5 Essential Checks For Your New Business Premises
It can be exciting to move into new business premises – a fresh start that offers you any number of new opportunities and where you can start to write the next chapter in your story. It’s also something of a blank canvas: if you want to do something bold and innovative, you’re not going to be hamstrung by the ghosts of the past. With all of this being said, you do need to make sure that your blank canvas isn’t just you painting over someone else’s mistakes. Before moving into a new set of premises, it is essential to work down a checklist of inspections you simply have to cover.
Check the electrics
It’s not always the first thing you think of when you look around a bare building – you’re generally busy mentally placing desks and decorations – but you’re going to need to make sure that the electrics in your new building are up to scratch. If you’re planning to undertake an extensive renovation, this is likely to be covered anyway, but it is doubly important to make sure that there aren’t electrical faults. As a best-case scenario, electrical issues can lead to outages and system downtime. At their worst, they can have tragic consequences, so electricity is possibly the most important aspect of your new premises checklist.
Check the working systems
Once you’re established in your new business premises, there are likely to be large numbers of people moving in and out of it on a given day. Often, those people will be arriving and leaving at the same time. That can mean dozens or even hundreds of people making their way to stairwells, lifts, lobbies and other common areas. You also need to bear in mind how the premises would handle a fire alarm. Even if start and finish times are staggered, an alarm can trigger when you have a critical mass of employees inside. Would they all be able to leave safely and in a timely fashion?
Check for contamination
Although some people wrinkle their noses at the name, there is a lot of important information to be learned about Sick Building Syndrome. Not to put too fine a point on it, various things about a building can lead to its inhabitants falling ill. Checking things like the HVAC and water supplies, and enlisting a SEM EDS analysis lab for any unidentified matter that is found in the course of an inspection. If there is matter in your building that can’t be accounted for, you need to know whether it is being caused by something that could, in due course, make your employees unwell or your building unsafe.
Check for asbestos
Yes, this could technically fall under “contamination”, but it’s a big enough concern to merit its own section and its own checks. There is not an effective asbestos ban in place across the USA, although some jurisdictions may have restrictions in place. So it is important to have any building you are planning to move into checked for asbestos, particularly in roofing materials and ceiling spaces. Asbestos is a fragile and potentially highly dangerous material, and anyone who inhales its fibers could be at risk of a highly lethal form of cancer known as mesothelioma. If it is present in a building, you should not inhabit that building until it is all removed.
Check the building’s surrounding area at night times
While the other checks relate to the interior of the building and the hazards that may be found there, it is also of significant importance to know how safe the area is at night. Exterior lighting, car park security and public transport links in the local area become all the more important not only in the evening times, but from early afternoon in winter. The cover of darkness is one factor in the ways that opportunistic criminal offenders like to cloak themselves. It may be necessary to beef up security, add extra lighting and even have a buddy system where no member of your team is left on their own between leaving the building and getting to their transport home.
A new home for your business is always an exciting development, but it is of vital importance to ensure that it is safe and secure before you begin operations in the new premises. If you cannot be confident of this, then you cannot realistically begin to treat the new building as a proper place of business, so make sure that all of the above checks are undertaken before you move employees into the new place.