How to deal with constant food deliveries at work?

Question

For some background, our company (around 100 people) uses a corporate Grubhub / Seamless account with everyone getting a daily allowance. People place lunch orders individually or as a group throughout the day. We are in an open office space.

During peak lunch time, the doorbell goes off very frequently for food deliveries. And our current system is that an HR person seated by the door will answer the doorbell, grab the delivery, walk towards the kitchen and place the delivery there. From there, the person will use Slack and message the responsible parties that their food is here.

I'm guessing that a good twenty to thirty minutes of this person's time is used answering deliveries and messaging people. I'm wondering what the best protocol would be. It's possible to have each person grab their own lunch from the door but that's difficult because the delivery person doesn't always call, and it's hard to time exactly when your meal will come. Perhaps, we can specify in our order that the person should call before ringing the doorbell.

Any suggestion would be appreciated. It doesn't affect me directly, but I see a system here that's really not scalable and would love to see what other people can think of.

Answer 1

People want lunch. Getting lunch takes time, which will probably come out of their work time. You have one person spending 30 minutes, that's 18 seconds for each of the 100 employees.

If that one person saves each employee just 18 seconds a day, the company is ahead. Add that many people are paid more per hour than the receptionist accepting the food. That system seems to work quite well and to be very efficient.