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How smart refurbished lockers were recycled, updated with eLocker enabling fairer usage for employees
Corporate
Retrofit Locks
On-going Contract
Table of Contents
Customer
This customer was actually looking to have smart refurbished lockers, but considering the environmental impact they didn’t want to change their existing lockers and throw them all into landfill.
However, they wanted to have a more up-to-date system to help them to save money, and to make it fair for users making it so that users could not be “hogging” the lockers.
Problem
The customer had moved to a hot-desking solution but had an old system with individual locks. People were keeping the keys, retaining the locker for their own use which obviously was unfair and had a negative impact on other users.
So, you have desks for, in this case, 500 people, you’ve got 1,500 to 2,000 people working in the business, coming in on various days and they found that 40% to 50% of the staff lockers were being retained by people throughout the week and not being shared. This was not fair or efficient usage and they needed to find storage solutions that worked better for this scenario.
In addition, there was nothing physically wrong with the existing lockers and the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility Statement said that they would be recycling at every opportunity. So they wanted to use the existing lockers if at all possible, to create smart refurbished lockers while reducing the potential waste.
Solution
All of our locks contain the same technology and operate in the same way. We have different sized locks to meet different requirements. In this case we opted for our retrofit locks which were specifically designed as a replacement to the traditional key barrel lock found in many lockers today.
Using these smart locker locks with the existing equipment allowed eLocker and the customer to implement socially responsible smart refurbished lockers as an all round solution.
To provide an allocated or hot-desking solution, we have a mixture of being able to allocate lockers to an individual for their personal use, but also having hot lockers that people can come in and use. So basically, the lockers are there. You come in, you have your ID card to get into the building. The same ID card works with your locker.
If you’re hot-desking, you come in, you look for a locker that is flashing the green light, which means that it’s free to use. You put your card against that lock. The locker remembers that it’s you and opens the lock. You can then put your personal effects in there for the day and shut the door. The light goes out, nobody else can use that locker.
At the end of the day, you come back, you touch your card against the lock, the door opens, you can take out your personal belongings and the lock forgets that it was you so that it’s now flashing green and available for somebody else to use later or the next day.
The allocated side of it is for certain members of staff who were in all the time, for example HR staff and other managers, and they were allocated lockers. So they would be coming in, again touching their card against the lock but it was not forgetting them at the end of the day.
The same process applies, you go in, touch your card against the lock, lock opens, put your belongings in and close the lock. At the end of the day, you could touch it again, take your belongings out, but that locker remained yours so you could leave things in there overnight if necessary, because you were allocated that as your personal space.
So the customer was able to fulfil that requirement for having a combination of both allocated and free lockers to meet the requirements of their mixed workforce.
The eLocker management solution was integrated into the customers HR system so that allocating lockers for those people who required them became a part of the standard on-boarding process as was the ability to use a hot locker for other new starters.
eLocker Insights was able to show the customer the usage statistics of both allocated and hot lockers so after a short period of time, they re-allocated some hot lockers from staff who were not using them and were also able to see the daily occupancy levels of the hot lockers and therefore determine whether they should add more hot lockers.
Outcome
The resulting smart refurbished lockers and locker management system made it simple to ensure staff storage was fair and equitable for all their staff, this was key requirement for them along with ensuring that staff who were in every day were not disadvantaged.
Our system made managing the floating items, allocated lockers and the hot desks simple and fast reducing stress for managers and administrators whilst reducing staff frustrations.
In addition, using the retrofit locks which were designed to just replace the existing barrel locks meant that implementing the solution was both cost effective and better for the environment as they were able to recycle the existing lockers.
The analytics allowed them to adjust the split between hot and allocated lockers to provide the best experience for their staff.
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