Our people

We are proud to employ a rich and diverse mix of people who reflect the communities in which they live and work.

Key facts

• We employ around 163,000 staff in the UK.(1)
• The turnover rate of our full-time frontline workforce is half the UK average.
• 45,000 people have left the business since 2002, without resort to compulsory redundancy.
• 18% of our workforce is female.
• 10% of our workforce is from black and minority ethnic (BME) background.(2)
• 7% of our workforce consider themselves to have a disability.(3)
• 65,000 Royal Mail Group employees have experienced formal training this year.
• 115 senior managers have visited 221 sites and spoken to 14,120 colleagues during the 2011/12 employee engagement programme.

Strategic priorities

We are a people business. Our people are daily ambassadors for Royal Mail Group. Almost no other company has daily contact with customers in the way that we do.

Royal Mail Group is one of the largest employers in the country. We are proud to employ a rich and diverse mix of people who reflect the communities in which they live and work. Investing in our people is a key part of our business strategy.

We have identified the following priorities:

• Modernisation. Our modernisation programme represents one of the largest change management programmes ever undertaken in the UK. It is changing every process and affects everyone who works for Royal Mail Group.
• Engagement. To modernise successfully, our people need to be fully engaged with the challenges that the business faces.
• Health and safety. To modernise successfully, our people need to feel that their health and safety is of the upmost importance to us.
• Diversity, inclusion, dignity and respect. To modernise successfully, our people need to feel valued and recognised.
• Learning and development. To modernise successfully, our people need to be equipped with the skills they require.

Modernisation

Our modernisation programme represents one of the largest change management programmes ever undertaken in the UK. As we modernise all aspects of our operations, the jobs of 120,000 postmen and women are changing across 1,371 delivery offices and 59 mail centres.

Modernisation is aimed at creating a more efficient operation which is vital to secure the six-days-a-week, one-price-goes anywhere Universal Service. Before the current modernisation programme started, we did not have the latest technology to sequence mail to the order of a postman and woman’s walk. Most of the mail was still hand-sorted before being delivered. Many postmen and women carried the full mail weight on their shoulders. Many of the changes are therefore improving the working lives of our colleagues. They include the installation of modern technology and better equipment, including more trolleys, shared vans to handle packets and parcels and handheld devices to record signatures when mail is delivered.

However, modernisation can be hard for our people. It requires them to accept changes to how they work. They may need to work different hours, adopt different working methods and undertake different delivery rounds. Modernisation also continues to mean significant job reductions. We remain committed to working with our people and the CWU to manage operational job reductions on a voluntary basis.

Engagement

Our colleagues, justifiably, take great pride in the valuable work they do in so many communities across the country. They like working for Royal Mail Group. The turnover rate of our full-time frontline workforce is about half the UK average.

Given the difficult situation facing the Group and the scale of our modernisation programme, some of our colleagues do not have full confidence in our future. Our employee engagement scores remain unsatisfactory.

It is imperative that we change this. We are committed to much more active engagement with frontline employees as we implement our modernisation programme. We need to know how our people feel so that we can take action where required. We wish to involve and encourage our employees to suggest changes to improve the way we work.

Employee engagement is now a key scorecard measure and we will report on the results of our annual employee survey in next year’s Corporate Responsibility Report. The success of our World Class Mail programme is dependent upon engagement with our people. Without this engagement, we will not be able to achieve the 10 pillars of the World Class Mail programme. We engage with our people via a number of different channels:

• Weekly Work Time Listening and Learning (WTLL) sessions – held in every Royal Mail site.
• JustSayIt (a direct email link to the CEO).
• Business TV – screens located in every Royal Mail site.
• Intranet and myroyalmail.com.(4)
• Courier – monthly newspaper to all colleagues’ home addresses.

Our employee engagement programme commenced in summer 2011 outside of the relevant financial year. Each senior manager will be on the road for at least one week, to listen and learn and to communicate to colleagues. They will provide feedback to our Chief Executive and the senior management team.

In the first completed phase of the engagement programme, 60 senior leaders visited 98 sites and spoke to 10,000 frontline colleagues directly about the challenges facing the business. In the second phase, another 57 senior managers will visit 100 sites and engage with 13,000 colleagues. Royal Mail Group is believed to be only one of a handful of UK companies which has established an employee engagement programme on such a large scale.

We hope an improved level of understanding of the issues facing the business and the issues of concern to employees will ultimately result in improvements in our employee engagement scores. We will report on the outcome of this engagement programme in next year’s Corporate Responsibility Report.

Safety

We want to build an unrivalled safety culture within our organisation.

The safety of our people and customers is paramount. Establishing a positive safety culture makes good business sense as well as making us a responsible employer. Low standards can lead to increased costs, poor service and low morale.

We aim to achieve this through the following initiatives:

• More visible leadership from the top. Health and Safety performance has been installed as a standard agenda item at monthly Royal Mail Group Board meetings. All Board members and other senior executives undertook rigorous safety training in the past year. This seeks to ensure that safety is embedded at every level within the organisation. Safety is also one of the key scorecard measures.
• Increased awareness amongst our people.
• Investment in modern equipment, such as high-capacity trolleys, and the adoption of more efficient ways of working. As a result of our increased focus on safety, accidents across the business fell from 24,842 to 19,389 this year. We also achieved a reduction in the number of days lost due to incidents. 40,000 days were saved which is equivalent to a saving of £3.3m for the business.

Royal Mail Group won a Gold Managing Occupational Road Risk medal in the 2011 RoSPA Occupational Health and Safety Awards.

Health and wellbeing

We aim to provide first class support to maintain and improve the health of our people. This is now more important than ever as longer shifts and later retirement become increasingly common amongst our workforce.

Providing excellent health and wellbeing support makes good business sense. It helps us attract and retain excellent people and boosts workplace morale. It helps us maintain the highest levels of service for our customers. By giving employees the support they require, we aim to ensure that they are able to return to work as soon as possible after an illness or injury.

The Royal Mail Group Board management is provided with a monthly health and safety performance report. This ensures that health and safety is given due prominence and high level support. Some of the ways we provide a healthy working environment include:

• An employee assistance programme, available 24 hours a day every day of the year for health-related advice and for arranging health services for our colleagues and their families.
• Occupational health clinics in more than 90 Royal Mail Group sites across the country.
• Fitness centres run by trained instructors within our larger sites.
• A national physiotherapy and functional rehabilitation service for colleagues suffering from musculoskeletal conditions.

This year the sick absence figure was 4.1%, which was on target and is in line with the CBI average absence target.

Diversity and inclusion

We are proud to employ a rich and diverse mix of people who reflect the communities in which we work. We are working hard to ensure that we are identified as an equal opportunity employer. This is critical if we are to achieve commercial success and be an employer of choice. We engage with various organisations to increase our knowledge and adopt good practice. In particular, Unite/CMA and the Communication Workers Union are important stakeholders in assuring our future success. In conjunction with our unions, we are reviewing all of our HR policies to ensure that they fit for purpose and easy to access and understand.

Disability

Royal Mail Group aims to be a Disability Confident Employer.(5) The Royal Mail Disability Leadership Panel (6) continues to monitor Royal Mail Group’s treatment of disabled employees and customers. During the period covered by this report, the panel focused on mental health issues, procurement of accessible IT equipment and the implications of the new Equality Act. We have continued to work in partnership with Remploy and Access to Work to increase the number of work opportunities for disabled people and provide adjustments to support their work when required.

Gender

Women represent 18% of the Royal Mail Group workforce. We are seeking to increase this proportion. Royal Mail Group is a key supporter of Business in the Community’s (BITC) ‘Opportunity Now’ programme. We were pleased to win a Silver in the 2011 ‘Opportunity Now’ Awards. Other gender-focused initiatives include the Springboard Development Programme, which is designed to encourage non-management female employees into junior management. Three programmes have been run this year, bringing the total number of participants to 707 women. The Royal Mail Group Women’s Steering Group and Network is also seeking to increase the quality of the opportunities available to women working for Royal Mail Group.

Dignity and respect

Royal Mail Group is committed to eliminating all instances of bullying and harassment amongst our employees. We dealt with 390 formal bullying and harassment complaints during 2010/11. This represents a decrease from last year, when we dealt with 797. However, the time taken to investigate these complaints increased, largely due to reduced capacity to investigate these complaints. We wish to eliminate all instances of bullying and harassment.

Our target for 2010/11 was to limit the proportion of our workforce stating that they had experienced some form of bullying and harassment to 10%. Unfortunately, largely due to dissatisfaction with the Transformation Change Programme, we missed our target by 2% this year.(7) We will seek to improve on this over the next 12 months.

Our 2010/11 employee opinion survey included a question asking whether the participant has experienced an instance of bullying and harassment.

Learning and development

Royal Mail Group is committed to enhancing the capability of our people. This will help our people carry out their job to the best of their ability and provide the highest possible service to our customers. We ensure that our operational training is aligned with our business priorities. 65,000 Royal Mail Group employees experienced formal training and just under 20,000 training days were delivered in 2010/11. All our front line employees receive 30 minutes Work Time Listening and Learning sessions once a week.

Outplacement support

We invest significantly in outplacement support for those leaving the business. This support begins even before redundancy offers have been made, to ensure that our people are able to make informed choices. Outplacement support includes ‘Career Transition’, a flexible, individual service which enables those potentially leaving the business to clarify their career and lifestyle options.

Priorities for 2011/12

• Introduction of an annual employee engagement survey. We will be very open with the results and what we are going to do with them in next year’s Corporate Responsibility Report. We hope to increase our employee engagement scores.
• More active engagement with frontline employees. Further rollout of our employee engagement programme.
• Continued initiatives to improve the health and wellbeing and safety of our people.
• Continued improvements to our diversity and inclusion agenda.
• Increased focus on learning and development.

Further information

Communication Workers Union: http://www.cwu.org/

Unite: http://www.unitetheunion.org/

Equality and Human Rights Commission: http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/

Direct Enquiries: http://www.directenquiries.com/

(1) Full-time equivalent.

(2) Derived from our Employee Opinion Survey. This percentage is in line with the proportion of BME citizens in the UK population as a whole.

(3) We do not formally monitor our disabled employees. This figure is taken from our engagement survey results.

(4) myroyalmail.com was launched outside of the relevant financial year.

(5) As defined by the Employers Forum on Disability.

(6) Membership includes: http://disabilityequalityprogramme.com/panel.htm

(7) Calculated from our Employee Opinion Survey.