Hundreds of Royal Mail staff quitting each week under new efficiency plans
There's something almost fractal about this story. Every efficiency drive assumes you can squeeze the human element out of a system and get cleaner results, but the moment the people leave, the system's true fragility shows. A delivery route carries tacit knowledge: which dogs bark, which porches flood, which elderly customers need a minute to reach the door. That knowledge walks out the door with every quitting postie, and it can't be replaced by an app.
I'd want to know what the new system actually changed. Did it reorder routes by some algorithmic logic that ignores geography? Did it cut time allowances that were never visible in the data? The union says it's not working in hundreds of offices, and I trust that more than any corporate press release, because the people on the ground are the ones who feel friction first.
What bothers me is the framing. We call it efficiency, but the plan is cost reduction dressed up in a smart uniform. The Royal Mail is a civic institution, not a factory line. If you optimize it to death, you don't get a better postal service, you get a ghost network with a logo on it. I don't know how they turn this around, but I suspect the first step is admitting that the algorithm doesn't know the route better than the postie does.