The tenacious Canadian who reshaped Royal Mail

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The tenacious Canadian who reshaped Royal Mail

Moya Greene shifted focus to compete with Amazon, drove through privatisation and brought along unions

Gill Plimmer APRIL 20, 2018

When Britain’s postal service was searching for a leader to confront the disruptive challenge of Amazon in 2010, it turned to an unlikely quarter to plot its fight for survival. Overturning five centuries of male tradition, it chose not only a woman but a foreigner: the Canadian executive Moya Greene.

Eight years later, as she prepares to step down from Royal Mail, Ms Greene has become one of the country’s most respected chief executives after driving through the politically fraught privatisation of a cherished national institution against the backdrop of accelerating technological change and hostility from unions.

The job of reshaping Royal Mail in an era when letters are declining and parcels are being delivered by gig economy workers on bikes is far from over. But the 63-year-old Ms Greene has gone some way to putting a business that, she said, was a “poster child for strikes” and “had to decide at each board meeting whether it could continue trading” on a more stable footing.

The first woman to run the Royal Mail since Henry VIII established a “master of the posts” in 1512 she has reshaped the business into one focused on parcels, taking advantage of the boom in internet shopping.

Along the way, she has acquired UK citizenship in the wake of the Scottish referendum and a British surgeon as husband.

Tenacious and focused, Ms Greene has been relentless, for example, in persuading the government and the regulator to relax constraints on Royal Mail’s freedom to raise prices and alter products.

She introduced Sunday opening hours in some areas and further automated letter and parcel sorting and delivery systems for easier tracking. She has also, so far, fought off an attempt by rival Whistl to break Royal Mail’s monopoly on the “final mile” of delivering letters to households, though a final ruling on whether it has abused its dominant position is still to come from the regulator Ofcom.

The straight-talking Ms Greene’s single biggest achievement may, however, have been her ability to bring Royal Mail’s unions on board.

Michael Fallon, the trade minister for business and enterprise at the time of the Royal Mail privatisation, said she was “formidable from the start”. “She understood very clearly what needed to be done. She dealt brilliantly with the very powerful Communication Workers Union. They trusted her because she was straight. She told them very clearly what was affordable and what was not.”

A threatened strike that could have disrupted the flotation in 2013 was averted with the agreement of a three-year pay deal worth 9.06 per cent, which included a promise to keep the final salary pension scheme open until 2018. Earlier this year she again averted strike action by reaching agreement with the CWU.

Despite the hit to profits caused by Amazon’s decision to start its own 24-hour delivery service, Ms Greene’s job in negotiating with her 159,000 strong workforce may have been inadvertently helped by the decision by rivals to employ people on piecemeal “zero-hour” contracts that gave no guarantee of work.

A former chief executive of Canada Post, where she had also been drawn into battle with unions, she argued it was “essential to find a way of doing things together because conflict slows us down”. About 12 per cent of shares are owned by employees.

“There’s a lot of talk about the positives around the so-called flexibility of gig economy employees but I think that’s in favour of the employers,” she said. “We are going to compete even against people who pay employees a lot less than we do.”

Nonetheless, thousands of jobs have been shed during her tenure, focusing attention on her own pay and pension allowance.

A parent who raised her daughter single-handedly, Ms Greene studied law and classics before she joined the Canadian Civil Service. She later became deputy minister of transport, where she oversaw the privatisation of CN Rail and deregulation of the country’s airlines. In 2005, she was named chief of Canada Post.

Ms Greene said she is leaving Royal Mail because “eight years is a long time and I’m well past the shelf life of the average FTSE CEO”.

But she is not disappearing from corporate Britain, having taken board positions at the Tate art gallery and easyJet. Ms Greene said she will use the time to talk to her adult daughter who lives in Toronto whenever she wants “rather than according to the schedule arranged by her secretary”. She will also read newspapers and poetry including Seamus Heaney because “a poem stays with you” and yell at Alexa to play her Adele.

CV Moya Greene
BORN
St John’s, Newfoundland, 1954

EDUCATION
Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1974

Osgoode Hall Law School, 1978

TOP CAREER APPOINTMENTS
1991
Assistant deputy minister, Transport Canada, where she oversaw privatisation of CN Rail

2003
Senior vice-president, Bombardier

2005
Chief executive, Canada Post

2010
Chief executive, Royal Mail. The first non-Brit and first woman to hold the post

EXTERNAL APPOINTMENTS
Non-executive director of easyJet

Trustee of the Tate

Additional reporting by Jonathan Eley

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