Article Contributed by Danielle
Working for a corporation has introduced me to a culture I didn’t experience while employed with a smaller company, from team building efforts like volunteering for community projects to spirit days that draw upon employees’ creativity. When it came time for our office to change locations, I was happy to assist with necessary research, such as figuring out which moving companies would best suit our needs. Here are some tips that I gleaned during the process, advice that will ideally help you in your move.
I can easily say that our move could have been better organized. While everything arrived in our new offices in a timely fashion, we discovered that all of our chairs ended up in the break room because they hadn’t been labeled with anything besides our suite number. While it wasn’t a huge issue to rally our workforce and roll chairs to their proper locations, it also took time that we could have spent addressing our customers’ needs.
While it would be easy to place blame on the people who were responsible for labeling the chairs, the better plan is to be proactive and offer direction for future moves. It may seem overly detailed to label 50 or 500 chairs with something like “second floor, suite 100, blue conference room next to the women’s bathroom,” the movers will appreciate specificity and it won’t add much, if any, time to the job they’re already doing.
The other problem we experienced when moving was not giving ourselves enough time to get things set up after the move was completed. Luckily, the minor oversight did not affect our business with customers, who knew we were changing locations, but it made for some late evenings when we were already a little stressed from the change to our daily operations. Where we had been able to pack up our old offices at our own pace – some departments were able to start weeks before moving day – we did not have that sort of time in our new space. Tasks that were done and ready for the moving company upon their arrival, such as unhooking computers and labeling cords, were waiting for us when we arrived on Monday. Hooking up our computer system and making sure our network was connected was a production-delaying task that could’ve been lessened with a better system of organization, such as having the IT department work on a weekend when few employees were around.
Our best move – no pun intended – was hosting an open house in our new offices for our customer base. We served light refreshments, happily gave tours of our bigger location and its amenities, and generally aimed to ease any hesitation our clients may have had about our ability to handle their needs so soon after our relocation. The party was also a great chance to pass out our new business cards and introduce personnel who had come on board since our last gathering with clients. Though a few aspects of our move could have gone smoother, we learned from our mistakes and know better what to do next time we change offices.