Moving office equipment is rarely the tricky part of a relocation. The tricky part is keeping your team working while it happens. Whether you are shifting a dozen desks out of a Bromley High Street office or relocating a small warehouse unit near Orpington, the difference between a smooth move and a lost week comes down to scheduling, labelling and a clear sense of who is doing what, and when.

Why a phased approach beats a single big day

The temptation is always to book one van, one crew and one long day. In practice, that approach forces your whole team to down tools at once, and any delay to the vehicle or the lift booking takes the entire business offline with it.

A phased move breaks the job into manageable chunks. You might move storage, archive boxes and spare furniture first, then tackle meeting rooms, and only shut down individual desks once their owners have finished the work they need to do. Each phase can be planned around quieter periods in your week. If Tuesday afternoons are your busiest, don't touch anything on a Tuesday afternoon.

• Phase one: items nobody needs this month — archives, spare monitors, old furniture, seasonal stock.
• Phase two: shared spaces, breakout areas and meeting room furniture.
• Phase three: individual workstations, IT and anything currently in daily use.
• Phase four: the final sweep, cleaning and handover of keys.

For most businesses in South East London, phases one and two can happen entirely outside working hours, and often on a Friday so the weekend absorbs the disruption.

Mapping your equipment before anything moves

Before a single crate is filled, walk the floor with a clipboard and a phone camera. Photograph the back of every server rack, patch panel and docking station, because cables have a habit of being reconnected in the wrong order when nobody has a reference point.

Give every significant item a number and, where possible, keep the number on the asset tag or serial number you already use. Record the number, a short description, the room it is currently in, and the room it is going to. A simple spreadsheet shared with your move coordinator removes almost every "where has it gone?" question on the day.

Flag anything unusual now, not on the morning of the move. That includes anything over 80kg, anything on castors that might mark a floor, and anything that needs a specialist lifting team — safes, compactors, large multi-function printers and heavy document cabinets all fall into this category.

Clearing desks without stalling the team

Most people can work perfectly well from a laptop on a kitchen table, or from a spare desk in another part of the office, for a day or two. The trick is to tell them exactly when that day will be.

Give each department a clear sticker with a personal clear-by time, ideally the end of the previous working day. Provide stackable crates with lids rather than bin bags, and give every crate a labelled destination room and a named owner. Ask staff to pack their own desk drawers — nobody else knows what matters in there — and to keep personal items in one clearly marked box they take with them.

• Label on two sides so crates can be read from either direction in a van or lift.
• Use colour coding by department or floor; it makes unloading dramatically faster.
• Keep a "do not move" list for anything being collected, repaired or disposed of.
• Pack screens separately from stands and cables, with the asset number written on the wrapping.

Shutting down and restarting IT safely

IT is where disruption becomes expensive, so plan it last and restart it first. Agree a shutdown window with whoever manages your systems — often an external provider — and confirm they will be available on the other side, not just on the day.

Servers, network switches and phone systems should be powered down in the correct order and transported upright, ideally in the original packaging or a padded rack case. If the kit is going into a different building, check that the broadband or leased line will be live before you move, not after. A short overlap on the old connection is worth every penny.

Aim to have core systems — network, phones, printing — live before staff arrive on the first morning in the new space. Even if desks are still being assembled, being able to send an email changes the mood of the whole week.

Lifting schedules and awkward access

Access is the part of the job that most often catches people out in this part of London. Victorian conversions off Bromley South, tight stairwells in Beckenham, service lifts with low headroom and controlled parking zones around Lewisham and Greenwich all shape what is possible and how long it takes.

Confirm in advance whether a lift can be booked and for how long, whether the lift will take a loaded trolley, and whether a parking suspension or bay booking is needed. Where there is no lift, agree a lifting schedule with the crew so heavy items go up in one coordinated push rather than being left in a corridor to block everyone.

• Measure the tightest point: doorway, stair turn or lift opening — whichever is narrowest governs everything.
• Protect as you go: corner guards, floor runners and door-frame padding save arguments later.
• Sequence by weight: heaviest and largest items first, while the crew is fresh and the route is clear.
• Keep a walkway free so staff can still reach exits, toilets and fire points throughout.

On the day: labelling, triage and settling in

On the day itself, put one person in charge of the move at your end. That person fields questions, checks off crates as they leave, and directs items to the right room at the other end. Trying to run a move by committee slows everything down.

Set up a simple triage area in the new building — a table near the entrance where incoming crates are sorted by floor and department before they go any further. It sounds like an extra step, but it prevents the classic pile of unlabelled boxes in the middle of the open-plan floor.

Finally, build in a settling-in period. Give the team the first afternoon to reconnect monitors, find their chairs and unpack, and keep the moving crew on standby for a couple of hours to shift anything that has landed in the wrong place. Small adjustments made on the day cost minutes; the same adjustments made a week later cost a second visit. Plan the disruption, communicate it clearly, and your business will barely notice it has moved at all.