Moving offices is an exciting time for a business, particularly if you’re upsizing into bigger premises, but it can also be disruptive to your usual operations. To protect your business and minimise stress for your staff, it’s important to have a bulletproof plan in place to ensure the move goes smoothly. Here are four tips for managing your business successfully during commercial relocation.
1. Assign a project manager
Relocating a business is a team effort, but it’s helpful to appoint a project manager to oversee the move. They’ll be responsible for liaising with the moving company, assigning roles and tasks to employees, and facilitating all aspects of the relocation. Choose a project manager with strong business skills. They should be logical, analytical, organised, and an effective communicator, and it will be very helpful if they have experience in managing budgets and assessing risks.
2. Plan well in advance of moving day
The more time you have to prepare for the move, the less likely you are to run into problems. Start the process around six months before your estimated moving day. This will give you adequate time to get quotes from moving companies, create an inventory, notify all relevant parties, and strategize the move adequately.
3. Communicate clearly with employees, customers, and suppliers
You should give your employees, customers and suppliers notice of your upcoming move to minimise the risk of missed communications. Highlight your change of address to suppliers and customers for a few months after the move to avoid accidental visits or deliveries to your former premises, both of which could lead to financial losses.
Communicating effectively with employees is also vital. 43% of workers feel that their trust in leadership is impacted by poor communication, and feelings of distrust or uncertainty are likely to grow if communication is lacking during a time of great change in the business. By keeping your employees fully informed about the move and giving them opportunities to provide feedback, you can help them feel secure throughout the transition and have their full cooperation in making the move run smoothly.
4. Back up your business data
For most businesses, their data is just as valuable as their physical assets. 94% of companies never recover from a severe data loss; this is partly because the lost data contains essential information necessary for the business to operate, and partly because the time and costs involved in restoring the data and containing the breach are too high. It’s vital that data is adequately protected during the move, so be sure to back up your data in case hard drives or servers are accidentally lost or damaged.
Planning is key to successful business relocation
The tips above rely on having a clear plan set out over a realistic timeline. Provided that you apply plenty of time to planning, the move itself should go as smoothly as possible.
We hope you found this blog post on Four tips for managing your business during an office relocation useful. Be sure to check out our post on Office Relocation: How to Make An Office Move Swift and Easy for more great tips!
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