Depends on how much you’re paying them I’ve found.

The chances are if they are on minimum wage they will take as long to pack as they have. You’ll have to supervise and instruct new staff. What seems obvious to you might not be to them.

Hey,

Ive been a one man band for a while too and this doesn’t seem fast enough to me. Saying that it all depends on how clear your warehouse is and how much training you have provided. You might need to set expectations as well. If you limit them to say 8 am to 12 is packing time, the rest of the day is for other tasks (listing prepping FBA shipments etc) this might make it clear that they don’t have all day to just spend on packing?

If they will be the ones predominantly packing as well maybe ask them for their feedback on the warehouse layout. Is there something that would make their process easier? Can you help them achieve faster results etc?

I would say see how it goes, maybe spend one day with them seeing their process and see if there is something slowing them down? But if your member of staff has only been there a week give them the benefit of the doubt and hope they improve.

Some orders depending on the product and packaging can take seconds to pack. So realistically yes, 3-4 minutes is reasonable as per my opinion.

From my experience, we do have 10 employees full time on board and each one of them works with different pace.

We expect them to pack to their best abilities and we are getting satisfactory results (we pay them on average £9-10 per hour)
If the pack for you so slow, then you might want to sit with them and look closely as to why it is so slow. It can be because of the access to the product, or maybe employees are in each other way and one is slowing other one.

It is really hard to guess what is going wrong, but one thing is for sure:
Your employees will only be as good as you will make them, without proper leadership and norms in place they will never be working to your satisfaction. If you do not have norms in place then you cannot expect them to achieve these.

An average of 20 orders an hour is expected for experienced packers doing easy pick and pack (e.g. single item, easy to pick); higher if handling a batch of exactly the same products to different customers; lower if orders are complex.

For operations where one person picks and one person packs the throughput can be over 60 orders an hour - but that uses two people (so is 30 orders per person per hour).

It all depends the ‘workflow’ - what works for you might not work for them and what seems obvious to you might not be obvious to them. Are they picking several orders at once or one at a time? Would it be reasonable to pick several at once or is that likely to introduce errors? Do you usually receive a load of orders for the same item and if so can you group those?

We have a staff count of 11 and they pick everything and then pack. Packing takes around 1 hour per sales account and sales channel except on Mondays and Tuesdays where we are busier, and each channel usually has around 120 orders on a good day. If they are big items that you are selling then prep like shrink wrapping, finding the right size boxes etc so it can take a while.
Which a lot of the time isn’t taken into consideration.

A lot depends on how efficient your warehouse is.

Do you preprint your postage?
To speed things up and try and avoid errors I now place a reference on each label with the contents (so no need for dispatch label)

Plus it may be worth taking out all the orders and placing them in a pile in your packing area.

With me printing labels and picking & my wife packing, we can do 60-70 per hour.

S L O W.

However, it all depends onthe systems you have set up and how easy it is for the staff to pick package and label.

In short, ours have picklists, a pile of labels and everything to hand at a dispatch desk. They use the computer system to select a bunch of order, print of a “location” pick list which tells them where and how many, then they return to the desk with 20/30 items and labels and they’re all packaged and in the appropriate baskets in 10/15 mins. We get approx 100 items per hour on average (we sell a lot of small items and large items, so its an average).

It may not be your staff, it may be the tools they have. All in all, they can go faster with the correct tools.

Hope this helps, GL!

Maybe you could consider using a different type of packaging.

Boxes are taking longer to package than bubble envelopes, for example.