Understanding Churn
One of the biggest challenges for any organization is managing their churn, or the number of moves that occur in any given year. Churn rate is often expressed as the number of moves in relation to the percentage of offices occupied. The median churn rate for corporations is around 40%, with about half of all organizations having a churn rate of over 100%. Churn impacts everyone in an organization, from the C-suite to facility managers to HR to IT/telecom staff.
Factors Driving Corporate Moves
Churn occurs in an organization through mergers and acquisitions, company relocations, inter-office moves and the day-to-day moves within a facility. Churn can also be the result of facility renovations and new hires or employee terminations.
Current trends to move towards a more agile or collaborative workplace mean more moves are happening than ever before. With this increase in moves, particularly when multiple locations are involved, corporations need a centralized system for managing their space. Even better if this solution can be accessed from anywhere and integrate with existing enterprise-wide systems related to asset management, sustainability, facilities and HR.
In an ideal world, an employee moving from one office to another would be seamless. They would understand where they are moving to and would never lose connectivity because they would already be a part of the organization’s network. But ideal situations and the reality of complex corporate moves don’t always line up.
What are the Unique Challenges of Corporate Moves?
Most moves follow the same process:
- Request management: submitting the necessary paperwork
- Planning: setting the structure and timeline of the move
- Coordination: informing all parties of their roles/responsibilities
- Execution: enacting the details of the move
- Process review: reflecting on what worked or didn’t
Many corporations have multiple locations, often all over the world. Managing churn at this scale can be confusing, particularly without a consolidated software solution to organize the details. When moves don’t go as expected (for instance, they take longer than planned) they can cause confusion and annoyances for employees who are either delayed or given inaccurate information.
They can also become extremely costly to the organization. In a recent e-book we published, “Getting Ahead of Your Move Process,” there is an example of the associated costs of a 2,000 person organization with a 50% churn rate attempting a move using outdated manual methods. The result was an astonishing $500,000 per year cost to the organization in combined expenses and lost productivity.
With the integration of a few key principles and reliable software, the process of a move can go from a chaotic and costly endeavor to a seamless one.
What does your organization need to have a successful move?
Transparency
Business leaders are empowered to set strategic plans once they have real-time visibility into current space availability and occupancy data.
Communication
Department leads need to be able to get on the same page so they can coordinate their moves efficiently.
Accuracy
Leaders need to have a single reference point for their current space to give them real-time, accurate information.
Efficiency
A company can be up and running faster, keep track of valuable assets, increase productivity and reduce disruptions to their business with a consolidated tool.
With all of these factors in play, an organization is set up to ease the otherwise difficult process of a corporate move.
The IWMS difference
An integrated workplace management system (IWMS) is a software platform that organizes your facility data in one centralized, cloud-based space. It’s a technology solution to replace outdated manual reporting and spreadsheets, which are often prone to human error.
Automating your space management processes leads to increased efficiency, cost savings and better cross-communication across departments so that moves are organized and timely. A tech solution can help facility managers do their job and decrease the downtime and confusion that occurs with most moves – thus creating a better employee experience.
Learn more about IWMS to support move management
Download of e-book, “Getting Ahead of Your Moving Process” to learn how you can leverage technology to reduce cost, complexity and risk.
