Package Management Health Policies to Keep Your Residents Safe

In our new world, residents have gained a new awareness of hygiene and health precautions. Suddenly, communal spaces are no longer a cherished amenity, but a risky proposition. As the world re-opens, we must do what we can to mitigate the risk of passing on COVID-19, to keep your residents and your team safe.

Here at Notifii we want to do our part and share some thoughts about COVID-19 and our bread and butter service – package management. USPS has cited that while letter mail has decreased during the pandemic, there has been a surge in package volumes due to an almost exclusive “delivery economy”. This spike is in addition to an already steady 91% YOY increase in U.S. package delivery since March of 2019. From groceries to household items, everything can be sent to your residents in a brown box, bag, or crate that eventually makes its way into your package room.

Keep it Clean – Wash your Hands and Wipe Down Packages

While the CDC has stated that the risk of COVID-19 transfer from package shipments is low, it is still the responsibility of your management team to keep the risk of infection at your property as low as possible. Make it clear to your team that they should sanitize their hands before and after handling any resident packages and wipe down the packages before handling them. This will decrease the chance of viral transfer between the delivery carrier, your team, and your residents.

Nix the Signatures – Take a Photo!

While logging packages out, let your residents pick up the package and then take a photo of their ID or the resident themselves with the package as your record of pick up. It’s an easy way to verify the identity of who picked up the package, keep a record, and skip the germ-passing.

Don’t Forget the Reminders

The key to safe and sanitary package management is an expedient package transfer process. The less time packages spend sitting around and taking up space, the less time you have to breathe, cough, or sneeze on them. While you may be sending your residents an initial notification of the package’s arrival, it may not be enough to prompt your resident to pick it up. Set a standard for how many reminders to send and at what intervals they will be sent. This will ensure that your team creates a sense of urgency to get the packages out of the common area.

Keep Track of Pending Packages

Whether you’re using a pen and paper process, spreadsheet, or a cloud-based system, do your best to keep track of how long your packages have been pending pick up. It’s not uncommon for some residents to let their packages sit for weeks at a time. This creates congestion in your package room. Some digital solutions include a pending packages report where you can quickly reference how long certain packages have been pending in your package room and who your common offenders are. 

Minimize Physical Handling

Do what you can to minimize how much your team handles inbound packages. While maintaining a package log is an operational best practice, it’s tougher when you can’t touch everything you need to get the necessary information. Using an Optical Character Recognition tool to snap a photo and capture all the records into a cloud-based log not only minimizes your workflow to seconds but also helps minimize package handling. Don’t have a cloud-based system? Take a photo of every package and copy the information down from the photo.

Use a Rent Manager Integration Like Notifii

We are proud to be able to work with Rent Manager to enhance your overall property management operations. The data integration between Rent Manager and Notifii allows you to sync your property roster and utilize features like automated notifications, in-depth reporting, and our OCR tool which instantly matches resident data to packages. If you’d like to learn more visit notifii.com/track-apt.

This blog was contributed to Rent Manager by Notifii and originally appeared on their website.