An IT Asset Self-Pack and Ship Program Might Be the Remote Employees’ Equipment Return Solution You Need

By: Glenn Laga, Founder & President, Guardian Data Destruction

While some businesses don’t suit a work from home (WFH) structure–healthcare, retail, service, hospitality/travel, manufacturing, it seems that everyone else is either evaluating or arguing about the benefits of hybrid or permanent remote work structures.

LinkedIn’s Jake Perez compiled reactions to the WFH debate in Should the office become extinct? in response to Chris Herd’s viral positioning:

work-from-home pros: wider hiring pool opportunity, more productive use of time without commuting, interruptions and office banter, greater personal satisfaction with life balance and time management.

work-from-home cons: impaired non-existent company culture, difficulty training and indoctrinating new hires, monitoring employees who are not motivated or communicative, creating personal relationships and cohesive teams.

How will you retrieve IT hardware from furloughed or remote workers?

Consider an IT Asset Self-Pack and Ship program to return employee equipment. It’s a customizable, easy, inexpensive solution for packing up offsite office IT equipment and shipping it to a processing center for serial # verification, grading, refurbishment and its next home. A computer Self-Pack and Ship program perfect for any office hardware whether it’s lease return, redeployment, recycling or reselling.

Self-pack and ship programs generally work this way:  sized to meet the destination equipment, packing materials, instructions and a box (sometimes two) are sent to a provided list of people. The included prepaid return label ensures that employees ship their designated hardware to the correct place with tracking and without excuses. Program management including monitoring and reporting are the features that make these outsourced programs really helpful.

Security options for self-pack programs 

1. Avoid shipping live data by including remote erasure as part of the program. All you need is an internet connection.
2. When the hardware itself isn’t valuable but still working, consider donating and shipping it to a non-profit like Laptop Upcycle or other members of the Digitunity Network who will send you a receipt and put it to good use. Be sure to remotely erase or remove hard drives first.
3. Ship safety goggles, a screwdriver and a hammer to every employee for personal removal and destruction of their hard drive but forfeit certificate of data destruction, verification of data destruction and chain of custody for the hard drives.
4. When quantities are small or there’s little urgency, consider a lockbox program that  delivers a secure, tagged bin to any location in the US. When filled with IT equipment securely ship for auditing and immediate data destruction upon arrival.
5. Shred hard drives upon receipt for live data or physical hard drive destruction requirements.

Self-pack and return ship anything

It’s not just laptops! Verify, sanitize, retrieve and inventory all company IT property (see 30 common places your company data is stored and waiting for a breach for even more for even more) including: 

• Docking stations
• Adapters
• Cell phones
• Hot spots
• YubiKeys
• Desktops
• Hard drives
• Tablets
• POS devices
• Printers
• Monitors
• All-in-ones
• Loaner equipment
• Motherboards
• Peripherals
• VoIP phones
• Handheld scanners

Remote work is here to stay 

While an estimated 20% of the American workforce telecommuted prior to COVID experts are predicting that 50% or more will remain working from home in a full-time or hybrid model. That trend will absolutely definitely change how offsite employee hardware will be managed. 
Talk to Guardian Data Destruction or your VAR or ITAD to explore self-pack and ship programs that can be customized to meet your in-house IT asset management goals.

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