Internal communication

Meeting of Royal Mail employees at their workplace in a Mail Centre

We are seeking to engage a lot more with our colleagues. It is vital that everyone in the organisation understands the changes we have to make, the reasons for them and our strategy for a sustainable, successful future.

Multi-channel approach

Royal Mail’s modernisation programme is one of the biggest in the UK.  It is a huge people change programme.   Effective internal communications is a focus for us.

We have reinvigorated existing channels and introduced new ones, particularly for our frontline people, most of whom do not have computer access during their working day.

We have revamped Courier, our staff newspaper.  With a circulation of 210,000, this is now a brighter, more tabloid publication, sent to employees’ and many pensioners’ home addresses ten times a year.   It features QR codes - readers can use mobile phones to scan these for additional information on some topics.

We now issue special Couriers on single topics for major developments, such as changes to regulation, price and our strategy.  Courier “newsflashes” are also used for getting the facts out fast to our people.

Our Work Time Listening and Learning sessions are 30 minutes face-to-face briefings held each week.  We’ve launched Royal Mail TV as a core part of these sessions.  This features frontline presenters with a news round up as well as special films dedicated to particular topics.

Our senior leader engagement programme involves around 200 of our senior managers spending time on the road.  Last year they visited more than 200 sites to listen and learn from around 20,000 frontline colleagues.

We hold regular conferences for our managers to keep them up-to-date with our strategy.

For our people to access our news from their homes, we introduced an employee website www.myroyalmail.com, updated daily with content that includes competitions and special offers.

For workplace computer users, we are making a significant investment in our intranet and bringing it up to standard.  We have completed the first phase of a major overhaul, with redesigned Group home page, easier navigation and continually updated rolling news content.

Annual employee survey

Our annual employee engagement survey will enable us to track progress in employee perceptions and focus attention where it is needed.  We measure the whole organisation with results provided at a unit level and benchmarked internally and externally.