Surviving Workplace Renovations

Since the onset of COVID-19, many of us have become somewhat familiar with working from home.  During this transition, most companies were able to boost their IT infrastructure and technology, making it easier for people to work remote. While renovating your office, the most cost effective and quickest option is to adopt a remote work policy during the time of construction.  When you’re able to work out of the way of construction, you save time and money.  A free open space gives the contractor the ability to come in, easily stage the site, get all trades in at once to knock out their scope of work, and move through the job quicker. These efficiencies also come as a cost saving to you. The biggest benefit – your staff can continue to work remote in a space that’s free of distractions, loud noises, and unwanted dust and debris.

On the flip side, you have the option to work through the renovation in your space. We realize that not everyone has the luxury of totally vacating their office and leasing temporary space during office wide updates. With this approach, it’s important to develop a solid phasing plan. A phasing plan identifies what work will happen and when. This also helps you track when certain groups will see the most distraction or be displaced from their current workspace.  Through this process, we’re constantly trying to identify how we can complete the work with minimum distractions to business operations. Once a phase is complete and usable, the contactor will move onto the next phase. Although you have the benefit of not leaving your existing space, there are a few things to consider. This process typically takes more time. Moving from phase to phase does create some inefficiencies in the construction process, which then leads to increased costs. Some tasks like demolition or saw cutting concrete slabs can be very noisy and disruptive. For some of these more disruptive activities, you may choose to have this work performed over night or on the weekend. Again, these types of decisions reduce distractions, but increase the overall timeframe and costs.