Remote work transformed productivity. It also scattered billions of pounds worth of corporate hardware across kitchen tables and spare bedrooms — and most IT teams are still catching up.
According to the ONS, approximately 40% of UK workers now work from home at least part of the time. For technology and professional services firms, that figure is often over 70%. The result is an IT asset register that looks increasingly theoretical — what you believe you own and where you believe it is are two different things.
Laptops issued during the 2020–2022 hiring surge are now coming off lease, becoming security liabilities, or simply sitting idle as employee roles change. The average organisation has between 8–12% of its IT asset register in an "unknown location" state at any given time.
The classic IT asset return process — "come to the office and hand it in" — assumes your workforce is office-based. It doesn't work when your employee is in Edinburgh, your IT hub is in London, and the employee's contract ended on Friday.
Emailing employees with instructions to "find appropriate packaging and send it back" results in devices arriving in consumer boxes with no protection, no documentation, and no tracking — if they arrive at all. The employee experience is poor, and the compliance position is worse.
The most operationally mature IT teams treat hardware recovery as a logistics problem, not a people problem. They maintain a live asset register with device assignment and location tracking, trigger return kit dispatch automatically at contract end or role change, use managed logistics services rather than asking employees to self-organise, and track every return from kit dispatch to device receipt in a single dashboard.
The key insight is that hardware recovery scales when it's standardised. A process that requires your IT team to make individual decisions for each return doesn't scale. A process where you enter an address and a professional kit is dispatched automatically does.
ReturnKits was built precisely for this operational reality. Whether you're recovering one device or a hundred, the process is identical — and fully trackable.
The average organisation has between 8–12% of its IT asset register in an "unknown location" state at any given time, largely a result of hardware issued during the 2020–2022 remote hiring surge never being tracked back.
It assumes an office-based workforce. It breaks down when an employee is in a different city from the IT hub, or when their contract simply ends without a natural office visit to hand equipment back.
They treat hardware recovery as a logistics problem, not a people problem — maintaining a live asset register, triggering kit dispatch automatically at contract end, and tracking every return from dispatch to receipt in a single dashboard.
According to the ONS, around 40% of UK workers work from home at least part of the time, rising to over 70% in technology and professional services firms.
