Overview

World Class Mail

Helping us to drive up standards throughout our organisation is World Class Mail. Structured into 10 pillars, our comprehensive programme for continuous improvement involves employees using both innovative and well-established techniques for improving safety, customer service, productivity and quality.

From inspiring an engineer at Leeds mail centre to devising an automatic sensor to help delay lines run smoother, to helping Taunton delivery office create visual warning cards to alert postmen and women to specific hazards on walks, World Class Mail is improving efficiency and safety across our business.

Inclusive culture

We seek to promote behaviours and working practices which recognise and respect the differences between people, and help them to fulfil their potential.

Royal Mail Group invests in training to ensure our staff can do their jobs effectively and keep pace with modernisation. Around 65,000 of our people experienced formal training during 2010-2011. Mail centre modernisation alone has involved training more than 6,500 of our employees to operate the new automation.

We also run an apprenticeship programme for engineers and vehicle technicians. The programme is open to current employees as well as the wider community and leads to a Level 3 national vocational qualification (NVQ) within three years.

Communicating change

Royal Mail Group is committed to involving all our employees in our change programme. We are doing this through an employee engagement programme in consultation with our unions as well as via a regular programme of internal communications.

Effective internal communications is a focus for us. We have reinvigorated existing channels and introduced new ones to make communication more interactive and engaging:

• Courier  - our staff newspaper, which is now a brighter, more tabloid style publication, sent to employees’ and pensioners’ home addresses ten times a year
• Work Time Listening and Learning (WTLL)  – our weekly face-to-face briefing sessions for our frontline colleagues
• Royal Mail TV – our new TV programme which forms part of the WTLL weekly briefing
• Our senior leadership engagement programme involving around 200 of our senior managers visiting more than 200 sites briefing our 20,000 frontline colleagues twice a year
• Regular conferences during the year for our managers to keep them up to date with our strategy
• A new ‘extranet’ employee website: www.myroyalmail.com  available 24/7 and a revamped intranet