Ž“A little leak will sink a great ship” is, indisputably, a platitude. Yet, it holds water in all situations where things are not well-planned, the consequences are not timely anticipated, and decisions are not based on a proactive approach. Developed nations do not owe their stellar progress to outstanding scientific inventions and discoveries but to their consistently progressive thinking, which helps them anticipate the consequences of their decisions.

Execution of projects becomes very smooth if the planning phase is based on a series of research activities, discussions, exhaustive debates, respect for differences of opinion, benchmarking and engagement with all the key stakeholders before arriving at conclusions. The human resource concept of change management also emphasises helping the workforce to acclimate to changes taking place in the organisation.

Currently, the long-awaited process of making new recruitments in the Pakistan Post is under way. A huge workforce, completely new to the postal system and postal culture, will be joining an organisation that offers a variety of products and services, both courier and non-courier, across the breadth and length of the country. The operational staff-starved organisation will be replenished with entirely raw human resources.

The engagement of thousands of new employees will add to the financial deficit of the organisation. However, this is also an opportunity to make a new beginning and lay practical plans for training, designing job descriptions, onboarding, orientation and performance assessment metrics, acclimatising with postal values and culture to get the best output from them.

The most recent changes in the postal cash management system, departure of financial services like Savings Bank and Military Pension Payments, and global e-commerce business strategies have accentuated the need for revisiting and revamping the traditional training modules, old and open-ended job descriptions in field units, disharmony between individual’s goal and Pakistan Post’s business model and accountability paradigm.

The HR section of the Pakistan Post Directorate General’s office can constitute three core teams. The first team can work under the direct patronage of the executive director to redesign and restructure the training modules of Postal Training Centres at Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. While preparing the modules, the team can consult international best practices in training the developed postal administrations. The members of the Asian Postal Pacific Union, Thailand, can serve as a convenient destination for this purpose. Inculcating postal values of customer care, work ethics, discipline, ownership, IT skills and operational knowledge based on postal manuals should be the prime focus of the training.

A team should be assigned the task of revisiting and re-aligning the job descriptions (distribution of work) related to the recruits. A well-defined and quantifiable job description helps the employees understand what the organisation expects from them. Consequently, managers can easily and fairly evaluate the performance of the workforce.

Nevertheless, excessive reliance on syllabi of postal manuals can be replaced with dependence on updated technology-driven skills needed to make postal service competitive and efficient in mail delivery.

The second team should be assigned the task of revisiting and re-aligning the job descriptions (distribution of work) related to the recruits. A well-defined and quantifiable job description helps the employees understand what the organisation expects from them. It also helps the managers evaluate their performance fairly.

The team constituted for this purpose may be headed by a BPS-20 officer who has had wide experience in postal operations. This team may conduct interviews with employees already working in the same cadre for which the job description is to be designed, feedback from unit officers, and valuable input from middle-tier postal officers in the field to oversee field operations.

The third team should develop a transparent and comprehensive mechanism to help evaluate the performance of the employees as per the defined and assigned job description. Reliance on the outdated annual confidential reports (ACRs), often written with a delay does not serve the purpose. There should be a mechanism to get daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly and quarterly performance reports. These reports should form the basis of annual performance evaluation report. This can render the ACRs realistic and result-oriented. Where possible, the ACR performa should be revised to make it more meaningful, quantifiable and reflective of actual performance in accordance with the job description. The various components of the performance evaluation report need to be designed on the parameters of discipline: i.e., punctuality, regularity, behaviour with customers and colleagues, tasks assigned, 100 percent completed, partially completed and not completed.

Pakistan Post needs strategic planning to equip newly recruited human resource with essential skills and techniques. The in-depth strategic planning process based on research to acquire necessary data about recruits, SWOT analysis of available resources at training centres and operational offices, developing clear goals and well-structured objectives, setting timelines for execution of strategic plans can serve as a roadmap for optimising the productivity of the workforce. Actionable goals and strategies can put Pakistan Post on a safe and smooth path of progress and prosperity.

The writer is a civil servant