LibanPost: Employee well-being is key to excellent customer experience

The Universal Postal Union has published on its website a LibanPost statement about the company’s efforts to achieve the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth).

Below is the statement’s full text as published by UPU:

“LibanPost: Employee well-being is key to excellent customer experience

At the time when Posts around the world had to adapt to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, LibanPost, in addition to this, was faced with an unprecedented economic and financial collapse, exacerbated by the devastating effects of the Beirut Port blast – one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in the world history.

In 2022, the effects of these crises persist. The currency plummet, financial meltdown and political deadlock are all having far-reaching negative impacts on people’s lives and well-being.

At LibanPost, over these past years, employees’ well-being and a conducive work environment have been the focus of the management’s policies. With limited means, the Post’s leadership nevertheless made all possible efforts to ameliorate conditions for its staff and address, as much as possible, their increasing financial needs triggered by inflating living expenses and transport costs.

Despite all those economic, financial and social challenges, LibanPost initiated small gestures in order to create a healthy workplace for its employees and help them confront these difficulties.

Some of the uncostly measures to improve the staff’s morale and well-being were related to the working schedule and included: cancelling presence on weekends, implementing the work-from-home policy, creating opportunities for employees to access the nearest Post branch to reduce fuel cost, and introducing for the first time a special schedule for the three summer months to uplift employees’ spirit and increase productivity. On occasions like Mother’s and Father’s days, one day off was granted to postal employees to greet their mothers and fathers and spend time with their families.

Believing that employees' well-being is incredibly important, in the longer term, LibanPost adopted this focus as a core element of its strategy meant to strengthen the organizational culture, improve morale, boost motivation and reduce absenteeism.

Having chosen to focus on simple acts that would lead to substantial changes without affecting the budget, the Post implemented several initiatives that played a key role in increasing loyalty and sense of belonging among its employees.

Thus, regular site visits were organized by the executive management to meet people, listen to their concerns, check their work conditions, spread positive vibes, and ease their anxiety. A new organizational set up was created to empower employees with high potential through increasing their involvement, and pushing them to be more creative and innovate for business improvement.

These efforts were further strengthened through a whole complex of related measures, like conducting one-to-one meetings with heads of departments to identify potential promotion cases, reviewing grading structure, re-designing organizational structure to create more opportunities for career growth, improving incentive schemes and allowances, and building a new salary scheme to meet market range and be able to retain key people.

As part of its corporate social responsibility agenda, LibanPost partnered with the Empowering Young Women Association to introduce new canteen services, thereby supporting young Lebanese women while providing healthy homemade Lebanese and Mediterranean menus to the postal staff at reasonable prices.

With this people-centred approach resulting in a higher customer satisfaction, LibanPost believes that a good human experience starts with a happy employee.”