Questions You Should Be Asking Yourself About Your Company’s Office Structure

Written by Chris Godinich. 

What a tremendous amount of change over the last two years as it relates to staffing and office footprints. And within all of this, priorities are priorities. Your team.

Do they have what they need to keep moving forward and navigate the company’s objectives and the changing landscape?   Check.

Now that two plus years have passed (all in a blur):

1. What about those offices that do not have people in them waiting for the leases to expire?
2. More importantly, what has been happening or should be happening with your physical records or file rooms?
3. Are there file rooms (no new office configurations have file rooms by the way) with records that were important at some point?
4. Records manager no longer on the team. No one to figure out what needs to be kept or purged?

These are the challenges we are currently consulting about. With the transformative office shift and downsizing of office square footage, we have many clients asking us to help address these needs. They want to vacate the last vestiges of a remote site and it has records.  And few are comfortable having a moving and storage company come and pack up everything from records to the coffee maker. But no one has the internal staff to manage even small projects as these. And bringing in a national provider becomes insanely expensive (and they are certainly not interested in projects below $50K).

Records are a unique challenge whether you are a physician practice hoping to retire, but need to navigate providing records to patients for the future 7 years. Or if you are an Oil & Gas company looking for some office rent relief with a new smaller space or just a smaller foot print. The records you have and those file rooms / storerooms / offsite storage units, should not diminish or postpone your larger actions.

We see so many times on these types of needs that important projects were delayed 6-9 months because no one wanted to tackle the file room move. Or they hired temps to box and move the records but the indexing was not well thought through. There are a 100 small tips to a project like this (none rocket science, but many important for success).

In these situations:

1. Wouldn’t this be a good time to review/purge unneeded (past retention) documents and scan what remains?
2. Do you really know how cheap records storage can be compared to occupying commercial office space?   Let’s discuss that.