U. S. Postal Service

The U.S. Postal Service is one of the largest organizations in the world. In fiscal 2005, it had nearly 705,000 career employees and handled about 211 million pieces of mail through an extremely complicated system of carefully coordinated activities (United States Postal Service Annual report, 2005).

In addition to the national headquarters in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Postal Service consisted of regional and field division offices that together supervised 37,683 post offices, branches, stations, and community post offices throughout the United States. It was the second-largest civilian employer in the United States during the early 2000s, behind Wal-Mart Stores, Inc (USPS Annual report, 2005). With all these employees and offices, the Human resource department has a huge responsibility.

The United States Postal Services human resource Department is responsible for many phases of employment, and health insurance, life insurance and retirement.

Another word for human resource is Personnel. This department (like human resources) performs the same duties, technical staff work. Knowledge of postal policies, procedures, and regulations related to processing personnel actions (hiring, firing, administrative leave).Employees rely on the human resource department to have information related to the employees benefit programs on health insurance, life insurance, and retirement. Forms are needed for each subject and in some cases, knowledge on how to fill out the forms are needed (vacancy announcement, 2008).

The Personnel staff of the human resource department must be able coordinate and oversee employment and selection processes, including the vacancy announcement program and the scheduling, conducting, and processing of entrance and in-service examinations.

The personnel in the human resource department must have knowledge of federal and postal regulations and policies related to the processing and administration of injury and unemployment compensation claims. Employees needing these forms must report to the human resource department and request these forms.

Personnel staff in the Human Resource Department must be able to coordinate the implementation of training programs and provide guidance on training and instructional processes for new in-coming employees and for the re-training of career employees.

The HR Department has the task of communicating in writing and orally, to conduct training, makes referrals, and provide on personnel program policies and procedures. In addition, personnel prepare reports, claims documents, and training materials.

In the U S Postal Service, the HR Department blends many aspects of management and management take over some responsibilities of the HR Department. Some of the tasks that management inherits from the HR department are recruiting and selections, training and development, compensation, performance evaluation and labor relations.

These tasks are inherited because of the workload in the HR department. Upper management (postmaster, office manager) is to try to solve any disputes before they reach the HR department. This in turn gives the HR department time and opportunity to work on technological aspect of the HR Department.

Technology

All Business (2008) states that if the U.S. Postal Service improves its data, this would strengthen maintenance and alignment to access to retail service. The Postal Service needs to capture and maintain accurate facility data.

The U.S. Postal Service has announced that they are “scrapping it 30-year-old human resource equipment and replacing it with a fully integrated system that agency official say will streamline HR processes and save millions of dollars each year” (All Business, 2008).

Steve Monteith, executive director for human capital enterprise at USPS in Washington D.C. said, “we were starting to get concerned about our ability to manage obsolete technology” (Zeidner, 2007).

The new system is called PostalPeople. It will be an e employee self-service database and is expected to save the Postal Service $60 million annually. These savings are made possible thought staff reductions, these reductions are from jobs such as rekeying information employees submitted when signing on for benefits, changing benefit options and other transactions (Zeidner, 2007).

The HR data that is in 80 locations is to be centralizing into one location with this new system.

Zeidner reported; the system also would automate the labor-intensive process of hiring workers and processing their departures. (In 2006, 118,000 workers were hired or changed jobs within the agency; a similar number left USPS.) Although some of its external hires' applications are done electronically, all