Every office owner has to face the moving procedure during their career. Moving to a new workplace is similar to moving to home because while working, most people spend most of their time in their offices and it starts to feel like a home. There are a number of reasons for moving office space. Whether your office lease period has been completed or you are expanding your work and manpower. Moving your office can be interstate or in the same city, in both cases, you will definitely need an office moving checklist for a reliable and cost-effective move.

Moving home or office is one of the same things you should start planning your move at least six weeks before your moving day. That will help you in the entire moving procedure. In this blog, we are going to discuss the end-to-end office moving checklist, and tips to save money and time during the move.

6 Weeks Before Your Move

Office moving can be a daunting task because it affects both personal and professional lives. If you don’t want any hustle before, after, and during your move, we would suggest you start planning 6 weeks before your moving week.

  • Schedule Your Move

Before starting any tasks make sure to decide your moving date. Your moving schedule will fully depend on the lease period. If you don’t want to suffer your office work while moving, make a moving checklist to avoid harassment.

  • Decide Whether you Want to Hire Professionals or DIY Move

Before making your budget make a decision about whether you want to hire professional office movers or do DIY moves.  The interstate moving cost with professionals or a DIY move is approximately the same. Because in a DIY move, you will require to hire a rental truck, buy packing supplies, and move tools to load and unload bulky items and it will affect your professional work also. However, on the other hand, if you will go for professional movers‘ help they will provide your end-to-end moving services including packing, loading, unloading, rental truck, and packing supplies also. 

  • Make a Moving Budget

While planning for an office move, creating a budget list will help you to avoid spending too much money. Making a budget list will also help you after your move to calculate your expenses. If you want to save money and don’t mind packing your belongings on your own with the help of your employees, that would be a great idea to save your money. But try not to give your employees a lot of tasks, if you will do it will impact their professional work. If you can manage your packing process on your own you can hire movers with hybrid moving services. Professional movers will only load, unload and rental trucks will also be included in this.

5 Weeks Before your Move

5 Weeks Before your Move

Here are the tasks that you need to complete 5 weeks before your move.

  • Make the Team & Assign Major Tasks 

Everyone has their own expertise in handling relocation, figure out your employee’s expertise and assign them tasks. You can make a plan and select a coordinator for hiring and communicating with movers. Similarly, you can have another team create an office layout and a floor plan to decide where each and everything will go.

  • Create an Office Inventory

After choosing a team the next thing that you need to do is to create an office inventory of the things that are being moved. The important things that you should note down in an inventory are the major documents and equipment that belong to your workplace. Your inventory should also include decorative items like plants and artwork. You would definitely know the average number of office employees according to the multiple gadgets, printers, desktops, and furniture. All you need to do is use a notebook to note down every expense, budget, requirement, and moving item so that you can cross-check if each and every item has transit safe and secure or not. 

  • Get Quotes From the Moving Company

Now that you have decided to hire an expert team of movers and set your budget and schedule, you should start getting a quotation from different companies. We would suggest you get moving quotations from 3 or more companies and compare their prices, services, and reviews before finalizing office removalists in Melbourne. There are three types of moving quotations available, you need to choose wisely one of them. These three moving quotations are given below.

  • Non-Binding Moving Estimate
  • Binding Moving Estimate
  • Binding Not-To-Exceed Moving Estimate

Most relocation companies provide above mentioned removalists’ costs to their clients. Binding not to exceed moving estimation is one of the highly recommended estimations.  It would be great to get quotations from more than three moving companies and compare their prices.

4 Weeks Before your Move

5 Weeks Before your Move
  • Announce the Move to your Employees

Do not leave a moving announcement for the last moment. Your staff should also be prepared for the office move. Also, make sure to prepare an email for physical and online meetings. Write down the information about the new office address, the date of moving, and the reason for moving. After one week’s plan and an official meeting, you might get suggestions for changes in a new office to make your workplace more interesting. Cheer up all your employees in a positive way to keep the move in their minds. 

  • Inform Your Current Landlord

Just after getting confirmation about your move make sure to inform your landlord about your relocation and the date of lease termination. Request them to return your security amount if you submitted it, at the time when you relocated to your current office. 

  • Collect Packing Material

To save time while moving, one thing that you should do is buy packing material to pack all the important documents in order to save them. Ask each and every employee to wind up their workstation as per their choice. You should be prepared with packing supplies in advance. There are great chances that your office might have a lot of supplies (like cardboard boxes, packing tapes, markers, and labeling stickers), but you might need to source some special moving boxes and packing tapes. You can get packing boxes from an online store or from a local store. Check out the packing tips for safe and secure transit.

  • Cancel Utilities

To avoid the stress in future make sure to send a request to cancel all the utilities on a particular date in the old office, so that you could apply for the utility installation at your new office. The utility change that you need to apply in advance includes internet connection, courier address, phone bill address, and so on. Book an IT expert to set up computers in the new location. You would need to hire a garbage collector, recycling pickup, or security services at the new office. We would suggest you hire them a few days before your move.

3 Weeks Before your Move

3 Weeks Before your Move
  • Buy New Furniture or Equipment

If you are thinking of replacing or adding some office equipment or furniture, don’t delay your purchase whether you want customized or non-customized furniture. It will take time to transit and assemble.

  • Start Packing

Non-essentials or the items that you are not going to use in the coming weeks but leading to move ensure to pack them first into a box and label the sticker with the address named non-essential items. 

  • Check Out the New Office

Cross-check the new office whether it’s clean or not, if it’s not clean make sure to clean it first before starting decorating or bringing the non-essentials that you’ve packed.

2 Weeks Before your Move

  • Backup all Data

To secure your current data from damage, get the backup of your data from the computer to Hard Drive Mirroring Software and make a copy in your hard drive. This will secure your important data. If unfortunately, something happens to your computers during transit you can recover your important data from the drive to your new system.

  • Ask Your Employees to Pack Up Their Own Desk

The moving company that you hired will pick up all the heavy stuff, it will still be a great help that your employees can do is to wrap their own desk space. Give them a deadline before that they should pack all their important documents. You might need to give your team a few hours of time off on the day before the move to get their desks in order.

  • Make Your Employees Familiar with New Office

If you are moving within the same city and you have limited staff in your office you can bring them to the new office to make them familiar with the workspace. By doing this they will be comfortable with the new workplace early.

1 Week Before your Move

  • Update Your Address

Replace your old office address on your company website, financial accounts, social media, and business listings with the new office address. Prepare a checklist to change addresses on official documents. 

  • Remind Your Moving Team About your Move

Communicate with the moving company that you have hired and recall them about your moving date and time. Ask them to reach the location on time so that your moving process would complete early. As soon as you start your moving process, you will be able to set up your essentials and start working as before.

A Day Before Move

  • Make a Reminder Call to Moving Team

Make a reminder call to the moving team and remind them of your address, moving date, and time. 

  • Click Pictures of Wirings 

Before disconnecting your electronics wirings make sure to click the pictures so that they would help you while setting up your new office. With their help, you can keep the picture of connectivity and assemble the wirings again.

  • Complete Packing and Labelling of All The Boxes

A day before your move each and every moving essential should be packed and properly labeled. Make a walk through your office to make sure that everything will be finished before the moving schedule.

On the Day of Moving

  • To Meet the Movers, Arrive on Time at Your Old Office

Even if you are hiring a professional moving team the things that you and someone from your office need to look out for are very important. To assist the movers make sure to be available in your old workspace. This will include letting the movers know about the things that should be loaded first and last. Also pointing them at any fragile boxes (even if the boxes are labeled), and required disassembling the furniture.

  • Provide Movers Refreshment

During the moving offer some snacks and beverages to the moving team. This will help you to make good relations with the movers in the future in case you need them.

  • Final Walk-Through of Your Vacated Office

Once movers load all the essentials into the moving truck, make a final walk-through to your office to be confirmed that nothing has been left behind and everything has shifted. If you want more confirmation you can take images of each and every corner of the office. It might help you in the future to cross-verify your move.

After your move

  • Help Movers While Unloading Essentials 

Help and assist movers while unloading essentials and guide them to keep the boxes in the right place. It will make their work easy and fast.

  • Test your Devices

Right after unpacking all the boxes. Set up your devices in their places and test them if they are working properly or not. If any of your devices are not working, call the experts and resolve the problem as soon as possible.

  • Designate employees to Organise their Essentials

This is the fact that having more hands on deck the sooner you will be able to reorganize and run your business. If your moving team is not available for unpacking and restocking your office essentials you can ask your team to rearrange their desks.

The Final Say

Moving is a stressful task whether you are moving to a commercial or residential place. But a proper checklist for moving is always the key to a successful move. Fortunately, with our office move checklist, you would be able to relocate your office without any harassment.

If you want to move your workplace and are looking for professional movers, we at OZ Removalists can help you while moving. Contact our moving team for more information at 1800842066

OZ Removalists has also prepared a house moving checklist to help you, in the future if you needed.

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