Delivering our agreement

Our agreement with CWU recognises the need for change and enables us to drive things forward. Here's an update on our progress.

Shorter working week

We are working with CWU to ensure the terms for each piece of activity remain aligned to the agreement.

We are at the beginning of the pilots and trials phase. We are testing different methods and equipment to see which are enablers of the shorter working week.

Delivery office managers will now begin discussions with their local CWU representatives on how best to deploy the shorter working week.

David Renfrew, Cambridge mail processing unit manager, says: 'This represents an opportunity to adjust the working hours of my unit to better distribute the workload around when mail is coming in.

'That will make a big difference to us and we are just having discussions about the best way to approach it now. Our busiest hours of the day have changed in recent times with the increase in parcels, so this is good news for the team and for the business.'

Shorter working week (Logistics)

• In Logistics, we are working with colleagues in CWU to agree an approach to delivering the shorter working week across the functions
• A number of options are being discussed and we are confident we will reach agreement soon.

Sickness absence review

The review is at the earliest stages and we have signed off a terms of reference with CWU. The key aspects of the review are:

• To build on and develop the joint work on attendance we began last year
• Reviewing annual leave, especially odd days at short notice
• To ensure managers and CWU representatives are educated around the need and importance for consistency and fairness in approaches.

Delivery methods

• We’re trialling different methods at eight sites. We want to establish the best method, which achieves the best outcome for the operation, while being practical and manageable for our people
• The union has agreed the terms of the trial. Together, we’re listening to the feedback from colleagues at the trial sites.

What’s next?

We will complete the development of the Resource Scheduler software and agree terms of reference with CWU on how we will trial it. We will also complete the Auto Hours Data Capture trials and agree a deployment plan to install in all sites. Finally, we will launch our Later Acceptance Times product.

Keep an eye out on myroyalmail.com and next month's Courier for further updates.