Keeping workers at their posts – company profile, Royal Mail

For the letters division of Britain's Royal Mail, protecting staff is a daily business continuity issue.

It is not the everyday danger for delivery workers of aggressive dogs, mailbag snatchers and abusive householders that most threatens the functioning of the business, though these are taken very seriously by the company's security officers.

Rather, it is what Alan Staniforth, head of risk management and business continuity manager in the division, calls "white powder" incidents.

Almost every day, somewhere in one or more sorting offices in Britain, a letter or packet breaks open, spilling its contents on to the sorting tables or machines. When the contents are an unidentified powder, liquid or other matter not easily recognised, a 20 metre exclusion zone is instantly declared and the emergency services called to identify whether the contents pose a health risk and, if necessary, clear it up. Work can stop for several hours.

Since the October 2001 dispatch of anthrax-contaminated letters in the US, resulting in the deaths of two staff at the sorting office serving Congress, white powder incidents have become a grave continuity issue for postal services everywhere.

"You can quickly develop something approaching mass hysteria in the sorting office," says Mr Staniforth, not without sympathy. "It is a major challenge." A serious white powder incident stopped all activity for six hours at a sorting office in Daventry this year, with knock-on effects along the mail distribution chain.

Fire and mechanical breakdown are also very real menaces for continuity of the company's delivery services. A fire at a main sorting office in Northampton in September 2003 obliged the company to implement emergency plans to redirect sorting operations and staff to other sorting offices for weeks.

"For us business continuity planning is no paper exercise," says Mr Staniforth. "It is forward planning for real events."

In spite of increasing mechanisation mail delivery is a labour intensive business employing 180,000 people and continuity contingency plans have to be drawn up in consultation with staff and their representatives.

"Staff safety is always the first priority when an incident occurs," says Mr Staniforth. "Staff have to know what to do. They have to relocate to other offices. All of this has to be underpinned by prior discussion and agreements."

The staff themselves, and their unions, the Union of Communication Workers and Amicus/CMA, take business continuity very seriously, Mr Staniforth says.

Regular consultation is essential to achieve agreements covering compensation when staff are obliged to relocate and how far they can reasonably be asked to travel. "You need staff to be prepared to be pretty flexible," he says. "You need to talk to staff all the time."

The letters division is seeking to extend continuity planning to all local offices. "We are trying to adopt a partnership approach with staff and unions," says Mr Staniforth. "By and large, our staff share our concerns. They appreciate that if we are to keep our customers, we need to maintain our service, whatever happens."

For while continuity planning at the letters division predates the loss of its historic monopoly the business and its staff are only too well aware they face tough competition from rival business mail services, priority mail services and express parcels services. Continuity is key to reliability, which is key to customer retention.

But there is one issue of business continuity and staff relations in such a labour intensive operation that is particularly thorny: that of maintaining services when staff go on strike.

The Royal Mail record of staff relations is tarnished by national and local stoppages. Yet Mr Staniforth and his team have to plan to continue sorting and delivery when staff walk out. This involves drafting in managers to plug the gaps with the aid of personnel records that show which managers have skills and experience that equip them for which emergency roles. The unions, of course, object vigorously.

Yet so well entrenched is most continuity planning that incidents are dealt with without recourse to continuity managers.

"Our chief role in any incident is to turn up afterwards and analyse how it was handled," says Mr Staniforth. "It is important to learn the lessons of experience."