The Volkswagen Audi group (VW) had offices and facilities in a number of places in the UK, with a headquarters building at Purley in Surrey. The lease on the HQ building was running out and a decision had been taken to build and occupy a brand new HQ in Milton Keynes (MK) which would house the 600+ VW office staff at Purley and all other VW offices throughout the UK.

The Group Personnel Manager, Mike Smith, was concerned about the move for two main reasons. The first was the sheer volume of people who would need to move home to work at MK and secondly the capacity of the HR function to provide adequate assistance. He was therefore looking for an organisation that could, in effect, become an implant within the organisation to produce a relocation policy and assist staff to move home. We were invited to meet the VW relocation team and were awarded the contract.

• At this stage employees were unaware of the impending move so we decided to hold meetings at the key VW locations in Purley, Doncaster and Ramsgate in order to announce the move and tell them how we could assist. We also enlisted the help of the MK Development Corporation team, with their detailed knowledge of the locality – which was of course rapidly growing.
• At the meetings we explained what would happen and how we could help. We also decided to run one to one in-house relocation 'clinics' to discuss in depth how people felt about the prospect of moving, what form of assistance they and their family would need and whether they were likely to move or perhaps opt for redundancy instead.
• Because of these sessions a clearer picture started to emerge about the likelihood of individual staff moving and how this would impact on the need of the company to recruit and train replacement staff.
• Working closely with VW management we designed and produced a carefully constructed and flexible support package covering the relocation benefits available, together with the redundancy terms and conditions.
• The overall project was designed to run for at least 18 months, spearheaded by an advance guard which was established close to the construction site itself. During this initial period staff were also able to opt for an early move if, for example, they had a child moving up to senior school at the start of the new school year.
• The main body of the move took place once the new building had been completed and the tail of the staff moves kept wagging until the old buildings finally closed.
• VW actually retained our services until well after the building was fully occupied so that we could assist them with their recruitment programme in the MK area.

The move was deemed by VW to have been highly successful – and in fact led to us establish a MK city centre office some six months afterwards.