Royal Mail has chosen to deploy the Workday Peakon Employee Voice solution as it looks to strengthen its employee engagement and approach to wellbeing. The firm is a subsidiary of International Distributions Services plc and the UK’s designated universal postal service provider. Founded in 1615 as a postal service exclusive for the King and his court, it is now an establishment that delivers to every business and household in the United Kingdom with 125,000 employees.
While the firm completed a transition from a legacy SAP HCM solution in 2018 to SuccessFactors, that solution did not fulfil all the employee engagement requirements. Instead, Royal Mail turned to Workday Peakon Employee Voice to better understand employees and to assist with driving and measuring positive change across the organisation.
Rachel Blackett, Head of Engagement and Wellbeing at Royal Mail, commented, “At Royal Mail, our people are our greatest asset, and we are committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels valued, heard, and empowered to reach their full potential. Workday Peakon Employee Voice will play a crucial role in helping us achieve this goal, enabling us to build a stronger, more resilient organisation for the future.”
Peakon helps drive change
Workday Peakon is a sophisticated yet simple-to-use employee engagement solution. It puts employees at the centre with pulse surveys that capture employee sentiment throughout their career, from hire to offboarding.
Peakon uses a library of scientifically validated questions, coupled with business analytics, to surface the sentiment about what employees think. It then enabled people leaders with insights on dashboards to make real time decisions to change people initiatives that will make a difference. It is proven to assist employers with retention.
Can Royal Mail see the same benefits as EDF did?
EDF has already deployed Peakon. Luka Winterbourne, as Head of Employee Experience at EDF commented, “Those organizations that have failed to open the door and allow the colleague’s voice to come through have continued to see higher attrition rates than those taking positive action. Our business is acutely aware that to maintain employer-of-choice status, we had to maintain and develop our employee-voice framework.
“And Peakon was the best and obvious choice for us to do that.
“For EDF Renewables, Peakon is much more than just a platform for analysing employee feedback and data: it’s a cultural evolution platform.”
The platform includes a sophisticated benchmarking tool that adjusts for factors, including age and location. It allows managers to better understand engagement levels within their teams.
Royal Mail will expect similar benefits from Peakon, whether for leadership development, employee wellbeing, diversity, or employee health. Royal Mail will hope that Peakon can help it better understand its employees and then drive positive change. As it looks to redefine itself in a future that is, at times uncertain, with the decline in post.
Daniel Pell, Vice President and Country Manager of UKI, Workday, said, “The key to any successful organisation is a connected and engaged workforce. With data-driven insights driven by AI capabilities, Workday will provide Royal Mail with the tools and intelligence needed to take action, build trust, and shape the future of the organisation and its continued service to the UK.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Can Peakon help resolve the high employee churn that the organisation has had for years? It certainly cannot make it worse. As Gareth Roberts, writing in the Guardian, discovered, the Royal Mail is beset with issues. Peakon is not there to solve the issues. However, it will help highlight the key issues that matter to the leadership as they seek to bring success back to what is still seen as an institution in the UK.
Blackett first joined the company eighteen years ago, and there are many with much longer periods of service. There is something about the Post Office that still makes it as much a vocation than a job. Many postal workers love their jobs, and with Peakon, the leadership may have selected a tool that can help bring about positive change.
Workday Peakon should provide real insights into employee sentiment and could be the catalyst for a better future that the Royal Mail desperately needs. The leadership now has a tool in their hands that can drive that change, as long as the right decisions are made.
