Thoughts on Royal Mail

Article courtesy of akenhurst.com

This thought was prompted by the ongoing tragedy of Royal Mail. Their problem, in a nutshell, is this. Volume of letters is falling year by year, as email takes over. The bright spot is the growth of the parcels market, thanks to the expansion of online shopping. Royal Mail still has a substantial part of the parcels market, but parcels are the part of the postal market that everybody wants. To remain viable, Royal Mail needs to become more efficient, through automation and more flexible working patterns. The elephant in the room is that this surely must mean substantial job losses.

It's a pretty straightforward case of adapt or die. For the workers it's not a nice prospect, but not, surely, hard to understand. But they don't see it that way. They are striking, despite the inevitable result being more losses of major parcels contracts. Amazon have already left them and others will follow. Nobody in the mail order business can live with an unreliable carrier. Yet the workers see a strike as a way to preserve jobs.

One postman, aged 42, was quoted as saying "I just want to know that I've got a job until I'm 60." Another said "the decision to strike is not taken easily. It's not just about pay and conditions, it's about securing jobs." They are tragically misguided. The parcels contracts lost because of this strike will be lost forever, and so will the jobs they supported.

How can the workers get it so wrong? There's only one possible culprit: management. Who has all the information about the organisation's performance? Whose job is it to communicate it? If the postal workers are set on a course of action which will produce the exact opposite of what they want, it can only be because management has utterly failed to communicate and educate them about the realities of the business and win their trust.

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