Do you remember a mail slot in your parent's front door? Even apartments had them. The mailman would walk to your home, not a central mail box system, and put your mail through your door. Wow, what a concept!
Mail a letter? There were mail boxes on neighbourhood street corners, close to houses where people lived. Kids walked to the corner to mail a letter. Mailboxes had openings large enough to take a shoe box, should you want to mail your own parcel. Today, without your iPhone's mailbox locator, you're just not going to find one. They're all gone.
Our condo's facilities are fabulous, except the mailbox area. Since we have to go pick the mail up from the lobby box, it can get forgotten for a week. I've had a passport renewal go back to Ottawa because I didn't act on the registered mail pickup notice quickly enough. Mail wrongly delivered gets scattered around the lobby by people not knowing what to do with it. Junk mail? Our caretaker thoughtfully puts an industrial size garbage pail close by so we can scoop junk from our boxes directly into the garbage.
The EU in Europe has mandated all postal monopolies be abolished in 2013, and that is probably the future of our postal system. Right now Canada Post has 20% more sick days than the average union workplace. It's employees work 64% of the time for which they are paid. A mail carrier works 38 minutes out of every hour.
My point here - this is the ultimate cost of bad management. Your customers or stakeholders will put you out of business. Tell managers how to manage and your people how to behave. If you won't lead, people won't follow. Lead with a set of rules. Rule for how we deal with one another around here. Tell everyone, if you want to survive in my department please read our Tribal Handbook.
I'll be developing more parts and details to this, it's not simple. I've attached the three pages right out of our last seminar at this link, Tribal Handbook, part I. Start including this in your employee handbook. You might have your own ideas for expected good behavior in the workplace. Please send them along to me.
It's a good thing we don't rely on the postal system the way we used to!
Thank you,
See you for breakfast,
Wolfgang
p.s. Source: I caught it on CKNW and later googled it. The source is a report by the Montreal Economics Institute
p.s. Tribal Handbook, how to behave, pages from last seminar, click here.
p.s. Who's supervising the supervisors that allows this to happen?
No comments:
Post a Comment