5 benefits of parcel lockers for office blocks

As employees begin returning to the physical workplace, many offices are experiencing an upsurge in the volume of delivered parcels. Some of this is due to an increasing number of online business purchases and equipment; some is down to employees having personal shopping delivered to work. Either way, these parcels have to be managed and that can be a challenge when processes are manual and heavily dependent on staff.

For inbound deliveries, goods must be received, they have to be tracked during the stages of delivery and they must finally make it into the hands of their intended recipients. Day-to-day, responsibility tends to fall on facilities and post-room staff, but it’s a consideration also for commercial property owners and developers who must factor inbound parcel trends into office building plans.

Within the workplace, many solutions don’t lie in allocating more floor space to parcel storage. In most buildings, space is at a premium and must be utilised as efficiently as possible. What’s more, labour-intensive, manual processes for handling parcels are unsustainable in the long term. They don’t scale as volumes increase and businesses find themselves hard-pressed to allocate more staff.

Technology provides another way. Building tenants and employees can self-serve through secure, electronic parcel lockers, collecting their parcels when it suits them so that post room and other staff don’t have to deliver. Lockers offer four key benefits:

1. Convenience

Parcel office lockers reduce the involvement of mail handling staff and take care of logging deliveries and notifying addressees. The item is placed in a locker, the recipient is selected from an index and they are automatically notified that they have a delivery. They then use the PIN/barcode contained in the message to gain access to the locker and pick up their package. It’s simple, convenient and secure, and it takes the emphasis off post-room and office management staff.

2.Time and cost

The time that mail handlers had spent delivering parcels can be reallocated to more productive activities, saving time and reducing the cost of mail management. Often, staff aren’t at their desks when deliveries are attempted. This leads to repeat delivery attempts, possibly even to parcels going missing with the resulting time and cost of replacing lost goods.

3.Employee work/life balance

Being able to receive deliveries at work is a perk for employees who don’t have to worry about missing deliveries at home. The provision of a convenient, secure way of having their parcels delivered helps employees with work/life balance – they no longer feel they have to take time off to be in for deliveries. This, in turn, helps with job satisfaction and morale.

4.Security

Once delivered to a locker, parcels are held securely until they are collected by their intended recipients. Staff are relieved of the responsibility of looking after items and there’s no opportunity for them to go to the wrong person in error.

5.Health and safety

Parcel Pending by Quadient parcel lockers eliminate the risks of person to person contact during the handover of goods by acting as a secure hub for items such as office equipment, paperwork or inbound and outbound parcels.

Parcel Pending by Quadient Parcel lockers can support corporate operations with more than just inbound parcels. For further information, find out what parcel lockers can do for your business.