goingpostal-beyond.com

Steve Musacco

The United States Postal Service (USPS) is actively soliciting for new concepts, business ideas, and innovation to improve its viability and overall organizational effectiveness. This solicitation can be accessed at www.usps.com/innovations/. In the following, I offer some specific innovations to assist in this endeavor.

In response to the national recession and the related, dramatic dwindling of mail volumes and revenues, particularly 3rd class mailings, the USPS has devised and will accelerate strategic, change management plans to downsize it workforce. Unfortunately, the USPS has not and most likely will continue devising and implementing these plans without the input and voice of the four national unions and three management associations. In any significant, corporate downsizing effort, it is imperative that an organization use all of its major stakeholders to improve the success of targeted actions and to buffer some of the negative consequences for its employees. Moving in this direction would be a dramatic departure from the USPS’ historical approach to large scale, change management initiatives, but it’s not too late to forge these alliances.

The change management actions that the USPS has taken in the last month and action yet to be announced and implemented will affect the postal culture for years to come. If it continues to take unilateral action in its strategic, change management initiatives, it will serve to further solidify, an already highly toxic organizational culture. Furthermore, the risk for injury to employees’ physical and psychological health will rise and so will the potential for serious workplace violence.

How about real, dramatic, and strategic reform of the postal culture? How about investigation of excesses and fraud committed at the highest levels of the organization? Taking bold actions in these two areas will improve the viability of the organization and serve to improve the organizational commitment and well-being of its employees.

As I stated in previous writings, it will take sweeping congressional intervention to ensure that these types of actions are implemented and sustained to shift the USPS from an unhealthy organization to a safe and healthy one. Congress has responded with the right action to ensure that core postal operations are not privatized, particularly in the last several years. Now is the time for Congress to implement legislation to reform the postal culture. Postal employees, regardless of rank or position, deserve a postal culture in which the core values of respect, fairness, and validation of dignity, are not empty slogans, but instead are the reality of organizational life.

Steve Musacco

Representative Lynch, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, recently announced his committee will hold a hearing this month on the pay and benefits paid to John Potter, Postmaster General.

Besides the pay and benefits of John Potter, Postmaster General, there are many other issues and questions the U.S. Congress needs to look at. Below are some of the more salient issues and questions.

1. Reform of the postal culture. That is, moving the postal culture from one that is highly authoritarian and paramilitary to one that validates the dignity of all its employees and routinely treats them with the fairness and respect that they deserve.

2. The relationship between large business mailers, the Board of Governors (BOG), and the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC).

3. Why has the BOG and their point person, the Postmaster General, been “hell bent” on contracting-out core postal operations and relaxation of collective bargaining agreements over the last 20 or more years, especially the last several years?

4. Why are meetings between many of the large business mailer advocates and the Postal Service outside of public purview?

5. Why hasn’t the Postal Service’s Office Inspector General Office (OIG) or the United States General Accounting Office investigated the relationship between the BOG, high-ranking postal officials, and the PRC to see if there has been a violation of public trust, and yes even unethical business ties and practices?

Accountability and oversight of these issues by the United States Congress are vastly more important than the salary and benefits of John Potter.

Action to reform the postal culture is necessary now.  Postal employees, regardless of rank or position, deserve a postal culture in which the core values of respect, fairness, and validation of dignity, are not empty slogans, but instead are the reality of organizational life.