Over 25% of people are staying home from work to receive packages. How employers could fix that.

 

Porch piracy results in $8 billion in losses annually in the U.S. Can shipments to the office solve the problem? - MarketWatch photo illustration/iStockphoto

Forget nap rooms and free snacks: Could the new office perk be the ability for employees to receive all their Amazon deliveries and other packages at their desks?

That’s the question some are asking in light of a confluence of trends that have emerged in recent years. Namely, the fact that ordering everything to be shipped to your home — clothes, household basics, you name it — has become a reality of American life. At the same time, porch piracy — the theft of packages from people’s doorsteps — has also become a reality, and one that is estimated to result in $8 billion of losses a year.

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So, as more companies are asking workers to return to the office on a regular basis postpandemic, that has left many employees feeling concerned their packages may go missing. Indeed, a new global survey from Vivint, a home-security and smart-home brand, found that 26% of employees are working from home on package-delivery days — just to avoid the piracy scourge.

Hence the solution of letting those workers have their boxes sent to the office instead, a practice that businesses have often shunned in the past for a host of reasons, including the most obvious one: It clogs up company mailrooms.

But Brandon Bunker, Vivint’s vice president of product, believes allowing for personal packages to be delivered at work could be a hallmark of companies that want an edge above the competition when it comes to hiring.

“In the war for talent, that could be the great differentiator,” he said.

Workplace experts say there’s almost no question that companies will have to be flexible about letting employees get their packages at the office if they want to nix or de-emphasize the remote-work option.

That doesn’t necessarily mean giving workers carte blanche to have every last box of laundry detergent delivered to their cubicle, said Jesse Meschuk, a career advisor. But a strict no-packages policy probably doesn’t make sense either, he added.

“There’s a middle ground,” Meschuk said.