Daunted and fearful, small business owners often approach the moving process with caution. When these small businesses move their offices or stores, they may not be able to tell what effect it will have on their business. Taking too much time planning or executing a move can take away from the office’s productivity.
Business owners and employees are often worried about simply transporting their items from point A to point B since the damage is so common in moves like these. Take it from an experienced commercial moving company; approaching the office move with knowledge and a plan can wash away a portion of trepidation and anxiety.
Preparing to Adapt to a New Space
Any business owner’s top responsibility after picking out their ideal space is ensuring they can develop a suitable working environment within it. Picking the ideal layout to work with your space and existing employees’ strengths is the task at hand. Talk to any office employees about what they rack their brain worrying about prior to an office move, and the layout of their office is quickly brought up.
Working within the strengths of the team is important. Will an open, collaborative space spark their productivity? Does the teamwork best in isolated individual quarters all to themselves? It’s up to the move manager to determine what space works best for their needs.
Keeping the feedback of the employees in question closeby when making these decisions can help remove part of the uncertainty. Often employees will have clear preferences or hypotheses informed by their previous working experiences on what type of working environment works for them.
A different set of eyes can often unlock a key insight to shape the new office environment for the better. A moving-related survey is often utilized by companies to gather lots of perspectives at once on how they can best construct their new office environment.
Moving The Items
When it comes to moving furniture, equipment, and whatever else is in the office, a gradual approach is often best. Starting early allows companies to maintain flexibility if something unexpected happens late in the process that time needs to be spent on fixing. Prior to packing, everything should be listed in an inventory of sorts. In a process as complicated as moving, things can often slip through the cracks. Every item should be tracked. If the company is doing its own packing, they can check off the items as they pack them.
The time frame Oz generally advises for finding a lease is 6 months prior to the move. Utilities take a long time to set up properly, and if something goes wrong, there won’t be a quick fix. Office and move managers should be gathering estimates and starting their packing process about two months before the move.
For many of the reasons discussed above, packing gradually offers plenty of benefits for the company, but any packing done beyond two months prior to the move is unnecessary. Packing gradually over a longer period of time prior to the move allows companies to maintain most normal functions while they prepare for the move.
Keeping The Business Running
Staying prepared and on schedule during the moving process is key, but it is vital that small businesses maintain the flexibility to keep their business functioning normally during the moving process. Small businesses can’t afford to throw away any time they could spend generating revenue to pay their employees and cover their costs, especially since the move itself has a fair share of costs.
Packing gradually helps spread the labor out over a period of days and allows employees the flexibility to stay on schedule with their day to day tasks while also keeping one eye on the responsibilities the moving process entails.
Any interruption in internet access amongst company employees can really derail their company’s operations. Moving managers typically keep pace with the setup of their company’s internet service, but may not realize its absence can cause their company’s productivity to flatline completely. Talking to moving company employees who’ve had a negative experience while transitioning offices, there’s no more common horror story than internet outages causing days of lost productivity.
Retail stores have a unique perspective when moving to a new location. Their move is an opportunity to gather interest and offer reduced prices to increase sales. Plus, getting rid of stuff before moving is a good idea, to begin with; the fewer things being moved, the less the move costs.
We recommend informing your customers as early as possible about your relocation, and using the opportunity to try and offload some of your inventory in a “moving sale.” Customers may think any price you offer is basically unbeatable and offered seemingly under duress.