What is Move Management?
Part 1: How you can better understand your move management process
Simply stated, move management is the process of moving one or more employees from one location to another or in and out of your organization. There are varying types of move management–there are Moves, Adds and Changes (MAC), which are typically simple moves, you’re either moving an employee from one location to another within your organization, you might be adding employees and onboarding them or perhaps someone got a promotion and they need to move work spaces. You might also be tracking things such as space standards–an employee who got a promotion may have been in a cubicle or touch down space and now in their new role they need to be in an office. Being able to track all of this is part of your MAC process and is critical to understanding move management within your organization.
The other type of move–which is much bigger and more complicated–is a project move. A project move is taking a handful of people to thousands of people and perhaps moving them from one location to another, completely restacking a building or even bringing a new building online. A project move requires a lot of coordination from various stakeholders in order for the move process to go smoothly.
What is Move Churn?
According to FM Guru Consultancy, Churn is the term used by facilities professionals to describe the continuous cycle of moves and changes within the work space. The churn rate is normally expressed as a percentage of the number of total occupants that have been moved during the year.
All facility professionals have to deal with churn, organizations are dynamic entities that must move people and equipment to order to adapt to change. Churn can be driven by business challenges–maybe you are upscaling or downscaling your business or there was an acquisition or a facility renovation taking place. There is also the daily activities of your occupants–maybe an employee is moving from one department to another or they submitted a move request to be closer to their team or perhaps they wanted access to more natural light.
There are a lot of stakeholders that get affected by a move–IT, HR, move liaisons or coordinators, and of course the person who is getting moved–and their work gets disrupted when any type of move occurs. There is an estimate of approximately four hours of downtime per employee who gets moved and a lot of organizations aren’t really cognizant of the actual costs and loss of productivity that is associated with a move, whether it is small or large.
The first step in understanding your organizations move management process is truly understanding what your churn rate is–and then getting it under control. Getting your churn under control is critical to the success of your organization.
How You Can Better Understand Your Move Process
Moves don’t happen instantly–they require a significant amount of communication between involved parties and there are a lot of things that take place during a move. But at a high level, all moves follow the same overall process:
Request Management
Move requests identify what employees should move and when as well as what small or large scale moves are in the works. Request management allows you to track these types of requests and every organization needs some way to manage this. One way some organizations manage their move requests is through email, however this is not the best option because you have to rely on someone, or a group of people, to manually track all of your incoming requests. A best practice is to find a solution that helps you automate your move management process, which I’ll get into detail further down this post. One way or another, you need a way to manage your requests to get people the space they requested in a timely manner, as smoothly as possible, and with little disruption to the organization.
Planning
Planning involves the high-level coordination between the groups that support the move process, which requires a lot of people outside of facilities and real estate and outside of the person who is getting moved. Move planning entails coordination from various departments including: HR–letting HR know that someone is either getting onboarded or that someone got promoted and now needs to move into an office, IT–you need to be able to track not just the move, but the location of the assets tied to the move (the employees chair, phone, laptop, etc.), facilities and telecom groups.
Coordination
Move coordination means getting the right information at the right time to both internal and external vendors to ensure the move happens in the proper order and on time. What if your employee is all ready to move and your external vendor isn’t ready or has the wrong date? Being able to not only coordinate with external vendors but having internal coordination within your organization is crucial. Coordination takes place from the moment the move is planned all the way through the process of making sure the move goes as planned and making sure the employee gets into their new location smoothly with little disruption to their work.
Process Review
After the move, a review should be conducted using follow up surveys. How did the move go? Is the employee able to accomplish their job in their new spot? Are they satisfied with how the move went and their new location? Could things have gone better? Did everything get moved in time? This move data can then be analyzed to uncover issues and determine areas for improvement in the future. Did you actually perform as a team and are the employees happy with the process? This process review enables you to continually optimize and improve your move process over time.
Part 2: Technology to Improve Your Move Management Process
There are many different methods to managing your move process–from manually tracking each and every move to having a point solution or a full blow facility management platform–each way has its own benefits and you have to find the right method that works best for you and matches the business goals and objectives of your organization. In my next post, I will discuss the different methods and types of technology that you can implement at your organization to improve your move management process. Stay tuned!
