Moving your office to a new location in Baltimore is a substantial undertaking. Moving is always a challenge, and moving a workplace means you are impacting people besides yourself. You have to be more organized, and you can’t afford mistakes. It’s crucial to find the right moving company to support you.
How can I find the right office mover in Baltimore?
To start your search for an office moving company in Baltimore, ask for referrals from some of the professionals you interact with in your day-to-day activities. If you used a broker or realtor to identify the new office space, they are useful contacts to ask for suggestions about moving companies. The property manager or leasing agent for the building you are leaving or moving to may also have referrals. You can ask other people in your field; perhaps people you have met at conferences or through industry associations.
You may already have experience with a moving company, even if you haven’t moved your office yet. Companies will frequently engage moving professionals for in-house relocations when personnel change, floorplans change, or the configuration requires a conference room to become an office or vice versa. Your experience with a vendor doing this kind of service will give you an indication of its reliability and may lead you to consider it for more.
For corporate moves, it is a good idea to conduct references even before you start to meet with potential vendors. This step may save you some time. The relationship that you will develop with the office mover is more detailed and complex than that necessary for a residential move, so you will likely want to plan a series of meetings with the vendors you are considering. If you have talked first with some of their recent clients, you may understand how they operate and whether you have compatible working styles. A full-service commercial mover will offer you a list of clients with whom it has worked successfully, and you should have in-depth discussions with several to ask about their experience. This strategy will be a good way of learning about the mover’s abilities, and it will help you broaden your exposure to the move process as well.
What should I ask when I interview the movers?
When you meet with affordable moving companies to determine which is the best fit for your needs, ask questions that will help you get to know their background. It would be useful to inquire about the size of the companies they have moved previously. If your organization has hundreds of employees, you probably don’t want to engage a company where the biggest job they have completed has been a move of twenty. Similarly, if you have delicate instruments to transport, you may want to consider companies with experience in that field.
Ask questions about whether they can provide you with resources, including communication templates, to help you disseminate information to your associates. Do they have experience in working with vendors? It’s also important to ask how they handle subcontractors. If they are contracting out some of the work, do they guarantee the performance and maintain liability for the work they aren’t performing directly?
Can an office mover help me plan the move?
A good office moving company is prepared to assist with all the details of the move process. If your company moves frequently, you may be a pro at creating the move matrix, filling in a floor plan, and communicating with your employees. But if you are unfamiliar with the various steps involved in the preparation of an office move, the right mover can support you from start to finish. The mover can steer you to helpful planning software and provide consulting and advisory services if you need them. They can assist in planning your new space and even refer you to vendors that offer services you may need.
The mover you select will assign a project coordinator to be your main point of contact during the move operation. You should expect to rely on this individual for communication about timing, as well as updates on staging and deliveries that come before the move. If you are moving into a building that you can furnish in advance, the work can be done in stages, rather than trying to move everything at once. Depending on the size of the move, it may be helpful to create a floor plan that you can share with the employees who are moving. If you have a relocation committee, you may want to seek their input on the layout and get an agreement on where teams are sitting and how space is allocated.
Do the movers pack for us?
In many office relocations, the employees will pack their desk contents and personal items. This practice helps maintain confidentiality and offers an opportunity to reduce the relocation of obsolete material. Employees should be encouraged to sort through files and other storage cabinets to determine what can be disposed of. In the weeks leading up to the move, you may want to provide shredding bins for the secure disposal of documents to aid in this process. Community file cabinets sometimes pose a point of contention, particularly if departments have restructured. It may be that no one wants to assume responsibility for a set of documents that must be reviewed and either maintained, stored, or destroyed. If your company has a legal compliance team, you may want to bring them into the discussion. It is often best for the individual employees to provide them with a specific time on moving day to suspend work and prepare their work area for moving.
If your business has other community areas, you may want the Baltimore moving and packing company to pack and transport these contents. This category includes the mailroom, security office, break rooms, an onsite gym or lactation room, and conference and training rooms. If there is no specific department that has responsibility for the area, it might get overlooked. Even if the move coordinator is aware of the room and arranges for the contents to be relocated, there will doubtless be things left behind. The moving company and move coordinator will need to plan a post-move walkthrough with you after the relocation is done to create a to-do list of tasks that need to be finished.
Another critical question to ask is about packing material. In many commercial moves, the moving company will provide used boxes temporarily. It will drop off the boxes ahead of the relocation date for packing and then pick them up when you have completed the project. This model saves your business from the cost of buying them, and it’s environmentally friendly as well. The mover will often have a color-coded label system that helps them direct the boxes to the appropriate location in the new building. Each employee is assigned a code on the master move matrix and instructed to label their boxes, their computer equipment, and even their chair if appropriate. Usually, the information technology team is responsible for unhooking and preparing any computer equipment, but the movers may be charged with transporting it, along with boxes and other equipment. It is up to the moving company to have a system for making sure that everything ends up in the right place at the right time. For more information visit here!
