Un-agreed Royal Mail Training – Resourcing and Engaging Your Delivery Office

Dear Colleague,

Royal Mail Training – Bite Size 5 Module V10 – Resourcing and Engaging Your Delivery Office

This LTB is to inform Branches and CWU Representatives that the above mentioned training is not agreed with the CWU; in fact we will go as far as to say it is not recognised by the CWU and presents another hurdle for DOM’s to jump through rather than focusing their attention on running the office and getting people out on delivery on time. It offers no value for our Representatives and members’. Some of its content is farcical and was clearly designed by someone who has no practical experience of a Delivery Office. It is also non compliant with our National Agreements, Guidelines and Joint Statements.

The following is a summary of some of the issues and problems that are contained in this ‘training’ module.

1. There is no mention in the module that resourcing meetings and forecasting is covered by a Royal Mail / CWU National Agreement. A copy of the agenda to be used at the weekly resourcing meetings is not provided, plus there is no reference to the resourcing methods contained in some of the National Joint Statements.

2. The module contains a communications board which has not been agreed with the CWU and contains several problems to say the least.

3. The reference to time out of office assumes all deliveries leave at the same time. In reality there will probably be several different times that deliveries are scheduled to leave the office.

4. There is reference to Items Per Hour (IPH) and a box on the communications board which states that “IPH processed per hour worked adjusted by a number of factors to enable level playing field comparisons with other DOs”. It makes no mention of what adjustment is made to the IPH figure, and more importantly using IPH to compare office to office is not part of any National Agreement. The CWU has not agreed this as a comparator and we maintain that this is an unrepresentative method of measuring office by office performance. The listing of the top 5 offices in an area using this method is a back door introduction of the Top 10% / Upper Decile which continues to be subject to national discussions and as such is not agreed.

5. The information collated on the Communications Board is subject to a daily huddle of all staff, which would take a minimum of 10 mins a day at least, 1 hour per week. However there is no mention of this time being factored into any revision activity or the daily operation. It would appear that our members are expected to absorb this time which in an office of 40 duties would equate to 40 hours per week or a FT job.

6. The training module assumes that accurate traffic figures can be obtained on the day from the Mail Centre, which then enables the DOM to adjust the resourcing of the operation that morning to match the traffic. In the real world this is simply not the case. Accurate traffic figures are not available at that time of the morning for resourcing to be adjusted. Even if they were the DOM would not have the time to get the figures and run them through the forecast IWT, work out what staff could be realigned, inform their line managers, populate the communications board, call for and undertake a huddle, and then debate with staff and Reps if the assumptions can be achieved. While all this is taking place most OPGs would be prepping their deliveries. This clearly demonstrates that whoever concocted this idea is from a different planet to those who work in delivery.

7. The examples given in the exercises contained in the module are unrealistic and there is no recognition that when traffic is above module week overtime may have to be scheduled to deal with it.

8. It makes no reference to the fact that forecasting/resourcing is undertaken at the agreed office performance.

9. It makes no reference to the fact contained in the Pay & Mod agreement that lower traffic levels during the summer can be used to create more annual leave slots. It also fails to mention that staff can cover for each other. But it does state that if you work an extra 30 mins Friday or Saturday Royal Mail can carry the time owed over into the next week. The National Agreement does not say that.

10. A screen shot in the workbook indicates it is from the IWT; however this screenshot is not in the IWT.

11. In one of the exercises the solution involves sorting D2D outside of the Standard Operating Procedure.

The whole module is not fit for purpose as far as the CWU is concerned. It also highlights an in principle problem with training where on one hand we have agreed joint training on operational issues and agreements, and on the other hand Royal Mail continue to develop their own independent training on the same or similar subject matter which is quite often not compatible with National Agreements and devoid of any practical experience or knowledge of the operation.

As an example a DOM could go to a nationally agreed joint training workshop one week and get an accurate assessment of how to carry out resourcing in line with National Agreements, and the next week go to a bite size training session where the operation is presented as being carried out in a utopian, unrealistic, ideal world situation, which in reality does not exist and Royal Mail are light years away from achieving, especially when they continue to colour the water with ongoing unnecessary training modules that appear to be there to simply preserve the employment of certain individuals who would otherwise be employed in Disneyland.

It is not a sustainable position for any business to have two or three different training forums sending out different messages on the same subject, especially when one is ill informed, naïve, and non compliant with National Agreements. It is not helpful that this approach to “resourcing to demand”, a Royal Mail term, seeks to highjack and undermine the nationally agreed joint process i.e. the weekly resourcing meeting.

We have a jointly developed, joint training workshop delivered by Royal Mail managers and CWU Reps to Royal Mail managers and CWU reps, who are actually involved in the day to day operation and realities of the Delivery Office environment, which is more than fit for purpose and delivers a consistent, fully informed message that is compliant with National Agreements.

If this is module is deployed in any Delivery Offices it is not agreed and managers should be asked where the time for the huddle is coming from. Any attempts to impose this process should be dealt with using the IR Framework and registering unilateral disagreement.