Deliveries and Post Rooms: 4 Risks Offices Miss
The post room used to receive post. It now receives everything: client documents, IT hardware, marketing stock, catering, office supplies, and a steady flow of personal parcels that staff have delivered to work because they are not at home to receive them.
Volume has grown, the space has not, and the arrangement is usually staffed by one or two people in a basement or a back corridor that nobody visits. It is a genuine operational function that grew without ever being assessed as one.
Four risks, and the last explains why the first three persist.
1. The volume changed and nothing else did
Start with what is actually arriving, because most organisations have never counted.
The shift is well known anecdotally and rarely quantified internally: e-commerce deliveries to workplaces have grown substantially, and hybrid working has increased it further, because people who are in the office two or three days a week arrange deliveries for those days. That produces peaks tied to the same core days that already concentrate everything else.
The consequences are physical. Storage designed for a day's post now holds three days of parcels. Items get stacked in corridors and against fire doors because there is nowhere else. Aisles narrow. Regulation 17 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 requires traffic routes to be organised so that people can move safely, and a corridor holding overflow parcels is not that.
The first useful action is to establish what arrives and when. Most organisations discover the peak is far larger than they assumed, and that a significant share of it is personal rather than business, which is a policy decision they have never taken.
2. Handling, and the point at which it becomes hazardous
Manual handling is the obvious risk and the one most often addressed superficially.
Regulation 4 of the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 requires employers to avoid hazardous manual handling so far as reasonably practicable, then to assess and reduce what remains. HSE's guidance on manual handling covers the assessment.
The specifics in a post room are worth naming. Loads of unknown weight, because a parcel does not announce what is in it. Awkward shapes with no handholds. Repetitive handling over a shift rather than occasional lifts. And the transfer points, which is where injuries concentrate: van to bay, bay to trolley, trolley to shelf, shelf to desk.
The controls are equipment and layout rather than technique training: trolleys and sack barrows that are actually available and maintained, delivery at waist height where possible, storage that puts heavy items low, and enough space to set something down rather than carry it further than necessary.
Where the loading bay involves vehicles reversing, that is a separate and more serious risk, and in most leased buildings it belongs to the operator rather than to you, which brings us to the fourth item.
3. Suspicious packages, which is a real duty for some firms
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The risk that is genuinely more likely in law firms, banks and insurers than in most workplaces, and the one least likely to have a procedure behind it.
Firms handling contentious matters, insolvency work, family cases, regulatory investigations or high-profile clients occasionally receive mail intended to threaten or harm. Most organisations have never told the person opening the post what to do about that, which means the first decision gets made by whoever is holding the item.
Regulation 8 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires procedures for serious and imminent danger and the nomination of competent persons to implement them. A mail threat is exactly that category of event, and the procedure needs to exist before it is needed.
What a workable arrangement contains is unremarkable and specific: guidance on what makes an item unusual, an instruction not to move, open or investigate it further, a defined person to contact, a means of contacting them that does not involve carrying the item, and a stated position on evacuation. The National Protective Security Authority publishes guidance on protective security including mail handling, which is the appropriate source rather than improvising.
Two adjacent points. Aggression and threats delivered in person at a delivery point sit alongside this, and HSE publishes guidance on violence at work. And where the person opening post is junior, temporary or agency staff, which is common, the briefing has to reach them rather than sitting in a policy they have never seen.
4. In a shared building, nobody owns the chain
The structural failure, and it explains the other three.
A delivery in a multi-tenant building passes through several hands: the courier, the building's goods entrance and its security screening if any, the operator's post handling, your reception, and finally your own post arrangements. Responsibility changes at each transfer and the transfers are exactly where nothing is defined.
Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires employers to conduct their undertaking so that people not in their employment are not exposed to risks, which reaches couriers in your space as much as it reaches your own staff in the operator's.
Three questions settle most of it in writing. Who screens what, and to what standard. Where the operator's responsibility ends and yours begins, physically and procedurally. And what the operator's arrangement is for an item flagged as suspicious, since that will affect your building rather than only your floor.
An operator who cannot answer the third question has given you something useful, which is that no arrangement exists and you are relying on one anyway.
Four questions to ask this week
| Risk | Question | Usual answer |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | Do you know what arrives, and when it peaks? | No, and personal deliveries are unmanaged |
| Handling | Is equipment available at the transfer points? | Technique training instead |
| Suspicious items | Does the person opening post know what to do? | No procedure exists |
| Ownership | Where does the operator's responsibility end? | Not defined |
Rows three and four are the ones worth raising this week. The third is a briefing that costs nothing and could matter enormously in a firm doing contentious work. The fourth is an email to your building operator.
For multi-site and international groups
Two points.
Screening expectations vary considerably by country and by building, and in some jurisdictions and sectors they are prescribed rather than optional. A group standard describing what good looks like transfers; the specific arrangement does not, and the building usually determines it.
And the personal delivery question is a policy decision that should be made once, at group level, rather than differently in every office by whoever runs facilities. Permitting personal deliveries is entirely reasonable. Permitting them without deciding where they are stored, how long they are held, and who is liable if something is lost or damaged is how a small convenience becomes a recurring dispute.
Holding assessments and arrangements for every site in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits reliably surface post rooms, because they are among the spaces least likely to appear in an existing assessment.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite assesses the parts of an office that grew into an operation without anyone noticing, and the post room is a consistent example. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with legal, finance and banking and insurance organisations, where contentious work makes the third item above a genuine rather than theoretical concern.
Where offices span several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish what each jurisdiction and building requires, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current.
If the person who opens your post could not say what they would do with an item that worried them, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
