If you’ve been following our blog over the past couple of weeks, you’ve already learned many useful strategies for planning your office relocation:
- Earlier this month, we outlined the planning phase of the project and the need to align your plans with business requirements, gather and validate all your baseline building and occupancy data, plan your comms and more. In case you missed it, see Office Relocation Planning: The Key To Keeping Your Move On Track, Part 1.
- In Office Relocation Planning: The Key To Keeping Your Move On Track, Part 2 we covered the steps to assembling and training your team, and putting your plans in motion so that everything is prepared and ready for the big day.
At this point, all you need is the following office relocation checklist to make sure everything happens with as little impact as possible on the business, and making sure people are supported for every type of issue that might come up during and after the move.
Your Office Relocation Checklist For Move Day
Use this office relocation checklist as a guide for the important tasks and actions you should have in place on move day.
SET UP YOUR RELOCATION SUPPORT TEAM
- Open a Relocation Operation Center (ROC) as a central point of contact for questions and problems that may come up either during the move or in the days and weeks to come. Don’t forget to let everyone know how where your support team is located and how to contact them.
- Make sure everyone knows your lead project manager or move coordinator who has overall responsibility for executing the move and handling any unexpected issues.
- If people are without computer access for a little while on move day, they may not be able to find the information about who to contact with a question or concern. That’s why you need delivery reps at the move site, walking around and checking on progress, answering questions and handling problems. It’s helpful to assign delivery reps to a specific business unit, team or group of people.
- Share this office relocation checklist and all contact information with everyone who has execution responsibility on move day.
PLAN YOUR PRE-ARRIVAL INSPECTIONS
- Even for small moves, you will avoid frustration and downtime for your employees (and even for your own team) by implementing some level of checking on the move delivery before people arrive for work. You can identify issues and take proactive steps to fix things even before the problems get reported. You might even get lucky and be able to fix some problems before employees ever know anything went wrong. For minor churn, inspections can be made and signed off by the delivery team.
- For major moves, you’ll want the lead PM or Move Add Change Coordinator (MAC) to personally inspect the execution of the move before employees begin to arrive. He or she has the best understanding of the requirements, schedule and dependencies, and is in the best position to identify and prioritize any critical issues that might be found.
HANDLING THE INEVITABLE ISSUES
It’s unlikely that you won’t experience any unexpected issues on move day; things are going to happen that you could not anticipate. Facilities problems may be discovered if the previous occupants didn’t tell you that something was broken. Network or equipment issues may arise and people will be unable to work. Items may be mislabeled and delivered to the wrong place. Or new hires are arriving that were not accounted for in the occupancy planning stage. There’s always going to be something! The trick is to be ready for the unexpected and have a plan for fixing it with minimal business disruption.
- The best strategy for dealing with the problems that arise on move day is to focus on returning your employees to business as usual as quickly as possible. That is your mantra on move day! Make sure everyone on the team knows it.
- With that strategy in mind, you’ll be able to guide the actions of your team in solving problems. For example: if a pod of desks has no power, temporarily move the occupants to a vacant space while you deal with the power issue so they can continue to work. Minimizing business disruptions is the name of the game.
- On move day, postpone dealing with issues that are non-business critical. Once everyone is in place, prioritize your issues and tackle them strategically.
Your Post-Move Office Relocation Checklist
The good news is, the hardest part is over and most of the work is done! If you did a thorough job of planning, you probably don’t have too many problems to fix. Here’s your office relocation checklist for handling what comes up post-move and closing out your project.
PROVIDE GREAT SUPPORT AND TRACK ACTIVITY
- Keep using those comms: make sure everyone knows who to contact if they are experiencing any problems
- Triage issues in order of priority and business impact and assign to the appropriate party for resolution. Remember to mitigate business interruption in any way you can!
- Track all support issues and record the resolutions. This information can come in handy when you’re planning your next move.
- Manage employee expectations and stay on top of all logged issues to be sure everything is resolved with a reasonable timeframe.
UPDATE YOUR OCCUPANCY DATA
- Now is the time to make sure all occupancy changes are updated in your workplace management system.
- Especially when the move has gone very smoothly, it’s a great time to enlist your business champions to take ownership of their data. When they take over regularly validating their information, everyone gains an accurate book of record for occupancy information.
What if your space planning tool has no business portal and is not practical for your champions to use? It might be time to think about a better workplace management system. This feature is only one critical component that you might be missing. Find out more with this reference guide to 5 Critical Comparison Points for Workplace Management Software.
MOVE PROJECT REVIEW and CLOSE OUT
- Upon completion of your move, solicit feedback from all parties on move planning, execution and delivery.
Specifically ask about how well you met expectations and how you might improve things for the next move. - Update your entire team on the issues that were experienced with the move project and how they were resolved. Record what you learned and close out the project.
- Everyone worked hard to complete the move, so congratulate everyone and thank them for their participation.
- Breathe a sigh of relief and get started on whatever is next!
We hope this office relocation checklist has proven insightful and informative, and guides you to make your next relocation a smooth and seamless transition for your business. Check our blog again next week for even more tips for optimizing churn management.