Management Finds Postal Problems Solvable by Removing People Who Don't Post Anything
LONDON, ENGLAND | Royal Mail has announced plans to remove about 2,500 administrative and support jobs as part of a £500 million programme to improve delivery performance, according to the Financial Times. The cuts are not meant to affect postal workers or drivers, which reassured customers who feared the company might finally dispose of the last people able to find a letterbox.
Executives said the restructuring would make the business leaner and more competitive. Customers proposed an alternative strategy in which envelopes arrive at the address written on them. Management considers this insufficiently ambitious.
First Class Now Describes an Aspiration
Reported figures show 75.7 per cent of first-class mail arriving on time, against a regulatory target of 93 per cent. Posting a first-class letter now involves roughly the confidence of asking a politician whether taxes will rise. The answer is probably yes, but nobody will commit to a date.
Ivy Lambourne, 81, of Croydon, said she posted her grandson's birthday card well in advance. "He's married now," she said. "Two children. We've stopped asking."
Ms Lambourne said she now sends her cards by hand. "I give them to the boy next door and he cycles them round," she said. "He's eleven. No app, no transformation programme, and he's never once left a card saying he called while we were out."
The regulator, Ofcom, publishes the delivery targets for anyone who enjoys a good comparison.
Consultants Find Too Many People
The restructuring follows a proud British tradition. When an organisation fails at its basic function, executives hire consultants to decide whether it has too many employees. The consultants interview staff, draw diagrams and recommend cuts. They then send an invoice big enough to employ several of the people they recommended cutting.
Economists call this efficiency. Ordinary people use a shorter phrase, which this magazine's lawyers will not let it print.
Under the new structure, managers may finally find out whether three separate departments are really needed to approve a rubber band. One unit is understood to specialise in emailing another unit to ask whether it received an email. The efficiency programme will reduce this to two units and a consultant.
Staff in the surviving units will receive new guidance on internal communications. In future, any email asking whether an email has arrived must be sent first class. Management expects this to slow the problem down considerably.
Britain Once Delivered Letters Without an App
For generations the Royal Mail ran on a daring principle. You wrote an address on an envelope, bought a stamp, posted it in a red box and the letter turned up. No password. No 37 pages of terms and conditions. No message saying your delivery was being optimised through a strategic transformation programme. Occasionally the postman even knew who lived in the house.
Today customers can follow a parcel through seven distribution centres, three vehicles and a mysterious sorting facility where all Christmas presents go to reconsider their life choices. The tracking is impressive. The arrival remains negotiable.
Postmen Now Compete With Cupboards
Royal Mail is expanding its parcel business, including thousands of parcel lockers. Stationary metal cabinets are now serious players in the delivery economy. Unlike staff, lockers do not ask for holidays, join unions or complain about rain. They also have no interest in their children's birthdays, which suits modern corporate culture.
Lockers have one drawback. They cannot bring a parcel to your door. Customers must collect goods that used to be brought to them, which is described as convenience. The industry is approaching the breakthrough moment when customers collect parcels from a warehouse, carry them home and pay for the privilege of not being involved.
Lockers do have one advantage over the customer service line. A customer can stand in front of one for a quarter of an hour typing in a code that has expired, and it will never interrupt, sigh or put him on hold.
A Return to the Job
Royal Mail faces real pressures, including falling letter volumes and strong parcel competition. Nobody expects a business to stand still. But the public is entitled to wonder why every rescue plan begins with a slide deck and not with a look at the service.
A postman needs a bag, a route and reasonable conditions. A modern executive needs a transformation strategy, a sustainability report, six deputy directors and a dashboard announcing that satisfaction is being monitored. The Adam Smith Institute has written at length about what happens when customers can walk away from a service. Royal Mail customers, who cannot, may find this a tender subject.
The company says the £500 million will modernise the organisation. Customers have one request. Before spending half a billion pounds on the future of mail, could somebody find the post that was meant to arrive last Thursday?
Five Humorous Observations
- Five hundred million quid to deliver letters. For that money I'll walk to everyone's house myself and wave.
- Two thousand five hundred people cut and none of them delivered anything. That means the Royal Mail had 2,500 people not delivering. Forty years in and nobody noticed.
- A parcel locker. So now I drive to a cupboard to collect a thing that was supposed to come to me. That's not delivery, that's a hide-and-seek where I'm always "it".
- Tracking says "out for delivery" at 7am. By 6pm it says "out for delivery". That parcel's not on a van, it's on a gap year.
- My nan's birthday card to the grandson. Married with kids by the time it lands. That's not first class, that's a dowry.
Disclaimer: This article uses exaggeration and satirical scenes to comment on reported Royal Mail restructuring. It is entirely a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. This disclaimer was sent first class and should arrive by Thursday, of some year. More UK satirical news and other news satire sites are available instantly, with no card left saying we called. https://prat.uk/?p=52013
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