Employees are On the Move – How to Keep Up

Corporate and campus mail centers are continually challenged to deliver mail to the correct recipients even as they change jobs within the organization, move to a new building, relocate, or are replaced when they leave for other opportunities. The work-from-home workplace model and other changes brought about by the pandemic have made these tasks even more frequent and problematic.

Traditionally, companies have informally tracked employee moves and changes using sticky notes, a 3-ring binder, or mail center employee memories. Temporary and permanent staff shortages and increased worker mobility now make manual methods of re-directing mail risky.

Fortunately, user-friendly technology reduces errors and improves productivity by automatically creating new address labels and re-directing mail to a recipient’s current location according to pre-established business rules. The benefit is three-fold:

1. Mail center employees spend less time processing inbound mail.
2. The organization lessens its reliance on tribal knowledge.
3. Remote employees receive their mail faster and with less chance of mis-delivery.

The Mail Forwarding Dilemma
Digital mail seemingly solves the problem of mail forwarding to remote or relocated employees. See this video about Tritek’s Oasis digital mail delivery solution. With digital delivery, mail center staff opens employee mail, scans it, and then forwards PDFs to the addressee’s email. Digital mail has its place and offers a certain level of convenience. It creates a digital archive of all incoming mail.

However, many companies do not want mail center staff opening and scanning everyone’s mail. This practice could reveal confidential or protected information to unauthorized parties. Tritek’s 2-step digital mail delivery option lowers the risk of unintentional privacy breaches, but forwarding unopened mail is a better solution in some situations.

Hardcopies with wet signatures are a part of doing business in many industries like legal, healthcare, and insurance. Forwarding these documents unopened to the intended recipient is a sound business practice that documents the chain of custody for critical communications. Rules governing the disposition of specific documents may make physically re-routing certain mailpieces the only choice open to some organizations. Fiduciary documents, for instance, may require delivery to a corporate address, not the home of an employee.

Digital Mail Delivery Solutions

Why This is Happening Now
The remote employee phenomenon was well underway when the COVID pandemic occurred. Video conferencing was already in place by several vendors, territorial salespeople had worked from home for decades, and real-time workgroup software was common. COVID just made the inevitable shift in work processes happen faster and on a grander scale. Manual mail forwarding worked for many organizations for many years. Eventually though, they would have adopted a standardized mail forwarding technology to improve efficiency and reduce the chance of error. COVID made the technology adoption more urgent.

Technology Finds Nomadic Employees
The good news is that employees working at home or at another office will not miss out on their mail. A mail processing workstation and intuitive software make mail forwarding simple. You may never touch a keyboard or a mouse in the process.

This is how it works:

1. Incoming mail is separated into two bins: One for delivery to on-site employees and one for remote employees. Further sorting may take place after the initial “rough sort.”
2. A mail piece for a remote employee is placed under a scanner.
3. The name and address are scanned.
4. Mail forwarding software determines the forwarding address by referencing an up-to-date database of corporate address changes.
5. A mailing label is produced with the forwarding address and placed over the existing address.

If an employee is receiving many pieces of mail in various formats, such as #10 envelopes, postcards, and folded self-mailers, accumulate them and mail everything in one envelope. This saves considerable postage over forwarding each piece separately. The mail forwarding software standardizes addresses to USPS specifications to speed delivery and reduce the chance of mishandling. Mail arriving at the recipient’s current address could be delayed by as little as one day, depending on internal processing and the final destination.

Putting it into Practice
Since 1988, Tritek has engineered patented, field-proven mailroom automation and document imaging solutions to improve productivity and mailroom efficiency. The Tritek Mobile ACE workstation and Mail Forwarding System assures an organization their employees will receive important documents, even if the employee has moved to a new location. See this short demonstration video of The ACE Mail Forwarding System, which joins Tritek’s growing family of mail center automation solutions. Our lineup includes inbound mail sorting, imaging and archiving of mailed documents, parcel sorting, and the industry-leading Correct Elect Vote-By-Mail technology. Tritek’s clients include Fortune 500 companies, government, educational institutions, financial services, healthcare, insurance, and fulfillment.

Learn More About Digital Mail Delivery

• Start Giving Employees Mail How They Want It
• Why Your Business Benefits From Digital Mail Delivery
• Keep Up With Work from Home Employee Mail Delivery
• Digitally Deliver Incoming Mail