Office mail rooms are getting busier as more and more people send personal packages to the workplace.
This is, of course, due to the drastic increase in online shopping. employees can find it much safer and more convenient to receive their orders at work than at home.
While it may not seem like a big deal for employees to send packages to themselves at work, the extra delivery traffic can start to drain significant resources in your office over time. As online shopping continues to skyrocket, those boxes will start piling up.
Sending personal purchases to the workplace also raises privacy and security concerns. Your personnel policies should proactively address these issues so that employees understand the expectations when it comes to packages moving through your office.
Front desk or mail room staff should also have a clear understanding of how to handle potential issues or violations of their official delivery policies.
Start by establishing a “mail and delivery policy” that outlines all of your employees’ responsibilities when it comes to handling the mail that comes into the office. here is a guide to what should be included:
a policy of personal deliveries in the office
The first thing you need to decide regarding your mail and delivery policy is whether or not your office will allow personal deliveries at work.
employees can really appreciate being able to send their packages to a secure location. however, you need to weigh those conveniences (and the happiness of your employees) against the added costs of the staff managing those packages.
These are some of the hidden costs of personal office deliveries:
- more staff disruption as more drivers come in and out of the office more frequently
- more space in the mail room or front desk is taken up with personal packages (which can become a major problem during the holidays, for example)
- more work for your mail room or reception staff organizing and distributing packages to your recipients
- possibly more risk of confusion and security breaches, due to a greater variety of packages and delivery businesses
These additional costs may not be significant if you already employ a full-time mail room staff member, or if you only have a few employees with a dedicated receiving staff. But for other companies with dozens of employees and a single front desk manager with many other responsibilities, the extra work can become a serious headache.
On a related note, your mail and delivery policy should also clarify whether or not employees can send personal mail or packages from the office. For example, if your office provides certain employees with access to shipping or postage supplies for business purposes, note in the policy that these services are reserved for business use only.
rules and procedures regarding personal deliveries in the workplace
If you decide to allow employees to send personal packages to themselves at the office, the mail and delivery policy should also include guidelines on the following:
- how packages will be handled
- where employees can pick up your packages
- whether there will be any verification or security procedures before packages are delivered to the recipient (do you have Does your full name have to be on the package? For larger companies where front desk staff don’t personally know all employees, will they have to verify their own identity in some way?)
You should also consider what type of notification system, if any, will be put in place to alert employees of any mail or personal deliveries.
Finally, consider whether someone will be in charge of monitoring and enforcing your office’s mail and delivery policy. what will be the consequences of policy violations?
clarify privacy risk and expectations
You don’t want to open the door to more headaches, like front desk staff having to spend time looking for employees’ personal “lost” packages, or your company somehow being held responsible for potential damage to the packages after they arrive.
In your mail and delivery policy, be sure to note that employees cannot hold you responsible for your mail or packages.
attorney william denham also suggests that employers give staff a clear indication that there should be no reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to mail sent to the workplace.
denham says that, in most cases, the law supports the rights of employers to open mail sent to their offices “unless it is clearly marked as personal or confidential and there is no compelling reason to do so.” .
You should include mail privacy as part of the official employee privacy policy and specifically note it in the mail and delivery policy as well. (Always execute employee agreements with your business attorney, who can review them for you.)
training and communication
Dedicate part of your mail and delivery policy to specifying how administrators should handle mail as it arrives. We’ve already touched on some of those protocols, like how to notify employees when packages arrive.
Larger companies or those that specialize in physical products may have more complicated requirements for sorting mail. But no matter how complicated your mail classification processes are, all administrators should know how to recognize suspicious packages and what to do when they see one.
according to the department of homeland security, employees should consider suspicious if a package is any of the following:
- stiff, bulky, crooked, or uneven
- misspelled or mislabeled
- marked with excessive postage or no postage
- remarkable to a missing, meaningless, or unknown return address
- marked by leaks, stains, dust, or protruding materials
the united states postal service also has useful and detailed information on the actions to take in the event that your office receives a suspicious package. your staff must understand that they are not to touch the package. There should be an incident response plan that tells them exactly who to notify and how other staff should be alerted.
In most cases, your administrator should be able to verify the sender’s address and verify the safety of the package.
track deliveries with visitor management software
Regardless of what your official mail and delivery policy entails, using a visitor management system helps alleviate the costs of handling personal deliveries.
Visitor registration applications, such as the receptionist, can keep track of who enters the office and for what reason, including deliveries. administrators can run reports to see how many deliveries were made, on what days, and for what purpose so they can adjust policies and staffing accordingly.
Receptionist also makes staff notifications much easier and more efficient. Your staff can see that they can be alerted to food or package deliveries at any time via slack notifications or emails and that they can go straight to the front to pick them up, instead of sending your front desk staff on a quest! mission to find them!
In addition, digital check-in apps like Receptionist make visitor check-in easier and more enjoyable for both managers and guests, thanks to streamlined processes and easy-to-use interfaces.
If you would like to learn more about the receptionist, click here to request a free, no-obligation demo.