office move - how to?

April 5, 2017 2:48 PM

I am coordinating an office move to a new space. We have a lot of equipment to pack and move. I don't know how I should coordinate the packing of all the equipment. Should I have each employee bubble wrap their equipment,or hire a service that would pack, move, unpack, and set up desktop monitors? I need recommendations and tips. Thank you.
posted by quasicalligraphic to Work & Money (8 answers total)

I'd strongly recommend that you go with a bonded, insured company that specializes in office moves. Your employees are not professional packers, they are qualified to do whatever it is your hired them to do, not pack and move their office. Get professionals to pack and move your office, and if something breaks, you submit a claim with the company, who is fully insured.

Just google [your city] + "office movers" or "commercial movers" and bring in some companies to give you quotes. Take three or four quotes. Pick the one you like best.
posted by juniperesque at 2:55 PM on April 5, 2017 [17 favorites]

At my large ecommerce company, each employee received a stackable bin with a lid. We packed up our personal affairs, assorted desktop items and random cables, then unpacked on the other end. In between, professional movers handled our bins along with our labeled file cabinets, monitors, furniture, etc. It worked out great, from my perspective -- I took responsibility for the safety of my fragile small items, and professionals handled larger / more expensive / shared items. (Also, we were each told to bring our corporate laptops home during the move.)
posted by thejoshu at 3:05 PM on April 5, 2017 [10 favorites]

Definitely hire someone who can do the bulk. A moving company who has done this before will be able to give you many good pointers. Before the move, tell your employees to bring personal things home. Provide banker's boxes, labels and sharpies. Take your existing seating chart (if you don't have one now, make one) and label everybody's desks with a simple numbering convention. Then use those same numbers for the seating chart at the new location. Then you can tag everything with labels with the seat # on your charts. Make sure people label their chairs too!

Definitely don't make your employees do it - they could hurt themselves, or damage the equipment.
posted by pazazygeek at 3:09 PM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

Every time my office has moved internally - eg when they moved our department to a new floor, when we packed up so they could replace the carpeting and cubicle walls, etc - the company hired a service, which provided each employee with several rugged plastic packing bins with lids (looked a lot like this, branded with logistics company's logo). We were responsible for putting our stuff into the bins and switching off our computers (I think keyboards and power strips and stuff went into the bins) then the movers came in, marked down the item number of our computers monitors, and all the bins, and whisked them away, to reappear in the correct new location. Individual employees were not responsible for furniture or public-space items like printers. Even when there was just one person changing offices and we could carry our personal bins over ourselves, somebody came in to move furniture and filing cabinets for us.
posted by aimedwander at 3:14 PM on April 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

Absolutely hire a company. Get the insurance protected move. Also make sure you let your business insurance know you're moving and add a temporary rider to your policy for the duration. When you're moving equipment for your business, it's worth the extra cost to cover you in case something goes absolutely haywire and you have downtime loss. Let the movers do all the packing and transport.

For personal items (not company owned equipment), give everyone a giant ziplock bag (one of the bigass camping ones) labeled clearly with their name and new desk location number. Everyone fills up a bag, it gets gently stacked in a bin to get moved by the movers, and then gets placed at their new spot. Employees come in the next day and unpack their own space.

(No loose personal items!! It goes in the bag or all bets are off!)
posted by phunniemee at 3:16 PM on April 5, 2017

I don't have any comprehensive experience to relate but I have to tell a relevant anecdote: a small company I was an intern at during college announced several months ahead of time that the office was moving. I spent months saving up the sturdiest cardboard shipping boxes that came through rather than tossing them in the recycling dumpster, in anticipation of using them in the course of the move.

Then I came in the weekend before the move to discover that while I was gone during the week the two founders of the company had thrown out all of my meticulously-saved boxes. They rented the sort of stackable plastic bins mentioned above from the moving company, but then of course once everything was at the new office those bins had to be returned, so we ended up with a shoulder-high pile of electronic equipment in one room like it was a junk yard or something.

So, you may not want to exclusively rent bins and other temporary storage containers, but have some owned by your own firm which don't need to be returned. (And consider whether shelf space at the destination is equivalent to your current location.)

Also, some of the guys hired to help with the move stole a bunch of stuff along the way, so be prepared for that possibility. (I assume that's part of what choosing a bonded and insured moving company has to do with?)
posted by XMLicious at 3:35 PM on April 5, 2017

Talk to local moving companies. Last time I office-moved, there were tons of boxes - a folding type we got from a moving company, and really big zip lock bags for miscellaneous loose stuff. Lots of labels and explicit information about accurate labeling. Everyone packed up their desks, books, etc. The movers moved the boxes, computers, desks, furniture, etc. It was quite manageable.

Tell people to get rid of useless junk before hand, and have extra trash/ recycling containers for the people who wait til the last minute to clean out.
posted by theora55 at 4:32 PM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

Long time federal employee here who has moved several times over the years: plastic totes, they get labeled with the destination and somebody magically whisks them away.
posted by fixedgear at 6:30 AM on April 6, 2017