ROYAL MAIL STRIKE

The recent strike by Royal Mail workers has been unhelpful and will do nothing to solve the company's problems



The recent strike by Royal Mail workers has been unhelpful and will do nothing to solve the company's problems

In 2002 the Royal Mail organisation was haemorrhaging losses of over £1 million a day (approx $500 million a year). These harrowing losses a well as other negative factors such as poor culture, industrial relations, (Anon 2006) etc, within the Royal Mail had been exposed since its privatisation.

Because of these losses and other negative factors the Royal Mail highlighted and decided upon a culture change programme, which they needed to invest in. So, in 2002 the Royal Mail launched their biggest programme of investment into change within the organization for 50 years.

Allan Leighton (Royal Mail's Chairman) called upon his people and organisation development director, Tony McCarthy to "make this a great place to work, to make changes to the culture to boost moral and sort out the HR department".(Anon 2005) The HR department was highlighted because of it large number of employees and admin processes which was potentially deemed unnecessary.

The change was needed because the organisation could no longer rely on subsidies by the government through the tax payers to cover their losses as they were no longer a nationalised business but a private one with had to fund itself and was expected to produce a profit for its shareholder (Heao 2005).

The huge losses needed to be addressed before 2006 because at the start of that year the consumer Mail market would no longer be a monopoly and any organisation, in theory, would be able to place a post box on the street and handle letters/parcels for distribution (Senior 2002). This meant the organisation could potentially no longer rely upon a continuous flow of business.

When Royal Mail started the program the first thing they did was to appoint someone to oversee the operations. Instead of using someone from within, the organisation brought in Tony McCarthy. By bringing in someone i.e. an external source, ensured that, as long as he was given the freedom, a new business driven perspective was brought in (Roberts 2005). If the Royal Mail installed someone from within who had been with the organisation during its years as a nationalised organisation then they would have different perceptions and might not fully understand the new needs of the Royal Mail.

The way in which McCarthy managed his changes are similar to aspects that Kotter & Schlesinger (1979) outlined as there strategies to manage change and the resistance of change. These were;

Education and Communication;

Participation and Involvement;

Facilitation and Support;

Negotiation and Agreement;

Manipulation and Co-optation; and

Explicit and Implicit coercion (Thompson 2001)

McCarthy's focus leans towards the positive approaches education, communication, participation, involvement, facilitation and support over the more direct and negative aspect.

McCarthy used education and communication as a way to ensure there was not a lack of information concerning the changes that were being made (Anon 2006). The use of seminars to explain the new ...