The real cost of parcel management done badly in office buildings
Most office buildings have no dedicated mailroom. Reception absorbs the problem by default. Here's what that actually costs — and how the best-run buildings are solving it.
Four million parcels were delivered every day across the UK in 2024. That number rose by 7.1% to 4.2 billion items in 2024-25 (Ofcom). For many employees, the office is still where they choose to receive them: more reliable than home delivery, less likely to result in a missed drop, safer than leaving a package on a doorstep.
The problem is that most office buildings weren't designed for this volume. And the cost of managing it badly is higher than most facilities teams have formally accounted for.
Parcels in office buildings rarely arrive in isolation. They land alongside visitors, meeting room requests, equipment deliveries and the usual daily flow of facility management tasks. For reception and facilities teams, that means managing incoming deliveries while still being the first point of contact for everything else in the building.
According to ExPD's workplace delivery research, many office buildings don't have a dedicated mailroom at all. Reception staff have simply absorbed the function by default, without the systems, space or time to do it properly.
The result is a pattern most facilities managers will recognise: parcels logged inconsistently, left in temporary storage that was never meant to be permanent, handed over without a proper record. Items go missing. Employees follow up repeatedly. The front desk spends time it doesn't have tracking down packages instead of managing the building.
The cost accumulates in categories that tend not to get added up together.
Staff time is the most immediate. In a mid-sized office building receiving 30 to 50 parcels a day, the manual process of receiving, logging, storing and notifying recipients absorbs a significant portion of reception capacity. That's not a fixed overhead: it scales with parcel volume, which is rising year on year, and it doesn't scale with staffing, which rarely does.
Hybrid working patterns add complexity. A parcel arriving on a Tuesday for someone who works Mondays and Thursdays needs to be held securely, tracked reliably and retrievable when that person is actually in the building. Without a proper system, this generates repeated follow-ups and an increasing backlog of uncollected items occupying whatever space is available.
Multi-tenant buildings compound the problem further. Multiple companies sharing a building, each with different staff and different delivery volumes, need a system that can segment access, track by tenant and report accurately across occupiers. Without one, the building manager absorbs the coordination cost across every company on every floor.
The reputational dimension matters too, particularly in a competitive leasing market. 58% of UK consumers now say parcel lockers are a better option than standard workplace delivery (InPost, 2026). Employees are increasingly choosing where they work partly based on the quality of facilities. A building that handles deliveries badly signals something about how it handles everything else.
Smart lockers are the obvious solution, but implementation matters. A standalone locker with its own app, its own notification system and no connection to the rest of the building's operations adds a tool without solving the underlying problem. The facilities team now has another system to monitor alongside everything else.
The difference Smart Point makes in office buildings is integration. Our smart lockers connect directly to the building's operating layer: parcels are received automatically, recipients are notified without staff involvement, and collection happens on the employee's schedule, not the building's office hours. For the facilities team, it means one fewer thing to manage manually. For building managers and multi-tenant environments, usage data, tenant segmentation and reporting all sit in the same operations dashboard used to manage other building services.
DPD grew its UK locker network by 63% in 2024. DHL expanded by 50% globally in the same year. The direction of travel for parcel delivery is clear. The question for office building operators and facilities managers is whether their buildings are set up to be part of that network, or whether reception is still absorbing the volume by default.