Delivering parcels and letters requires people power. With 84 million parcels and letters to sort and deliver to 27 million households every day and with 184,800 employees to do this, it is clear that Royal Mail’s impact on society is enormous: it recruits and employs people, it delivers a service, and it enables businesses to go about their day-to-day activities.
This focus on connecting people forms the crux of corporate responsibility strategy at the company and it is emphasised by Kay Allen, head of social policy and inclusion at Royal Mail, when she says: “There are people in the UK who are disadvantaged and therefore we aim to make connections between people in need and people who are willing to make a difference and to help.”
According to Allen, Royal Mail’s philanthropic attitude goes back 130 years and was only formalised as a corporate social responsibility strategy after the company became wholly-owned by the British government in 2000.
The Royal Mail Group is made up of three business strands:
– Parcelforce Worldwide, its express parcel delivery service;
– Post Office, its national network of post office branches, and;
– Royal Mail, its national letters and packages business.
The group as a whole generated external revenues of £9.2bn in 2007.
CSR management and measuring progress
Corporate social responsibility at Royal Mail is managed by the CSR Governance Committee, which meets on a quarterly basis and is made up of the managing directors of the various business units. The committee is responsible for developing corporate responsibility strategy and the company’s long-term goals, identifying issues that impact on the group as well as making recommendations for future actions. Progress on CSR issues is also measured and monitored through a system of CSR scorecards that are prepared and distributed across the group on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis as well as an adhoc report service, which provide one-off information requests that are not normally covered in the annual reports. There is also a CSR audit programme in place, which gathers compliance data.
CSR strategy
Such a big and far-reaching organisation has to be sustainable and according to its 2006 corporate social responsibility report – Talking, Listening, Improving: Passionate About Progress – Royal Mail is working towards this and has developed a CSR strategy that will see CSR integrated into the “culture of the business”. The company believes that this approach will position it effectively in the highly competitive market in which it now operates.
The UK’s postal market was liberalised on January 1, 2006, which meant that Royal Mail no longer enjoyed the monopoly position it had experienced since its inception 350 years ago. Other companies can now be licensed to collect and deliver post and parcels from any customer – businesses, private customers and the public sector. Licences are granted by Postcomm – the Postal Services Commission – which is the independent regulator for the postal market.
Allen echoes the importance of CSR in competitive positioning and regards social inclusion and attention to diversity issues as integral in giving Royal Mail a competitive edge. She says: “Business customers like Barclays and HSBC are getting very smart with regard to diversity and corporate social responsibility in their tender documents by asking what exactly we are doing with regard to diversity and equality.”
So, she sees an integrated and well-thought out social responsibility policy as “part of our armoury when winning new business” and points out that she has a “business reason” for developing a good social policy because “I can use that ethical conversation in the tender process”.
Social policy at Royal Mail
Allen explains that the social policy at Royal Mail is focused on making connections between people – in this way it mirrors the core purpose of the business in bringing people together through its services.
Recruiting from socially excluded groups
One way of connecting people is through volunteering but, Allen explains, this is difficult in an organisation such as Royal Mail because “we cannot take our staff out of the office” due to the early starts and the nature of the work – letters cannot be delivered a day late because staff have gone volunteering instead. But by recruiting from excluded groups of people, such as the homeless, volunteering is brought into the workplace. One way in which Royal Mail has done this is by partnering with Business Action on Homelessness, an initiative run by Business in the Community that aims to help homeless people to find employment and live independently. It is a partnership between businesses, the UK government and homeless charities.
Allen explains that Royal Mail has had “pockets of success” in this area and that “Business Action on Homelessness has been fantastic in Liverpool and Manchester and we’ve recruited about 46 homeless people into jobs at Royal Mail in these areas”.
“The homeless person is buddied-up with someone at Royal Mail and mentored in this way, so we have re-defined what volunteering means,” she adds. That is, staff don’t necessarily have to take time out of their working day to volunteer but can do so while working.
Royal Mail has also partnered with other organisations that represent people who are socially excluded. These include Remploy, Project Compass, Job Centre Plus and Reed in Partnership and in this way it recruits people with physical and learning disabilities, ex-service personnel and lone parents. In 2006 to 2007, Royal Mail employed 50 people in partnership with Mencap, a UK charity which campaigns for equal rights for children and adults with learning disabilities.
Diversity
A broad commitment to diversity begins at the top of the organisation. For example, Adam Crozier, chief executive of Royal Mail Group, was appointed as chairman of the Employers’ Forum on Disability in March 2007, and the group further has a Disability Action Group, which is made up of senior Post Office managers and oversees the implementation of a strategy in relation to disability issues.
Allen believes that Royal Mail’s size is an advantage and that “we should use our employment size, our knowledge and our leverage to help the debate around disability grow in the UK”.
All aspects of diversity need to be factored into the development of a corporate social policy at Royal Mail, which has operations throughout the UK and therefore employees work in diverse ethnic, socio-economic and religious areas. An organisation such as Royal Mail should thus reflect this diversity.
“Local knowledge is crucial to our operations,” says Allen. However, she stresses that she doesn’t focus on percentages when it comes to diversity: “I will never say that Royal Mail has to have, say, 21% ethnic minorities working for us, or, for example, 31% women. Because it’s not about numbers, it’s about respect for our local community.”
For example, she explains, there are areas where “we recruit more white people, where we recruit older people (like in the south of England), and where we’ll recruit more ethnically diverse people (like in the north)”. The focus, Allen reiterates, is to source “local knowledge, local talent and local skills”.
However, Royal Mail does have commitments in place to address issues around race, gender and age. In particular, Allen admits that the business employs a large number of men and not that many women but would “welcome more women to come and work in our organisation”. She thinks that this imbalance may be due to the historical nature of the company: “We have early starts [which makes caring for a family difficult].”
Therefore, in 2006, Royal Mail committed itself to improving the representation of women and people from ethnic minority groups in all management positions, particularly in senior levels.
The company reports that progress was made in these areas with Parcelforce Worldwide hosting gender events and actively recruiting more women, in particular in the London area. The Post Office also held a conference, which discussed the importance of inclusivity at all levels of the organisation, and selection and recruitment material was developed to assist managers to recruit new staff in a bias-free way. Further, there are ten diversity champions across the group who are responsible for communicating and supporting diversity and inclusion strategies across all the business units, and the group is also chaired by Adam Crozier.
Vision for the future
The language of diversity and inclusion is of great importance to Allen who thinks that “some language around diversity and inclusion can become exclusive”. She points out, for example, that calling an initiative Women at Work could alienate the lone fathers within the organisation: “We need to make sure that all our employees are supported.”
Linking in with language, she believes, is the issue of flexible working: “The language that we will use is all about doing work differently. Whether you are disabled, whether you have a religious or cultural need, or whether you have an elder care issue. We all work differently and each one of us has to find a balance in our lives.”
So, she explains that the future of corporate social responsibility strategy at Royal Mail will move towards finding a language that all the people in the organisation can identify with. Otherwise the risk is that “people will self-select themselves out of the process”.
Allen is optimistic about the future of corporate social responsibility at Royal Mail. “There is huge community spirit in this organisation,” she says, and adds that this shapes Royal Mail’s long-term impact on society so that it will keep connecting people irrespective of their physical or mental abilities, cultural background, religion or ethnicity.
Biography
Kay Allen, Head of Social Policy and Inclusion
Recognised as one of the leading diversity specialists in the UK, Kay is MCIPD qualified with over 16 years’ direct experience in diversity management. In 1992, she became the HR Director for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Working in this role, Kay became aware of the need to understand diversity in relation to customer profile and business development and introduced one of the first diversity programmes in the arts. From this, she developed a specialised role in corporate diversity management and was invited to head B&Q’s diversity team in 1995, where she was responsible for developing and implementing its award-winning diversity strategy. In January 2000, Kay was appointed as a commissioner of the Disability Rights Commission. In 2001, she joined the Grass Roots Group as a diversity specialist and has been involved in a variety of programmes, including work for the British Army and several public sector organisations. Prior to joining Royal Mail, Kay was part of the public affairs team at BSkyB, where she was implementing a diversity strategy. She is looking at a range of issues, including portrayal of disability, employing disabled people, and access to services. On 5 December 2006, Kay Allen was announced as a commissioner for the Equality and Human Rights Commission.