FEATURE
COMING HOME: A REPATRIATION STORY
Rachel Houghton, Manging Director at Business Moves Group, explains how organisations can return personal possessions from the vacated workplace.
One of the major impacts of the pandemic on the workplace is the shift to more agile, hybrid forms of work. Indeed, these changes are only just beginning to take place as organisations plan a return to the workplace and try to account for changes in working patterns and building use.
As a result, many organisations have used the national lockdown as an opportunity to make changes in their workplace, be it refi tting for more agile, collaborative working or downsizing. Organisations are also making workplace adjustments to facilitate building reoccupation, implementing social distancing, or simply cleaning and tidying spaces.
Having near-empty offi ces seems an ideal opportunity to make these changes, but the pandemic has thrown up its own challenges. Working with social distancing and other protective measures in place limits what can be done.
Some organisations are still working with skeleton teams in their offi ces and moving teams must work around them. Multi-tenanted buildings require additional coordination with all building users. But perhaps one of the biggest unforeseen challenges of the pandemic is managing premises that were vacated virtually overnight.
Many organisations implemented remote-working measures after an evening government announcement and staff that had been expecting to return to their offi ce the following day have been working remotely ever since. This has meant that many premises still contain numerous personal possessions that can be diffi cult to collect.
Certainly, staff that commute by public transport may be unwilling to put themselves at risk to pick up a family photo or a forgotten jacket, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want those possessions back. For those in the offi ce moves sector, new processes have been created to account for the numerous possessions left onsite.
Digital audit We begin each move by completing a full audit of the possessions onsite to ensure that everything is accounted for and can be returned safely to its owner. We photograph each part of the offi ce that we are making adjustments to, recording each item and the place it was left. All products are boxed with other items from that location. The boxes are given a unique reference number and itemised inventory.
This is not always a fast process. Some of the buildings we have worked in house thousands of people at full capacity and a single fl oor can require hundreds of boxes. We can’t
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send in a huge team to carry the process out as our own staff take careful social distancing precautions. Of course, working with small teams has the benefi t of providing greater consistency across the whole process.
“Clients are sometimes surprised by the number of unclaimed items
that are left of their hands after the repatriation process.”
Due to the additional time this process takes, we have worked closely with clients to make adjustments to any plans made before the pandemic. We send a surveyor to the site to assess the layout and demands of the space, the number of boxes required, and the time the process will take. For example, with one client, our initial process was set to take place over three weekends. When their staff moved to remote working, we worked with them to carry out the move over two working weeks. This saved them the cost of paying for evening and weekend working rates and allowed the process to be completed over a shorter span by working more intensely.
Managing data Data in any form, physical or digital, should be dealt with separately to ensure complete security. Data-containing items are managed separately from non-sensitive items. We recommend robust and multi-layered processes which ensures any sensitive data does not leave a clients’ premises.
Repatriating possessions Once the items are recorded and stored, we are able to carry out the work as planned. We also make information available to our client’s workforce so that they can make plans to come in to claim items, ask friends to collect possessions, or request boxes be posted to them. We generally work with the client to ensure only a limited number of their staff come onsite to collect boxes and often, individuals will nominate a colleague to collect possessions for a group.
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