Unrest grows over treatment of Royal Mail IT workers

An IT department shake-up that has caused workers to suffer months of job insecurity is souring relations between managers and staff, and threatening to undermine the group's modernisation plans

The staff unrest raises questions over Royal Mail's IT-led £1.2bn business transformation scheme

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.