Enhance benefits programs, reduce shipping costs, improve cost accountability, and keep people safe, secure, and productive with Transtream Personal Shipping
At some point, most people need to ship a personal package – important paperwork, a gift for a friend or a family member, items they’ve sold online, etc. Many large organizations formally or informally support personal shipping by allowing their employees to ship on their corporate carrier accounts and work to recover fees afterward, or by turning a blind eye to rogue shipping. Accurately accounting for and recovering personal shipping costs can be an administrative headache.
If organizations don’t support personal shipping, then employees will take time out of their day to ship their personal packages, impacting their work time, productivity, and responsiveness.
With Transtream Personal Shipping, organizations can provide their employees with a simple and convenient way to ship with their carrier of choice from their desktop and to pay for it with their personal credit card at a cheaper rate than they would otherwise get at a retail shipping counter, eliminating time away from their busy workday.
Employers win by providing a no-cost employee benefit, that requires little or no management, eliminating cost accounting and recovery issues while improving employee productivity. Employees win by saving time and money.
Enhance your benefits package
*UPDATE* More employees are working from home than ever, and that number will remain fairly high even as the COVID-19 vaccine allows more businesses to operate more normally. With that shift, many benefits, from filled fridges to casual Fridays are no longer relevant to employees either working remotely or in a hybrid set-up. And, as companies struggle to attract and keep employees in a robust job market, benefits such as the ability to ship personal packages from home are more relevant for employees while they’re remote—especially with 57 percent of employees saying that benefits are more important than ever.
The U.S. economy is doing well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), nonfarm payroll employment rose by 266,000 in April 2021, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 6.1 percent.
While low unemployment is a good sign for the economy overall, it means there are fewer people looking for jobs and it is harder for employers to keep the great people they have. Companies need to provide all the additional benefits they can to remain competitive in a demanding job market. They need to work hard to recruit employees and retain them by keeping them engaged and happy.
While salary and bonus incentives are key components of any compensation package, studies show that today’s top-level employees appreciate a robust benefits package ranging from traditional health care and vacation time to more lifestyle benefits like massages, bringing pets to work, fitness memberships, casual dress, and discounts on services that help them improve work-life balance. In order to address the issue of engagement, organizations need to recognize:
- Employees' lives are increasingly complicated and demands on their time are countless. People need to feel that they’re not hurting themselves professionally in order to keep their lives in order.
- Technology can be a productivity enabler or a distraction. By giving employees the ability to accomplish necessary personal tasks at work, organizations demonstrate that they value the people who work for them and are cognizant of their needs, both professionally and personally. This encourages employees to reciprocate and care about their employer’s concerns.
- By giving employees the ability to accomplish personal tasks, like shipping packages, at a discounted rate, employers are showing employees they care about their financial health, time, and job satisfaction.
Universities and colleges face a similar competition for not only staff and faculty, but for students as well. For students, shipping something often involves a long journey off-campus, usually by public transportation, and away from their studies and the secure campus environment. If they do try to ship on campus, it adds an additional strain to already understaffed and overtaxed mailrooms.
Enabling personal shipping is a low-cost, high-impact benefit that organizations can provide without taking on additional financial risk or onerous program management. It also allows them to show not only that they care about personal needs but are willing to support them by providing a convenient solution.
The costs of personal shipping
When employees ship personal items on their employer’s carrier accounts (“rogue shipping”), it undermines cost accounting accuracy and profitability.
Even if organizations allow employees to ship on their carrier accounts, it creates a cost recovery headache. They need to find a way to charge for the shipping, collect the fees, often in cash or deducted from payroll and account for the transaction. It is common for carriers to make adjustments for unexpected post-shipment accessorial fees and errors such as incorrect weights, dimensional (DIM) weights, incorrect addresses, residential surcharges, and so on. Those charges are difficult to determine and collect. More likely than not, they become unrecoverable to the organization.
Parcel carrier special service fees have increased dramatically over the last several years. Post-shipment charges can therefore add up, especially for the casual shipper (employee) who may not be aware of how to avoid them. A large social media company currently offers a benefit to its employees through a custom-built tool, that allows them to ship packages on the company’s shipping account. They incurred over $50,000 in unrecoverable costs in 2018 alone as a result of post-transaction shipping adjustments.
Keep people safe, secure, and productive
Time away from your desk, whether you are an employee or student is unproductive time. It can involve long drives to the shipping center and long lines at shipping counters. When employees or students leave the safety and security of the office or campus, they are put at risk for car accidents or worse.
When people don’t have to leave their desk during business or learning time, they can stay more engaged and productive, contributing to the overall success of the organization and themselves.
The benefits of personal shipping
Transtream’s Personal Shipping app is a browser-enabled tool that everyone in your organization can use to ship their personal packages from their desktop or tablet. It uses secure, third-party credit card processing to process shipping costs and any subsequent adjustments on personal credit cards, totally removing corporate accounting from the equation. The app features shipping wizards and other production-caliber parcel shipping tools such as address validation and address books to reduce the time spent processing the actual shipment. Personal shippers can also save money by automatically selecting the most efficient and least costly shipping option, using discounted rates.
Some of the benefits you will realize include:
- Improved engagement, recruitment, and retention
- Increased productive time
- Reduced “rogue” shipping
- Reduced accounting processing times and headaches
- Elimination of unrecoverable shipping costs and post-shipment charges
- Reduced shipping costs with discounted carrier rates
Click here to see how easy it is to add Personal Shipping to your benefits program.