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The postal workers’ union says Royal Mail is failing to meet its delivery targets as workplaces across the country are experiencing “chaos and demoralisation”.
Royal Mail is pushing for changes including scrapping Second Class deliveries on Saturdays after falling short of the targets set by Ofcom.
The postal service revealed that between 29 September and 30 November, 77.5% of First Class letters reached their destination the next working day, below Ofcom’s 93% benchmark.
Communication Workers Union (CWU) general secretary Dave Ward said: “These failures are due to a recruitment crisis that has been caused by the decision to impose low wages and poor conditions on new starters in 2022.
“This devaluing of a postal worker’s job, combined with a toxic managerial culture, has created chaos and demoralisation in almost every workplace across the country.”
Morale in organisations “doesn’t deteriorate overnight”, said leadership and culture consultant Jackie Handy, but “disappears gradually through a combination of factors and is hard to rebuild”.
Read more: Workers spend a quarter of the week on morale-sapping shadow admin
Handy told HR magazine that staff want to feel valued and included in their organisation, and to have a sense of purpose, meaning and growth in their work.
“Measures to promote inclusion and belonging start as simply as having one-to-ones with managers, support with wellbeing and feeling understood in and outside of work. If staff don’t feel seen, they will experience greater levels of disconnection and isolation,” Handy said.
“Targets that feel impossible, managers who’ve stopped being human, and communication that’s become purely about what’s wrong” can all trigger a slide in morale, according to Lucy Bulley, founder of consultancy The Structurist.
Bulley told HR magazine: “When people feel like a line on a spreadsheet rather than part of something, they check out. And once trust breaks, everything else follows.”
Read more: From tension to turnover: factoring conflict into retention strategy
For HR professionals trying to stabilise a dispersed workforce, the “fastest fix is usually the simplest: make communication human again,” said Bulley, explaining: “Drop the corporate script. Train managers to ask how people are, not just what they’ve delivered. Give people permission to say what’s genuinely hard without it being treated as weakness.”
Handy added that, to reverse demoralisation, there needs to be a “shift in cultural priorities”: communication channels must be opened up, and listening deeply to people’s experiences should become a priority.
Handy explained: “Focusing on great pay and benefits will only take [employers] so far. It is most often overlooking the small daily practices that lead to widespread problems for businesses. Those can take much longer to rectify but must be treated with the importance they deserve.”
The uncomfortable truth, Bulley said, is that you can’t motivate people out of a broken system: “If targets are genuinely unrealistic, if managers aren’t supported, and if communication only flows one way, no amount of wellbeing initiatives will fix it.
“HR’s real leverage is getting leadership to show up differently. When that shifts, morale usually starts rebuilding on its own,” Bulley concluded.
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