Walkers on P/L luck of the draw with drivers

[hampshireman]

Give bag drops asap

Thought you said you had park and loop? Shouldn't be any bag drops now

Where do I put my 12 bags for my delivery then ??
The driver has my bags in our van and when I finish my 2 bags on my trolley I ring him for the next ones, as there are fields on one side of the road none of our loops start or finish at the same point .
More like park and straight line
example.
My driver has 100 calls on his 1st bag and then delivers all the large packets for his and my 1st bags whilst I have approx 200 calls.
As he always finishes15 mins before me most days he decides to thin out his other bags and delivers them and waits until he is pranked by me sitting in his van eating sandwiches before he brings my next bag
This then makes his (drivers) next bag even lighter and quicker to deliver and this carries on rather than dropping my next bag off to me as he knows I am nearly finished.
I must lose 5 minutes per bag waiting for my 8 drops so that is 40 minutes and whilst I am waiting he is delivering packets or delivering parts of his later loops.
When I do the driver part of my round on occasions I work as a team and easily finish on time helping the walker when I can but the driver I have at the moment is just taking the p*ss . The DOM knows whats going on but as the driver is the Health and Safety rep so lets him get away with it.

I tought I understood P&L. Maybe i don't understand RM

To me P&L is about two in a van. You get to a point and you both get out and LOOP back to the van.

Why is there a designated driver? Unless of course one person cannot drive

Surely you share the duty?

[feduppostie]

ours are the same Fishtank

it means we have more loops but they are manageable and we can take all our own parcels

and guess what doing it this way it works!!

yes folks you heard me right p&l works in my office

Are your rounds in a densly populated area or semi rural?

our rounds are both I live in a very large town so they can be either although the really rural bits still get done by a rural driver

[feduppostie]

Loops take 35 mins to 1hr30.

loops should be roughly 40 mins

anything above that and it wont work as you have found out as you can't fit everything in the bag

insist on it being re written into proper loops

[goldy]

Iam coming to the conclusion that p & l doesnt actually work its just a big expensive mess.

Park&Loop does work,it's just more inefficient than a single delivery.
Anybody who has been in the job for any length of time could have told RM that and some of us did about 4 years ago when the idea first appeared...they didn't listen.
If you couple that with the increase in packet traffic and decrease in letter traffic it stands to reason that your cost per item will rise.
What went wrong with park&loop was that managers have been tasked with cutting hours from delivery offices at the same time as introducing the new delivery methods,it was a crazy idea that these revisions would cut costs,any saving from the introduction of walk sequenced mail was negated by the introduction of D2D into workload and any savings from removing conveyance duties had to be re-invested into the delivery side.
The position of senior Royal Mail management should have been to introduce these changes with at best a zero overall cost to office budget.
Instead they took bad advice from somebody and got greedy resulting in the mayhem of failing revisions and bullying and harassment of our members as managers panicked.
The union hasn't exactly covered itself in glory either through poor training of reps,poor support from branch and an unwillingness to even accept there was a problem for the first 18 months.

The whole point of it was to be more efficient ( less staff) but if a walker is waiting up to half an hour for the driver its not working is it ,our office is in freefall id give anything to go back to bikes

[Hitcher]

I tought I understood P&L. Maybe i don't understand RM

To me P&L is about two in a van. You get to a point and you both get out and LOOP back to the van.

Why is there a designated driver? Unless of course one person cannot drive

Surely you share the duty?

The driving duty will have time built-in for van checks, etc and smaller loops than the passenger duty.

[fishtank]

The whole point of it was to be more efficient ( less staff) but if a walker is waiting up to half an hour for the driver its not working is it ,our office is in freefall id give anything to go back to bikes

The whole point of it according to the spin put on it at the time was to give us a delivery system able to cope with the changes in mail profile away from a declining letters market and onto a more packet driven business.
Whether you believe that or not is a different matter but why would you care whether you are waiting half an hour on the driver?
You are still being paid and (i hope) no-one is making you work outside your contracted hours.

[eastie]

Give bag drops asap

Thought you said you had park and loop? Shouldn't be any bag drops now

Where do I put my 12 bags for my delivery then ??
The driver has my bags in our van and when I finish my 2 bags on my trolley I ring him for the next ones, as there are fields on one side of the road none of our loops start or finish at the same point .
More like park and straight line
example.
My driver has 100 calls on his 1st bag and then delivers all the large packets for his and my 1st bags whilst I have approx 200 calls.
As he always finishes15 mins before me most days he decides to thin out his other bags and delivers them and waits until he is pranked by me sitting in his van eating sandwiches before he brings my next bag
This then makes his (drivers) next bag even lighter and quicker to deliver and this carries on rather than dropping my next bag off to me as he knows I am nearly finished.
I must lose 5 minutes per bag waiting for my 8 drops so that is 40 minutes and whilst I am waiting he is delivering packets or delivering parts of his later loops.
When I do the driver part of my round on occasions I work as a team and easily finish on time helping the walker when I can but the driver I have at the moment is just taking the p*ss . The DOM knows whats going on but as the driver is the Health and Safety rep so lets him get away with it.

To me P&L is about two in a van. You get to a point and you both get out and LOOP back to the van.

Cant do that on my round, how can you loop back to the van with only houses on one side of the road.
plus none of the driver and walker loops start in the same place.
No road layouts are the same, their lies the problem

[chrisj]

Surely, there must be some of your roads with properties or both sides... And where there are no properties on one side, the loops should be made smaller to minimise the dead walk for either the walker and/or driver.

Smaller loops, more or less equal numbers of loops and regular swap overs of the loops or adjustments based on volume of work. Even where the revision and loops have been cocked up, the postpersons can re-adjust and realign the loops and workload.

In my office, some people mainly drives because they are walk holders of one of the rounds and are often paired with reserves (no re-sign yet), some drive because they are regular driver/collection posties, some drive cos they like to be in charge and some drive cos they can take the vans home and/or swap their cars for vans in the multistory car park.

The example above seems to be like the old style type of working where some tends to get away with not doing enough work or fair share of work.

There should be no designated walkers or drivers. It should be democratic where both of them can drive and the loops done should also be interchangeable.

[POSTMAN]

If you have a looooong one sided road where you can't loop the loop,s**t happens and it should be in the planning.

[bigcol]

.. how can you loop back to the van with only houses on one side of the road.

Simple. You move the van. Works on my walk.

[eastie]

If you have a looooong one sided road where you can't loop the loop,s**t happens and it should be in the planning.

PLANNING!! your being silly now

[goldy]

The whole point of it was to be more efficient ( less staff) but if a walker is waiting up to half an hour for the driver its not working is it ,our office is in freefall id give anything to go back to bikes

The whole point of it according to the spin put on it at the time was to give us a delivery system able to cope with the changes in mail profile away from a declining letters market and onto a more packet driven business.
Whether you believe that or not is a different matter but why would you care whether you are waiting half an hour on the driver?
You are still being paid and (i hope) no-one is making you work outside your contracted hours.

It doesnt matter if i get paid or not i should get paid i was making the point that the new system is meant to be more efficient people hanging about on street corners is not efficient its called down time a business should be trying to reduce this but it as increased as far as i can see, the old system required a seperate driver for bulk and drop bags but every minute was utilised on the very odd occasion you were waiting for your bags but this was not a big deal now sometimes an hour a day is wasted on hanging around or waiting for driver to do packets oh and i have never been fond of sitting on the side of a pavement in rain for half an hour or so.