Changing offices is never easy. You’re dealing with an abundance of technology equipment, printers, and cables that are expensive and easy to damage. Cabinets and wardrobes are heavy, awkward and too much to lift for a couple of staff members, even when their contents have been emptied out first. The last thing you need is a work-related injury to an employee’s back because they tried to lift something too heavy for them.
Here are three things to focus on when relocating your office to ensure things go smoother than they otherwise would do.
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Plan Around Employees Not Lifting Heavy Items
Avoiding worker compensation claims due to on-the-job injuries is a major concern for companies. While there’s business insurance to cover it, who wants a claim and their premiums to rise for every subsequent year just because of a single worker claim? The cost of their medical care, a chiropractor and more to handle back problems, which could be long-running or never-ending in the worst case, is a nightmare. This is why we suggest planning for employees doing none of the heavy lifting.
Use alternative ways to lift heavy items even if they seem unnecessary. Items can be stored on pallets for export and then the pallet lifted into the air using a forklift truck instead of by hand. Moving vans and trucks can be loaded up using the forklift to avoid injuries. You want quality heat-treated pallets to ensure they can hold the weight and won’t fall apart under the strain.
Digitize the Office & Declutter
Any important documents that haven’t been switched over to digital scan and storage methodologies should be actioned before a move to reduce the number of physical items that still require packing and moving. Not everything can be digitized, but most things can.
The other thing that helps is a general declutter of the work areas. Everyone has their favorite items that they don’t wish to dispose of. Most drawers contain an accumulated amount of heavy junk that’s totally unnecessary and adds to the weight when removals people lift desks from offices and carry them out to the moving vans.
Backup All Data
Both at the employee level and at the departmental manager level, it’s important that everyone makes sure that their data is fully backed up. For the IT department, they need to make their own backup preparations to store full data backups once the employees have finished their own computer file management process.
One of the hardest things for a company to recover from is data loss, whether because of a building fire, a relocation, carelessness or a hacker invading the company’s servers. Off-site data backups are inexpensive, easy to setup, and only take a few hours in most cases to complete the first backup process, whereupon all subsequent ones are only incremental backups storing data changes.
Relocating isn’t the easiest thing. For businesses, it’s highly disruptive to ongoing business and client relations. However, there are efficient ways to approach it, which reduces the difficulty and time involved.