The poor self-esteem of our employees was weighing heavy on my mind, so I wrote a detailed report on my visits to the British Royal Mail and how we could adopt some of their practices to improve our work and image.
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”
Sir Isaac Newton, 1675
In late1986, I was selected for the post of Principal of the Post and Telegraph Training Centre (PTTC) at Saharanpur. Officers posted at training centres had recently been granted a 30% allowance as an incentive to draw good officers to the training function. The posting was therefore decided by a selection committee. My work in Kota, Asian Games, Non-Aligned Summit Meet, Postal Staff College, Philately and the Stamps and Seals Factory in Aligarh had been recognised and I was quite happy taking up the challenging assignment.
Established in 1951, PTTC Saharanpur was the most prestigious training institute of the Postal Department, which catered to the induction and in-service training needs of close to 80,000 employees in the Northern states of India. The institute was spread over 57 acres of land belonging to an abandoned training facility of the Civil Aviation Department. An old plane hangar served as the auditorium, and the many barracks served as classrooms, offices and residential quarters. The compound had lots of trees and beautiful gardens. The centre was fully residential and self contained with its own health centre, dairy, barber, washerman, cobbler, tailor, a small shopping complex, library and museum, etc. The atmosphere was as sylvan as you can imagine, but life was slow and the training function, our raison-de-etre, was not dynamic enough. We took feedback from field offices and redesigned our programs to make them more relevant to the needs in the field. The larger challenge, however, was addressing the high attrition rate among freshly recruited employees. I started talking to every batch of trainees in our hangar-auditorium and realised that the problem lay in low social recognition, heavy workload and outdated work procedures in the department. The poor state of our post offices and absence of any technical aids also contributed to their low self-esteem. My motivational talks appeared hollow to myself, as merely talking about the importance of the postal system was not cutting much ice.
After about a year I was nominated for a three months’ “Training for Trainers” program at the University of Manchester. This was an excellent course with participants from several Commonwealth countries. In addition to the course work, I also tied up with the University and the Commonwealth office in London to visit several establishments of the British Royal Mail. I visited their mail offices, parcel sections, automated sorting centres and their staff training college. At every place, I was received with great warmth and was able to see the functioning of the oldest and by far the best postal system in the world. The poor self-esteem of our employees was weighing heavy on my mind, so I wrote a detailed report on my visits to the British Royal Mail and how we could adopt some of their practices to improve our work and image.
Around the time I was in the UK, the government set up a Committee of Experts for Excellence in Postal Services, to be headed by Shri B.B. Lal, a former Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat. The Joint Secretary (Personnel) was Member Secretary of the Committee, which went on to co-opt many experts in fields related to the scope of its work. Notable among the permanent invitees was Dr N. Seshagiri, Founder Director General of National Informatics Centre (NIC).
I was informally associated with the Committee’s work and assigned the responsibility for keeping a record of all its deliberations. Officially, the Committee asked the PTTC to conduct a nation-wide survey of consumer expectations from the postal services and identify the issues which were affecting the motivation levels in our staff. We designed the questionnaire and administered it to over one lakh postal employees and customers in every state of India. The massive data collected was processed with professional help of the NIC, which reduced the data to an intelligible shape in the form of charts, graphs, diagrams, etc. I went to Delhi every couple of weeks to attend meetings, drove back to write the minutes and simultaneously worked on a draft for the Committee’s report. My staff worked far beyond office hours, till late in the night, taking dictations and preparing drafts before fairing the final version. These were days before computers were available to us. To make things even more difficult, some senior officers in the Board did not want me to help the Committee, which they thought was finding faults with their system. I was told not to come to Delhi but to their chagrin I decided to bear my own travel expenses and even availing personal leave to go to Delhi. I was threatened in no uncertain terms that I would be posted to some Godforsaken place after the Committee completed its work. I was, however, convinced that the work we were doing was of immense importance for the department and therefore carried on.
Sitting on the Committee meetings was an enlightening experience and our national surveys were giving me new insights on what we could do to address employee motivation and consumer satisfaction. My weekly interactions with the trainees in the hanger-auditorium took on a new and meaningful thrust. I was able to talk to the trainees with confidence that their department was soon going to see path-breaking changes which would give them a modern work culture. Did I imagine that they walked out straighter and taller from the auditorium? Did I sense a palpable change in their enthusiasm? There was hope and everyone looked forward to a time when they would have the latest technology to work with, which in turn would raise their social standing and self- esteem.
My most satisfying moment came when the Member Secretary suggested to the Chairman that they should start writing their report as the Committee’s term was drawing to an end. All my painstaking work and bad blood with the Board Members was more than adequately rewarded when the Chairman held my seven-part report, running into almost two thousand pages, close to his chest saying that “this was his report and he had nothing more to add”. What more could I ask for?
The report was finally edited and presented to the government, which directed the Department to implement it. Around this time, I decided to leave the Postal Department as it was clear that I would be assigned a “punishment posting” after the Committee wound up its work. I was not bothered since I had done what I had wanted to do—be part of a sincere effort to set the postal services on a path to modernisation and excellence in all aspects. Several years later some former colleagues told me that they still referred to the Committee’s Report as the Bible of the Indian Postal System.
The lessons here are obvious:
- Set your own goals and take ownership for the setbacks;
- Keep doing your best and use every opening to further educate yourself and master your work; and
- Remember American poet-philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words: “Life is a journey, not a destination.”
Arvind Saxena is an Indian civil servant and a former Chairman of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). A 1978-batch Civil Services officer, he served in the Indian Postal Service for ten years, before joining the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) of the Cabinet Secretariat, in 1988. After retirement from government, he joined the UPSC in May 2015.