Does your workplace mailroom deliver?

Fact: According to a study produced by research firm Edelman Intelligence, 74% of packages are stolen during the day from your employees’ home while they are at work. This means that employees are increasingly opting to have online purchases shipped to them at work. What does increased personal package delivery mean for your workplace––and for your workplace experience for employees, visitors and customers alike? 

A commissioned study by Wakefield Research discovered what aspects of the workplace experience were most important, what was working, and where improvements were needed. This exclusive online workplace experience study surveyed 1,000 U.S. office workers across industries, locations, ages, genders, and roles. The responses reflected both a strong need to minimize time spent troubleshooting workplace technology, and that first impressions matter––and are formed––the moment someone steps into your office. Delivery management impacts workplace experience and first impressions in two main ways. 

The study revealed that more than 2 in 5 people (44%) say a greeting at the door is the biggest influence on their first impression of an office when arriving for an interview. If your office manager is busy trying to deliver packages to employees, they aren’t as available to greet visitors. Second, packages are often stacked behind the front desk until the office manager has time to deliver to employees––or even worse, in the lobby area itself. So what do visitors see? A lack of organization, inattention to the visitor experience, and that your company doesn’t prioritize the very first opportunity to make a lasting, positive impression.

Relegating delivery management to the back burner of your organization’s workplace experience is a mistake you can’t afford to make. Here's why it pays to be proactive with your workplace deliveries and remove barriers to making a great first impression on visitors. 

Improve the state of your workplace mailroom

69% of respondents to the Wakefield Research workplace experience survey say they have had a personal package delivered to them at work. Why? Among the top reasons named by our survey-takers:

• Convenience based on not being present at home during delivery windows (63%)
• Concern for security (50%)
• For privacy reasons (37%)

According to a Shopify report, online shopping is expected to nearly double from $2.3 trillion to $4.5 trillion by 2021. As online shopping increases, personal deliveries to your workplace are sure to follow suit, as people are not able to be home to receive packages. 

How can companies keep up with their workforce’s personal deliveries? No matter the role you have or the size of your company, workplace technology should always make your day easier and better. This is especially true for office managers, who wear many hats and field tens if not hundreds of questions a day about everything from the Wi-Fi password to wayfinding.

Optimize your workplace experience

Still not convinced? Delivery management doesn’t end when you sign for a FedEx package. Even if you feel like you don’t have that many packages delivered, little inefficiencies add up. And the bigger your company gets, the more your delivery management matters.

Why? Here’s what the manual-process lifecycle of a delivery looks like in the workplace. 

1. A delivery arrives. Someone from your office has to arrange for the delivery representative to leave the package somewhere. Depending on whether you are in a multi-tenant building, the package then needs to be signed for, left at a desk, in the hallway, by a door, or with a security guard, to name just a few scenarios.
2. Someone must receive the package. This could involve taking an elevator or going downstairs to collect the package(s). Depending on staffing, this could leave the front desk unattended.
3. The package is placed in a mailroom, behind a desk, or (in some less-than-ideal cases where space is at a premium) on the front desk itself.
4. An office manager or other employee needs to record that the package has been received for due diligence, compliance reasons, and for general best practice to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
5. The office manager or employee notifies the recipient of the package arrival manually via email, text message, phone call, or other internal communication method. 
6. If the delivery recipient is in the office, the office manager or that employee is tasked with physically going to pick up or deliver packages.
7. If the delivery recipient isn’t present, the package is perhaps left on the desk of the employee, leaving it at risk of being taken by someone else. 
8. If same-day delivery retrieval is not possible due to an absence or other reason, the package is left sitting in a mailroom, or behind the front desk. 
9. If the package remains unclaimed for days, the office manager or employee must take the time to remind, and re-remind, the delivery recipient to pick up their package.

Even if your workplace receives just a few packages, the manual process of logging and managing deliveries is a disruption that you continually have to navigate. Multiply this process by even a factor of 10 and you have a significant, time-intensive delivery management headache that leaves much to be desired. 

Know where your high-priority deliveries are at all times

In addition to the challenge of manually managing the influx of your employee’s personal deliveries, there are times when better tracking of a high-priority delivery is essential. For example, an IT manager could be waiting on a high-value order of equipment, such as computers or other hardware. This is yet another mission-critical reason to have a secure delivery management system in place.

What if your employee who manages these kinds of office operations isn’t at work? Say someone is out sick, goes on vacation, or leaves the company. All it takes is one page from your delivery log goes that goes missing to create a problem –– one that also carries the risk of being out of compliance and leaving you on the hook should the delivery go unaccounted for. 

On average, those surveyed in our workplace experience study cited spending 24 minutes a day troubleshooting workplace technology inconveniences and workarounds. Over the course of just a week, this adds up––nearly two hours––and this is unacceptable.

Get the ebook now to explore how delivery management software can replace a manual delivery in-take process, and give office managers valuable time back.