Insights on Excellence | "Insights on Excellence" Archive

How the post office improved efficiency

by Stephen Hawley Martin
for Virginia Business
October 4, 2007

My son's Amateur Athletic Union baseball team traveled to Cooperstown one summer to play in a national tournament, and the whole Martin family went along. We found a place in the country some miles from the ballpark where the tournament was being held.

One day I needed to mail a book and went to the post office in the tiny upstate New York town closest to where we had rented a cabin. It looked like something Norman Rockwell would have painted.

I went to the first window where I saw an older gentleman with glasses perched on his nose wearing a green visor. I explained I needed to mail a package, and he said I'd have to go to the window around the corner where they took the parcels. So I stepped back and walked around the corner to the next window. When I arrived, I realized that the man standing behind the counter at that window was the same guy, but he was now wearing a different hat. As if he'd never seen me before, he asked, "May I help you?"

Jolted a bit, I replied, "Um, yes, sure, I just want to mail this package." The older man weighed it and calculated the postage. When the transaction was complete, I said to him, "I'm sure glad you waited on me. That other guy around the corner is a real jerk."

The point of this story is to know how much labor your business can support and to staff accordingly. This post office had obviously figured they had two roles to fill -- regular mail and package delivery. They needed to be able to service both areas at all times.

There wasn't enough customer traffic, however, to justify two workers. So, they improvised, albeit in a somewhat comical way and put their workers where the revenue was needed, reacting to the demand for labor in real time. If the employee had told me the post office didn't do parcel packages until 3 p.m., I might have walked out the door, driven to Cooperstown, and gone to UPS. That is exactly what happens when labor cannot meet customer demand. Business walks out the door, and in this case the parcel post window space would not generate any revenue.

If the person scheduled to work that day could only process mail, and not packages, that would have been a problem. But that post office employee was the perfect person to have in that office because he could wear two hats.

In large organizations that pool resources, knowing where people are needed, the number that will be needed, and what particular skills they must have is critical. The companies that provide scheduling software have finally caught on, meaning it's no longer necessary to stick a figure in the air when deciding on a work schedule. Historical data can be plugged in to a computer program along with the skills and qualifications of the various members of your work force to deliver a schedule that should optimize labor usage on a given day in a particular location.

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Stephen Hawley Martin is a former principal of The Martin Agency in Richmond and the author of more than half a dozen books including his newest, Lean Enterprise Leader: How to Get Things Done Without Doing It All Yourself. He is editor and publisher of The Oaklea Press, a book publishing business dedicated primarily to helping business executives increase productivity.