21 May 2009
Royal Mail’s prolonged attempt to reorganise its IT department is sapping morale and casting a pall over its modernisation programme, according to affected employees.
To support the group’s £1.2bn change agenda unveiled last year, chief information officer Robin Dargue launched a staff review with the aim of reducing the then 300-strong permanent IT workforce by half.
As part of that review, IT staff were asked to undergo one-day assessments, which were to be used to identify staff who could be moved to new roles. Meanwhile, workers union Unite secured an agreement with the group that no compulsory redundancies would take place.
Following the assessments, some employees found positions internally, others were offered jobs that they felt were unsuitable and decided to leave, while about 20 staff have been left “in limbo” on full pay.
The staff in question were told by the group that they had to do “voluntary” work for three days a week and use the remaining two days to look for a job.
“We feel that the process could have been handled differently, by, for example, redeploying staff to value-adding activities such as improving customer relationships, instead of just getting them to apply for jobs,” said Brian Scott, assistant national secretary at Unite.
According to an internal source, who asked to remain anonymous, the idea was that the activities would enhance their chances of securing future employment.
“But when we asked what would happen at the end of the three months, which was the end of April, we were told that no decision had been made and that it would be reviewed before the period ends,” the source said.
The group then told the employees to stop the voluntary work from the end of April and revert to full-time job searching.
But without any firm plan for their future, many of the staff are becoming anxious about their prospects. “The longer we stay out of work, the harder it will be for us to find another position,” said one of the employees affected by the reorganisation.
“A lot of our skills are specific to Royal Mail and do not easily translate into another working environment and we don’t have formal qualifications because we barely received any training,” said the worker.
“The fact that our skills could be used in the business doesn’t matter they just wanted us to leave. They have been successful by getting rid of a lot of employees with many years of service and taking on new people under a completely different package,” said one ex-employee.
Around the time of the review, a large recruitment drive sought to bring in people with skills that Royal Mail said it did not have, in such areas as business partnering, service delivery and policy, methods and governance.
Royal Mail confirmed it hired more than 80 people last year as a result of the programme.
But the drawn-out reorganisation is sapping morale, according to one former IT employee, who chose to leave after turning down an offer of an alternative post.
“From speaking to my ex-colleagues, I know IT management at Royal Mail is perceived very poorly and that the whole department is now suffering. They are not the trusted advisers they were once seen as,” said the former worker.
With the staff in limbo now able to compete for IT jobs, the other staff in the department are being put in awkward positions, one Royal Mail worker told Computing.
“It is difficult for the internal people, who are essentially going up against ex-colleagues. This is grinding morale down further as people don’t want to see their friends out of work it is a vicious circle,” said the source.
Royal Mail declined to comment on the points raised by our sources, but a spokesman said: “There is a variety of things that we do to help people whose roles no longer exist in seeking opportunities internally and externally. What we can say is that there isn’t anyone on a six-figure salary sitting around doing nothing.”
Unite said it will ensure the arrangement with regards to surplus stays in place. “If the process takes longer than expected, Royal Mail will have to work with that,” said Scott.
Royal Mail told to modernise or decline
Modernisation has become the watchword at Royal Mail. Next month, MPs are due to vote on government plans for part-privatisation and with the prime minister’s reputation on the line, the stakes are high.
Pressure to transform Royal Mail has been building. Last week, postal service
minister Pat McFadden admitted the company was reaching a critical juncture.
“Royal Mail faces a stark choice about its future: to modernise or decline as
mail volumes drop because of the shift to email and text messaging,” he said.
“Given Royal Mail’s falling revenues and limited profits over the next few years, and pensions fund deficit, clearly Royal Mail will not be able to fund this investment alone,” he added.
“Additional capital will be required and this could be hundreds of millions of pounds, in addition to the funding we have already provided. And as well as capital, there is a need to transform Royal Mail to preserve the universal service which is at the heart of our postal system.”
When Computing reported the staff restructuring in April 2008, chief information officer Robin Dargue then six months into the job had carried out a skills assessment to support the £1.2bn IT-led transformation, which eliminated half of the group’s 300-strong IT workforce.
“We identified some people to retrain and they are moving forward. Others perhaps were not up for it, so their career choices had to lie elsewhere,” Dargue said at the time.
Clearly none of this could be true. I am forever reading articles about how wonderful the CIO is. Boyden, the recruitment firm, keep telling me he is marvelous and has fundamentally made a huge impact.... that much is true. Silicon.com appears no better.
Any model of a new person coming in which wipes out the old team, bringing in your past mates, is a recipe for disaster. It shows a complete lack of trust, integrity and leadership.
Posted by: Francois 20 Jun 2009
So the PO is still delivering mail as it has been doing for 370 years, and still using 'assessment centres' as a means of shedding staff. I see from an earlier article that the new CIO said on appointment "A crucial part of the job is getting the best available expertise and being an inspiring leader, regardless of whether the troops are your own or extended teams at your partners." From the so obvious low morale of his team he seems to lack the ability to inspire.
Posted by: A Sapper 08 Jun 2009
There was a real need to change the culture of IS in Royal Mail, and of course you can't 'move' 300 people overnight, so the quickest and most effective route is to -
Remove the senior managers
Remove 50% of the rest
Replace with consultants and new people who will take on whatever culture you decide is needed.
The mistakes here were manyfold.
The replacement management were friends of Robin's on inflated consultant rates, who mostly left after 6 months destroying the continuity.
The other staff who were filtered out were a mixture of space-wasters and good people who had unique knowledge of the systems. This last category are the ones replaced by people on inflated salaries who have no knowledge of the systems they are working on, and sloping shoulders when it comes to responsibilities.
People in Royal Mail IS used to really care about the performance of the systems and the effects on customers - internal and external.
We now have a situation where so long as an SLA is met, then its no-ones fault when the customer looks elsewhere.
Posted by: Anon 29 May 2009
The unhappiest place to work has to be Royal Mail not content with treating the IT dept badly they are in the process of doing the same with HR services.
Assessments where no previous history or qualifications are taken into account. 200 people on the surplus list doing nothing and worst of all 50% of the staff on surplus are over 50(age discrimination)
What replaces us unqualified inexperienced people plus lots of external consultants.
what thanks for all the work we have done over the years.
We can't be that bad look at all the awards we have won over the past 4 years
Posted by: Anon 27 May 2009
Losing your job and having uncertainty about it is never pleasant.
But having recently encountered, from the Royal Mail group, the first ever website that told me I couldn't use it because I was using Linux (Firefox on Windows and Mac was OK...), frankly said IT department clearly has some issues.
When you complain to the person responsible for that website and find that she has been told that "fixing" the Linux compliance would be a major release feature (actually it requires deleting one short line of code) and that testing requirements would include installing Firefox on many Linux distributions to ensure it worked (it doesn't, FF renders the same on all OS), you realise those issues are pretty major. A cleanout is probably the only sensible option.
Posted by: Chris Puttick 23 May 2009
The restructuring of Royal Mail's iT department has seen failure on all levels.
The assessment process was a complete farce. When the external assessment company would not "provide a list of people to sack" the process was put in jeopardy. A symptom of disorganisation that dogged the whole reorganisation. In addition, the assessment was supposed to be unweighted yet remarks made by senior managers in the new organisation suggest that was far from the case.
Following the reorg, many small but essential systems are unsupported with calls for assistance being routed to a mailbox that, until recently, went unmanaged.
Key services provided pre-reorganisation have simply been dropped, despite promises by Mr Dargue that there would be a period of "hand holding" and "baton passing" whilst Group Technology helped the business units take on these responibilities.
As for cutting the iT workforce in Royal Mail, that has no doubt been achieved. But the new recruits have come in on such exhorbitant remuneration packages that the cost of providing a reduced service is now actually costing the business 30% more, as well as creating resentment among the surviving staff who do the same jobs for half the reward.
Group Technology now seems to have no focus and no sense of customer or delivery.
As for processes, we are 14 months into the new organisation and there are still essential processes that are not in place or are constantly being changed.
As for retraining of staff, I understand that this has just started with a blanket iTIL foundation course, a whole year after the reorganisation. Lastly, we have displaced employees on significant salaries sitting around doing nothing while the business cries out for their knowledge and expertise. Simply because Group technology no longer see a majority of iT related issues as falling with their sphere.
I don't see any of the above as success markers.
Personally, I have not heard a good word about the business unit since the reorg and I am glad that I am no longer part of it.
Posted by: Anon 23 May 2009
I chose to leave after almost all my team were made redundant from what was recognised by our customers as being a high performing group - ebusiness. This was after they had assessments based in areas largely irrelevant to their jobs in web.
Since then I believe they have spent a fortune using consultants to replace the web skills and keep the ebusiness service running - and they've had 5 heads since the one they made redundant. People who come in don't seem to want to stay unless they are paid consultant rates - its madness.
Posted by: sue perry 22 May 2009
What sort of Manager uses an external consultancy company (and at what cost?) to make an assessment of his staff that takes NO account of either QUALIFICATIONS or EXPERIENCE?
I suggest Mr.Dargue had no real idea as to the calibre of the staff he was dumping AND yet he paid out a fortune to get rid of perfectly good employees who were more than able to perform their jobs with proper direction from above.
He then spent an even bigger fortune employing people whose QUALIFICATIONS and EXPERIENCE may have been the same as or inferior to that of the people he had dumped (except he wouldn't know)
Posted by: ANON 21 May 2009
Reading between the lines, it is quite obvious that Royal Mail would have been quite happy to completely clear the decks of the former IT department.
There is no appreciation whatsoever of the perilous financial position RM found itself in over the last few years. Those individuals that were successful in getting through the assessments are now blamed for the decisions of the previous management team who were working in an environment of continued austerity.
The remaining individuals are treated as second-class citizens and there has been a huge increase in the reported volume of bullying and harassment cases in the technology area.
Posted by: Anonymous 21 May 2009
Not strictly true. Nobody was asked to attend an assessment, they were told that if they did not then they would be assumed to be surplus. It was made clear to surplus staff that there was no future for them in Royal Mail and they should leave. This was difficult for many, especially after Mr Dargue publicly rubbished the staff in an interview with the press.
Posted by: Simon Hamblin 21 May 2009
Anyone working in IT Department prior to the Review would agree it needed drastic overhaul. However one would have expected Royal Mail's HR to oversee and ensure this process was reasonable and that any surplus staff were re-deployed. It would seem that this Review was undertaken without any forethought for the future of either the workers involved or the Royal Mail's strategic plan.
Posted by: ANON 21 May 2009
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