No personal deliveries to the office please.

If you wanted to buy clothes 10 years ago the chances are that you would have purchased them in a shop. Nowadays though things have changed and in a lot of countries internet shopping is incredibly popular.

After all, why travel to the shops, try to find somewhere to park and then purchase your items when instead you can order the items in the comfort of your own home and they can be delivered to you the next day.

One challenge though is the delivery the next day as where will you get your shopping delivered? If you’re at work you don’t want your shopping delivered at home as you’re not there. The obvious solution is to get your internet order delivered to your office.

Well, if you thought that getting your internet shopping delivered at work was a good idea then you are not alone. According to the office for National Statistics in the UK, 75% of Britains have brought at least one item online during the last year and a lot of them are getting their shopping delivered to the office.

That’s great news for the companies that are selling online (more sales means more revenue), great for the buyer (items delivered to the office so no waiting at home for the postman) but it’s not so great for the employers.

The cost and security implications for handling all the personal parcels delivered to offices have caused a number of firms to tell their employees to stop having personal items delivered to the office.

In Canary Wharf, the east London financial centre, there were reportedly more than 130,000 parcels delivered in the last year alone. One Canada Square (the main office building in Canary Wharf) has over 11,000 deliveries per month with an estimated 30% of these being private parcels.

The extra cost of receiving, storing and security testing these parcels has resulted in a number of companies telling their staff not to have personal parcels delivered to the office. HSBC, Citigroup and JP Morgan have all now instructed their employees not to have personal parcels delivered.

Is this a good move in that it helps keep control of costs and minimize security risks or is it a bad move in that it could demotivate staff?

Only time will tell but one thing for sure is that other organisations are not standing still.

Doddle, which is a collection service where parcels can be delivered and people can pick them up has recently opened a depot at Canary Wharf. My guess is that they will soon have plenty of people picking up their parcels which can no longer be delivered to the office.