Rico Back has left Royal Mail with a 1m £ pay-off. A 5.8m £ golden hello when he joined was the subject of much controversy!

[postareale]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 ... t-packing/

Royal Mail boss Rico Back on familiar ground after being sent packing
Back – who was given a 5.8m £ 'golden hello' when he took on the role – has been put on gardening leave

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BEN MARLOW
CHIEF CITY COMMENTATOR
15 May 2020 • 1:57pm


Rico Back has left Royal Mail – with a £1m pay-off. A £5.8m 'golden hello' when he joined was the subject of much controversy

Congratulations to Rico Back, who will surely be the first company executive to see out his gardening leave in the same place that he did his job as boss of Royal Mail: his garden.

Modernising the national postal service in the face of stiff union opposition was always going to be a hellishly tough job, but Back did his cause no favours by refusing to move to the UK, insisting instead on running the company from his Zurich home.

Back's tenacious predecessor Moya Greene was happy to up sticks and move thousands of miles from Canada after she was handed the thankless task of leading the struggling company through privatisation.

Former chairman Peter Long should have made Back’s relocation a key demand of an eye-watering £5.8m “golden hello” that the board foolishly lavished on the German, a package that was all the more outrageous because he was already an employee of Royal Mail through its GLS European parcel delivery service.

Still, Back’s unusual overseas living arrangements are not the main reason why he has been sent packing “with immediate effect” after less than two years at the helm, all while forgoing a potential bonus pot of up to £2.7m.

One only has to peek in the Royal Mail postbag to see that this is a company that despite all its talk of modernisation is still engaged in a fierce struggle to move with the times.

A steep decline in letter volumes is gathering speed as people turn their backs on old-fashioned stamped envelopes in increasing numbers.

Admittedly a pandemic that has forced people to remain in their homes won’t have exactly helped matters. In a five-week period between the end of March and May 3, 308 million fewer addressed letters were sent, a decrease of a third.

A 23pc fall in letter revenue was partially cushioned by 36 million more parcels, but it wasn’t nearly enough to offset a £22m fall in turnover in April alone.

But the demise of the stamped letter is nothing new. Letter volumes have been falling for a decade-and-a-half, having roughly halved since 2004.

Royal Mail, first under Greene, and then Back, has simply moved too slowly. Which is why chairman Keith Williams is stretching credibility with a fond farewell to Back thanking him for his “significant contribution to the evolution of our business”, when the company also freely acknowledges the need for an “accelerated pace of change”.

Whoever takes over will need to break the deadlock with a trade union that represents roughly 90pc of the Royal Mail workforce and has a habit of striking before major changes even get going.

But Back hardly enamoured himself to the Communication Workers Union. His attempts to enforce a £1.8bn “productivity improvement plan”, while commuting from his home on the shores of Lake Zurich, at the same time as collecting an annual pay package worth a hundred times the average postal worker’s salary, were comically tone deaf.

Still, perhaps Back would say he won the argument: thanks to coronavirus, everyone is working from home now.

[Janet Brum]

A good article here too:

https://news-sky-com.cdn.ampproject.org ... f-11988987" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[teesdale]

Back. I would say a failure of a man, but will he have not taken £10.5 million before his end. I think all his shares have been bought under £3.00. I cannot see a single achievement by the man within two years. Moya continued closing offices according to the Labour plan and gave us backless frames, before taking them away again. What worries me most is that he borrowed £500 million for his 5 year plan. Can you pay back bonds early.

[britwrit]

Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?

[Woody Guthrie]

Whoever takes over will need to break the deadlock with a trade union that represents roughly 90pc of the Royal Mail workforce and has a habit of striking before major changes even get going.

That's a strange definition of habit.
It's 11 years since we've had a national strike and that lasted all of 2 days.

[k979aaa]

Reminds me must go to the supermarket and get some cashback.