Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
Businesses can of course choose whichever carrier they like. When given the option of carriers as a consumer I always choose Royal Mail or Parcelforce if available, or another reputable carrier if they're not. I won't buy from businesses who use Yodel and Evri and I know I'm not alone. It's not just because I work for RM - I'll happily accept DHL, FedEx, UPS etc. but it's a quality issue, even if it means I have to pay more. And that's what good businesses should do - offer buyers a choice. I recently got caught out buying a new phone from Virgin. I didn't realise it was coming via Yodel. Of course it didn't turn up on the day promised, despite Yodel claiming they attempted delivery. They scan things as delivery attempted without them leaving the depot so the senders think they have a better quality of service than they do in reality. You get what you pay for.
Indeed - some people are happy to do their 7/25/30 hours and go home, but most aren't in my experience. Once they're on the full 37 hours many more are happy to do the hours and no more but part-timers are nearly all doing overtime to boost their wages. I mentioned the 11 part-timers made up to full-time in our office recently. They only had to ask 12 people to get their 11. Only one was happy to stay on a 30 hour contract.
In our last employee opinion survey one question was along the lines of 'what can we do to make more people apply to join Royal Mail?'. My answer was to offer more FT contracts from the start. They won't.
It's just how RM works now. There have been part-time only jobs available in Delivery Offices for at least seven years now. In fact, in my old office, we had one person on a 7 hour contract. She was only contracted to work Saturdays. She did over 20 hours overtime a week on other days as she was in virtually every day.
Just one thing to point on re. Oli's links - the numbers quoted are for full-time posties. I don't know if it's the same nationally but, around here, you can only join as a part-timer. Hours vary between offices but are usually 25 or 30 hour contracts (vs 37 hours for full-time). To be offered a full-time contract can take years. In our latest rejig they offered 11 part-timers a FT contract. They have been with the business between four and seven years. Of course, overtime is available for anyone from day one.
Having read all the official announcements it does make me laugh how often the word 'efficency' is mentioned. RM don't know the meaning of the word. Someone has decided that every tracked item now needs a signature or photograph on delivery. This adds to the time. My back of the fag packet calculations come up with a £30 milion cost annually if each item takes an extra five seconds to deal with, or, as is more likely, £60 million for ten seconds per item. Fine if it reduces the amount of claims for non-delivery and expands business but the presentation shows the number of Tracked items is flat without Covid test kits counted.
The revisions are also mentioned. RM don't use cutting edge technology to map out routes. The software they do use is so bad it's laughable. It doesn't know where there are bollards or suchlike in the rosd which means you can't follow the routes they suggest, it doesn't seem to realise that houses in different roads that back onto each other have fences / hedges separating them and it's not physically possible for posties to climb over these to follow the most efficient route. We have a thing called RO+N on our PDA's - Route Optimization and Navigation. It's appalling. Your average postie doesn't need to use this on their daily rounds but, for example on Sundays, it's used by all of us as we're not following set routes and often delivering to areas that are covered by neighbouring Delivery Offices. It adds to your time meaning less can be done in the hours given. We all end up using Google Maps on our phones when we get sent down a dead end. Of course, RM could use Google Maps themselves but that'll cost them money. Instead they use some useless system that has had one update in three years. Try delivering in a town like the one I work in which has seen thousands of extra houses built in the past few years - whole estates that just don't appear on the maps.
Please don't be fooled into thinking RM can make deliveries more efficient. TNT tried this in London & Liverpool a few years ago - they gave up on it as they couldn't make it work and invented what's now called Whistl. They do the easy stuff of transporting mail around the country. Anyone can do that profitably.
Sorry for the rant!
I can't say for sure but it appears the issue is with area management rather than the CEO or the line managers at each office. I've done 25 years at RM and have spoken to all sorts of people at different levels in different areas of the business in different offices and it's always the same sticking point - someone higher than the line managers has said this is the way it should be done and they haven't got a clue what the reality is like.
I spoke to someone in Revenue Protection once who reckoned RM could save £30 million a year on unpaid PO Box fees, business replies etc. if they spent £10 million a year chasing it up but they chose not to do that as the £10 million was too much of an outlay. What do you do?
Sundays aren't always a premium rate. I work every Sunday as part of my contracted hours. Doesn't bother me personally but I can see it'll bother others. We have three Royal Mail staff and between 8 and 10 agency staff doing parcels on Sundays. We manage to get around 75% of them done on a good week - 50% on a bad week. The new contracts stipulate that you may be required to work Sundays so anyone joining now should be aware of that.
Have to agree with Dynamo here. We don't have an issue getting mail to the delivery offices, it's the final mile delivery that's failing so parcel hubs will make no difference to that. Maybe in the North West there is an issue and Warrington will help that but here in the South East it'll make no difference. Only today I was taken off my rural round and put on a town round in a shared van as we don't have enough vans. Our fleet is so old we have 5 vans in the workshop out of about 40. We were told this week we had too many hire vans so they've been taken back meaning mail hasn't been delivered. This is just the latest excuse after Covid etc. People are complaining, some of us posties are actually encouraning them to. RM isn't abiding by it's licence conditions to deliver the mail to every house six days a week. If the regulator wakes up and actually does something there could be some big fines coming.
I think Veteran10 must read the Express. RM change prices every year, always have done (in my 25 years anyway) and always will. It seems to come as a shock to some people. As Maximas pointed out, RM have reduced online prices but they've also reduced offline prices for some items by getting rid of the 1-2Kg band so a small parcel weighing between 1 and 2Kg now costs £3.95 whereas last week it was £5.07. A small parcel between 1 & 2 Kg sent Tracked24 has gone down from £7.80 to £5.45. (Figures from Tamebay - https://channelx.world/2022/03/reminder-royal-mail-price-update-from-monday).
And as for us being underpaid, downtrodden and abused etc., we're not. I had a stint outside RM for five years and it was terrible. I went back. the real world is a damn sight worse than working for RM.
gssvejk - you may want to recalculate your figures. Even at the top end of your figures, 30 million a year is £3.60 a week for every RM employee. That's not even a 1% rise.
Last year RM's 'people costs' were over £6 billion. Just a 5% rise on this is an extra £300 million. Current inflation rate - closer to £500 million and that's not taking into account the changes in employers NI contributions etc.