Coordinating your office relocation: step by step guide

Relocating a place of business is always a tricky process. You need to minimize the disruption it will bring to your processes, and you need it over with as soon as possible. But you can’t discount safety, either. For this reason, your best course of action is to hire a professional commercial mover. They can help you with coordinating your office relocation and will do most of the work for you. However, finding the best moving company for the job can be a time-consuming process in and of its own. If you want to optimize your time and energy, Verified Movers can assist. We can match you with the best commercial movers in the area, in a fraction of the time. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, hiring a moving company is actually the last step in our guide. Let’s take a look at all of them.

Important steps for coordinating your office relocation

While there are, undoubtedly, a lot of things that need to fall into place when conducting an office move, these are the steps you will need to go through:

1. Organize your documentation
2. Announce the office relocation
3. Plan your moving budget
4. Discuss your relocation with your employees
5. Book a moving company

Depending on the type and nature of your business, you may need to add extra steps. These steps are universal, however, and applicable to almost all business profiles. You will also want to make sure that you are working with one of the best moving companies North Carolina has to offer. That has the possibility to have a dramatic impact on your move, in a positive sense. These professionals will be with you from start to finish, ensuring a smooth transition.

But, first and foremost, you will need to:

Organize your documentation

The best way to approach this subject is to have one person in charge of all the documentation. You don’t want anything falling through the cracks, after all. Additionally, you will need to gather documents that you may need during the moving process. The best way to organize these is by uploading them to cloud storage such as Google Drive, or DropBox. You need to be able to access your documents at any time, and these services allow you to do so. Of course, if you would rather do it the “old-fashioned” way, create and organize a binder or a file folder. The best way to organize is one that you are most comfortable with, after all.

Announce the office relocation

Here comes the difficult part. Announcing the relocation is something that most business owners dread, due to the numerous issues that come with it. Your employees may have valid concerns, and you will need to communicate the move to your customers, as well. You may also want to add practicing how to announce the move to your moving checklist, as it can be really impactful. The key information that you need to provide to your staff is:

• New office location
• Date of the relocation
• The reasoning behind the relocation
• Key features in the new office
• List of “needs to be done NOW” tasks

You may, of course, include any additional information in your announcement but try to make it brief. After you “hit” your employees with the news, they may have a harder time processing. Try not to overwhelm them with information, as well as make it publicly accessible. Also, consider getting feedback from your employees. To make that easier, it is always best to appoint a person to be a “moving coordinator”. That way, you will not have to deal with a zillion of questions and concerns by yourself. But if that is you, try to be patient and understanding. These people just had their lives significantly shaken up.

Plan your moving budget before coordinating your office relocation

As with everything else in life, you can make your office relocation all but effortless if you put enough money into it. However, this is not plausible for most businesses. What you want to do is create a moving budget and then hire services according to it. Here are some numbers to get you started:

• Average office space in the US costs anywhere between $8-$23 per square foot
• The average cost to move is around $1-$2 per square foot
• Relocating to a larger city may cost you more

With that in mind, you need to figure out if you need any additional services. You may also want to consider some relocation packages for your employees, to make the whole transition a lot smoother. Either way, you will need to carefully manage your budget, as you will have a lot of options to spend it. This is something best done 6-12 months before the move.

Discuss your relocation with your employees

After everyone has time to process the news, you can start discussing moving plans with your staff. Naturally, people will have questions and concerns, and your moving coordinator will not be able to answer them on their own. The key information that needs to be addressed is how the move will impact the day-to-day routine. Try to speak to your employees with respect, as that will have the most beneficial outcome. This is also the point where you will want to re-confirm all the other information. You need to make sure that there is no confusion in the ranks. At this stage, the most important thing is that everyone knows precisely what their role is in the moving effort.

Book a moving company to make coordinating your office relocation a lot easier

The last part is to hire a moving company to help you with it. You may wait until 2-3 months before a local move to do so, but for long distance relocations, you may need to hire your long distance movers as soon as possible. Booking your movers 6 months prior is usually the best idea. You don’t want anyone to say that you have not given them enough time to plan.

And there you have it, if you follow all these steps, you may even find that coordinating your office relocation seems easy! But it is through your hard work and research that you’ve made it all possible. The more you know, the easier things get, simple as that!