving smoothly. It’s a big disruption, and it helps to keep their confidence to have regular updates, so they know where they’re moving to (to plan a new commute) and the reasons for the move (so they know the business is not in trouble).
Making sure they know the plans for the day itself – how to pack up their desks, what, if anything, they need to move themselves, and how to cover this for employees who may be on holiday at the time – mean the move itself should work like clockwork!