Ensuring that Employees Get Their Personal Office Belongings During COVID-19

SIRVA
Relocation Services
Global Services
Ensuring that Employees Receive Their Personal Belongings: Unique Office Solutions During COVID-19

Whether your employees are heading across the country or crossing continents, Sirva has the on-the-ground international relocation services you need. From Canada to Australia and everywhere in between, we understand the nuances across each region .

We provide offerings to satisfy your unique needs, whether selling a home in the U.S., managing a cross-country household goods move, or helping employees to get settled into their new homes in Europe. Our global experience means that you can count on seamless international relocation, no matter what’s next.

Departure Services

From the initial policy consulting call through the move itself, there are a lot of moving pieces associated with employee relocation. Whether planning a domestic or international relocation, SIRVA is expertly positioned to offer the best departure services available during a relocation in every region around the world.

Destination Services

Setting your employees up for success upon arrival at their new locations will be key to successfully meeting your company’s goals. SIRVA’s global network and expansive resources allow us to you achieve your goals. Our destination services and international movers help employees and their families settle in and prosper in their new homes.

Visa and Immigration

SIRVA’s team of experienced international relocation specialists are expertly equipped to manage inbound and outbound global immigration services. With SIRVA’s Immigration team, the focus is on providing a smooth customer experience that enhances the relocation process, not just achieving a successful application.

Employee Counselling

For your employees, a single relocation professional assists with end-to-end coordination of services: a relocation consultant for domestic/intra-country moves or global assignment consultant for international relocation. These consultants are your employees’ resource for all communication and services relating to their move, and coordinate the delivery of all authorised services. Regardless of the service being delivered (temporary housing, moving services, etc.), the employee can rely on the consultant as their go-to resource to address any concerns.

VIP Services

If you are searching for an enhanced service for your employees, SIRVA offers VIP services such as personal relocation assistants, in-home cleaning services, personalised family assistance, and many other tailored and luxury enhancements.

Related Services

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As a result of a number of unprecedented events related to COVID-19, organisations are facing an equal number of unprecedented challenges. One of these is how to best ensure that employees receive any personal belongings that were left behind during office closings, office moves, work-from-home orders, or timely repatriations. Whether a temporary or permanent scenario, many employees have found themselves with no access to their offices and no ability to retrieve personal items that vary in size and importance – from family photos to office furniture. Company stakeholders are faced with the daunting challenge of identifying these items, collecting them, and finding efficient ways to return them to their owners, whether these employees now live locally or on the other side of the world.

Factors Impacting Employee Access to Personal Items

There are a number of reasons employees have been unable to retrieve their personal office belongings, including:

Local government ordinances
Company-initiated COVID-19-related protection policies (for reasons of employee safety and/or risk mitigation)
Building restrictions
Repatriation or long-distance relocations that were implemented before access to the employee’s office could be granted

Challenges for Human Resource and Mobility Professionals

When businesses are tasked with returning items to hundreds – or thousands – of employees, they face a number of concerns. Ensuring that the right items make their way to the right individuals is a top priority, as is protecting personally identifiable information (PII) such as social security numbers, email and mailing addresses. From sanitising and packing items to their delivery, a high level of attention is required to the smallest details to ensure that the right items will make it to the right individuals, successfully; adding to the challenge is the reality that the current global environment can be expected to present its share of roadblocks along the way. Shipping and customs rules can vary from country to country – and securing service may prove challenging as packing, moving, delivery teams, and couriers are overtasked during this unusual time in global history.

Managing the Challenge

The methods used to return personal items can vary, depending on whether the employee lives locally, lives within the same country, or will require a cross-border delivery. Regardless of the scenario, enlisting the help of an experienced provider can be key, particularly if its staff are able to implement the entire process, from door to door. In doing so, PII protection is enhanced through reduced transfers and handling, accountability is more readily identified, and door-to-door timelines and trails can be more easily tracked. Internal HR and mobility teams are also relieved of many of the administrative duties involved in this massive undertaking, so they can focus on other organisational or pandemic-related priorities.

Technology as a Solution

Since there will be unexpected challenges due to the pandemic, choosing a provider with advanced technology will go a long way towards ensuring a smooth delivery of employee belongings. Ideally, decision makers should choose a provider with technology that can:

Assign barcodes to employee items to ensure proper tagging, grouping, and tracking throughout the process
Provide insight into overall project and individual shipment statuses in real-time via mobile devices
Issue notifications to company stakeholders and individual employees when their items have been packaged and delivered – and all stages in between
Maintain secure control and safeguarding of employee PII through a single system, limit the release of data, and delete that employee information upon completion of the overall project

Utiliging an end-to-end provider with technology that accomplishes the above allows for:

Timely, detailed visibility, at every stage of the project/each move – rather than the time-consuming process of sifting through pages of digital spreadsheets or hard-copy manual lists from one or multiple providers
Proactive troubleshooting since issues, concerns, and changes can be flagged during any stage of the project or shipment

SIRVA is currently utilising a unique patent-pending technology that accomplishes the above and more. Commercial Connect ^TM is uniquely able to assist our clients with the management of moving and personal goods challenges that have resulted from office closures, employee repatriations, and work-from-home orders. Rather than hiring multiple providers for various phases of this type of project (or using different providers, regionally) our platform allows stakeholders to manage all aspects of returning employee belongings (or a commercial move due to closure or an office relocation), streamlining the process while controlling costs, protecting employee PII, and minimising the stress of internal staff members and employees. This technology is available for use in 109 languages.

Unique Circumstances Call for Unique Solutions

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on employees and the utilisation of the physical locations they work in. When employees find themselves a world away from their recent host locations – and organisations adapt and/or shift office arrangements due to closures or other circumstances – stakeholders will have a tall list of responsibilities to tackle as they make these transitions. Returning personal items to employees or moving the contents of entire office buildings is one significant item that can be checked off of that list, when partnering with a provider that has a wide global reach, innovative technology, and the means to handle the process from end to end.

For more information about how SIRVA can provide a seamless solution when returning personal items to employees or managing your commercial move, contact us at commercialmoving@sirva.com.

Learn More:

SIRVA Commercial Moving Services (informational web page): https://www.sirva.com/moving-services/commercial-moving

Welcome to SIRVA Commercial (video): https://youtu.be/LyaiWmQNaU0

Commercial Connect (video): https://youtu.be/XwTuN8ghnTs

For more information please see SIRVA’s Blog Disclaimer.