Whether it’s because of growth, the end of a commercial lease, change in needs, or something else, many businesses will move offices in their lifetime. Although it can be inconvenient to the business, managers, employees, and customers/clients, ultimately an office or business relocation can be beneficial for everyone. Moving offices gives give the opportunity to have a new modern office fit-out, create more space for everyone, and streamline operations with something created completely fit for purpose. All in all, the inconvenience of an office relocation can be outweighed by the long term benefits.

To make your office relocation easier, we’ve created a short checklist/guide on what to expect and what to plan for when moving your business. This list isn’t necessarily exhaustive, of course, as all businesses will have different needs and challenges. Use this checklist as a guide to expand and plan your move.

3-6 Months Before The Office Move

While a lot should be happening a year or more prior to your office move, things really start to get busy 3-6 months before the move. A year prior you should have scoped out (and found) new office space and began working with a builder on an office fit-out. Now it’s time to figure out how you’re going to be leaving your office.

Things to do and consider around this time include:

Notifying internal and external parties: ideally employees will know about the upcoming move as early as possible, but about 6 months in advance is a good time to give them firm dates, plans, and timeline ideas for the next 6 months. This is also a time to notify any external parties of your move, making sure you give plenty of notice for services that may require them. Remember services like:

• All utilities, including internet and specialised IT services, making sure important IT infrastructure and data isn’t lost in the move.
• Services such food/water deliveries, office plants, stationary deliveries, etc. These services may require a notice period to cancel them or relocate them, so start early.
• Keep clients across the move as well. They’ll need a reminder closer to the date, but it’s good to let them know what’s going on.

Engage with an office relocation specialist: office and business relocation specialists like us here at A1 Precision Solutions are used to working with tight timelines, but the early you can engage with use, the better. The extra time allows for extra planning and making sure nothing is forgotten.

Start planning your make good: when finalising a commercial lease, the vacating tenant will likely have make good obligations. Make good obligations are what the vacating tenant needs to do to ensure the property is left in a suitable state for the landlord. This may involve simply removing fit-out items like partitions or it may include stripping the building back to its base. It’s important to review your commercial lease, understand what needs to be done, and engage with a builder to plan your make good.

0-2 Months Before The Office Move

Obviously a lot is going to happen in the 3-6 month period prior to the move, but if you engage early with professional office relocation specialists and make good specialists, they’ll guide you through the process. These are the two biggest parts of an office move, after all, and engagement with specialists will help you create further check lists that are unique to your business.

So, as moving day approaches, you need to ensure the following:

Make sure the fit-out of your new office is on track: you don’t want your employees and business to be without an office, so it’s important to make sure the fit-out for your new office is on track. If it’s not, it’s important to create a contingency plan whether that means pushing back your move out date, creating a temporary working from home option, or finding short term office space. This will all depend on the way your business operates as well as the terms of your lease.

Ensure utilities will be ready in your new space: it’s always easy to forget utilities, so make sure they’re ready to go in your new office space. As mentioned when discussing shutting off utilities, pay special attention to IT infrastructure and how it will rollover between the two premises, especially if it needs to be always on and is business critical. This may also mean communicating with customers on expected downtime.

Start packing early: recognise what can be packed up early and pack it, moving it to the new office if possible. While you obviously can’t start packing up work stations until the very end, things like paper records that need to be kept for legal reasons (but are very infrequently accessed) can easily be packed and moved, relieving stress on moving day. Use this as an opportunity to go over the plan for moving day as well.

Communicate with employees: a few weeks before the move, it’s important to communicate with employees what their obligations will be on moving day; we’d suggest doing this verbally in a town hall style meeting as well as in writing with clear instructions they can follow. What employees are obligated to do will depend on the office set up, but it may include them packing up parts of their workstation themselves, taking personal items home, or just a general tidy.

Communicate with customers: although you should have communicated with customers months prior, it’s also important that you remind customers of your upcoming move a few weeks beforehand. Although your office move will likely go well, it’s important to let customers know there may be some communication delays (whether planned or unplanned) in order to pre-empt any problems.

And Don’t Forget The Fit-Out Of The New Office

This article only briefly touched on planning the fit-out for the new office. This is a topic all in its own that we won’t go into here. What we will say though is that A1 Precision Solutions is a true end-to-end commercial construction firm. This means we can handle the fit-out of the new office, the make good of the old one, and the move in between. This allows clients to only have to work with one provider, not having to worry about coordinating three. Feel free to contact us regarding your office move. We’re happy to help.