Challenges Faced By U.S Postal Service To Maintain Public Satisfaction And Improve Efficiency

Background and Problem Statement

The U.S. Postal Service is abbreviated as USPS is also known as Post Office for U.S. mails or Postal Service. This is an independent agency for the government of United States who are responsible for providing the postal service in United States. The USPS provides service in all its insular states as well as in all the associate states (Converse, 2017). This is one of the government agencies that is explicitly authorized by constitution of United States. The postal service of U.S. employs near about 617,000 workers which makes itself as the third largest civilian employer followed by Wal-Mart and federal Government in United States.

The postal service of U.S. implemented five year plan in October 2016 that was required by the law which started in the year 1993. The five year plan outlines some goals of the Postal Service for the coming five years. The plans are:

• Delivering a top-class customer experience.
• Engage employees, empower as well as equip employees.
• Implements faster delivery.
• Invests in the future platforms.

With the increasing use of internet technology, the Postal Service in U.S. is coming to end. Although the postal service is improving its services in the financial position as well as in delivery performance, there are many downfalls in the Postal Service that are to be improved. In the upcoming years, the service of Postal service are expected to decline more because of the increasing growth of electronic commerce, electronic communications, and Internet. These technologies has the potential to affect the service of Postal Service (Drucker, 2014). This is the main problem that is faced by the United States Postal Services. The Postal Service finds difficulty to maintain its position for delivery environment and dynamic communication. The Postal Service is declining among the citizens of United States. The problem remains in increasing involvement of Internet, electronic communications and electronic commerce.

The main aim of this research study is to find the main reasons for the challenges that are faced by U.S postal service to balance between public satisfaction and improving efficiency. As the United States Postal Service is facing challenges and the main reason for these challenges are analyzed in this research paper so that they can balance in between the public satisfaction and in improving the efficiency of their service.

The objectives of this research paper are stated below:

• To study the challenges that are faced by the Postal Service in United States.
• To understand the reasons behind the challenges that are faced in the Postal Services.
• To find out about how to balance the services of Postal Service in between public satisfaction and improving efficiency.
• To realize the challenges faced to balance service in between public satisfaction and improving efficiency.

The research questions that will addressed in this research paper are stated below:

• What are the challenges that are faced by the Postal Service in United States?
• What are the reasons behind the challenges that are faced in the Postal Services?
• How to balance the services of Postal Service in between public satisfaction and improving efficiency?
• How to realize the challenges faced to balance service in between public satisfaction and improving efficiency?

According to Converse (2017), Postal Service of the United States is mainly declining because of the long lasting challenges in the relation with the labor management which has resulted from employees’ adversarial attitudes, management, unions and management styles. The Postal Service provides inadequate as well as inappropriate performance in the management system. The relation between the employee satisfaction and the efficient service provide by the Postal Service has expanded because of the employee grievance that are still unresolved, impaired initiatives for improving efficiency of the postal operations including implementation disagreements for making the service of Postal and automated one (Homer et al., 2015). The automation postal is done in between Service and labor union which represents city letter carriers, depending on third-party for settling the contract negotiations.

Aim and Objective

The success of Postal Service will mainly depend on the ability of the controlling the operating cost, strengthen the internal controls as well as ensure the integrity service of the Postal Service. For mitigating the differences in between the user demand and the service efficiency mainly needs cost management as well as needs strong as well as effective operating controls for avoiding the unwanted costs (Kentnor, 2015). For improving the indicators of the postal performance, the goals of the Postal Service is to be set to track the progress as well as meet the requirements of Government Performance and Results Act adopted in the year 1993 (Tesla, 2018). The Postal Service have improved their delivery systems which includes the recording time of the delivery system overnight. This strategy has improved the condition of mailing system in United States. However, overnight mailing delivery is very much costly to avail which proves as disadvantage in the Postal Service of U.S.

Outline of Research: Research study that is carried out is based on the literature review that is being carried out in the previous section. The research philosophy that will be carried out for conducting research is realism research philosophy (Israni 2t al., 2014). The approach of research that will be conducted is deductive approach of research. Descriptive research design will be done for analyzing the methodology in this research paper. Secondary data source is used collecting the data with qualitative data collection method and quantitative data collection method.

Research Philosophy: There are four types of research philosophy namely Interpretivism, Realism, Positivism, and Pragmatism. The philosophy that will be used in this research study is realism research philosophy. In this philosophy the methods that is chosen contains the subject of the topic and also contains quantitative and qualitative research.

Approach of Research: There are three types of research approach namely Deductive Approach, Inductive Approach, and Abductive Research Approach. For carrying out the research study, the research approach that will be used is deductive research approach (Shapiro, 2015). In deductive approach, mainly the assumptions validity is checked in states is the premise of true then the conclusion is also to be true.

Research Design: There are many types of research design that can be used for analyzing the data in a research. Three mostly used research designs are exploratory research design, experimental research design, and descriptive research design. The type of research design that will be used by the researcher in this research study is descriptive research design (Gurjão et al., 2018). In descriptive research design, research is conducted about a particular research problem and answers the questions about who, when, what, how and where related to the research problem. This research design collects details about the current stage of the phenomena.

Research Questions

Data Sources:  There are two data sources that are used for data collection. They are primary data source and secondary data sources. For conducting the research study about the U.S. postal service, secondary data sources are used for analyzing the data. The secondary data collection includes collecting all the data that are already being researched by different researchers. The secondary data sources comes from different organizations or research institutions.

Data Collection Method: Data Collection is basically an approach which data about the research problem is collected satisfying the objective of the research paper. There are two types of data collection method (Kujacic et al., 2015). Qualitative data collection method and quantitative data collection method. Data collection method that will be used in this research paper is a mixed approach of data collection. Both qualitative and quantitative data will be used for carrying out this research paper. Secondary quantitative as well as qualitative data collection methods are used for data collection.

Table 1: Research project Timeline

(Source: Created by author)

Conclusion

There is vision of UPSC (United States Postal Service). The vision states that for enhancing the value of using mail with the use of information and insight from delivering mail has increase with the customer value as well as drive all the operational efficiency. For achieving this vision taken by UPSC, the agent had realized that it needed to have a robust as well as resilient practices and processes of businesses which gave introduction to mailing system.

The agency of UPSC, in recent days has struggled for fulfilling the statutory obligation for prefunding the liabilities of health benefits in the future postal services. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act has established a prefunding schedule. The USPS made $20.9 billion contributions from FY2007 but were defaulted on remaining payments of $28.1 billion. In the recent financial statement of USPC, the agency requested reforms which would integrate the healthcare options of the postal employee by providing Medicare, which would preferably reduce the cost an makes the liability expense manageable to a better extent.

From this research proposal, it can be concluded that there are many reasons for challenges that are faced by the Postal Service in United States. The Postal Service are facing difficulties to balance in between the expectation of the customers and improving the efficiency of the service provided by them. This research proposal are analyzed by studying many online available articles, books, journals from where the data related to the problem statement is explained clearly.

References

Christine Michelle, Kathryn Francis and Garret Hatch (2016).Reforming the U.S. Postal service: Background and issues for Congress. Retrieved from: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44603.pdf

Converse, J. M. (2017). Survey research in the United States: Roots and emergence 1890-1960. Routledge.

Drucker, P. (2014). Innovation and entrepreneurship. Routledge.

Gurjão, L. M., Barros, G. M., Lopes, D. P., Machado, D. A., & Lotufo, T. M. (2018). Illegal trade of aquarium species through the Brazilian postal service in Ceará State. Marine and Freshwater Research, 69(1), 178-185.

Homer, C., Dewitz, J., Yang, L., Jin, S., Danielson, P., Xian, G., … & Megown, K. (2015). Completion of the 2011 National Land Cover Database for the conterminous United States–representing a decade of land cover change information. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, 81(5), 345-354.

Israni, A. K., Salkowski, N., Gustafson, S., Snyder, J. J., Friedewald, J. J., Formica, R. N., … & Samana, C. J. (2014). New national allocation policy for deceased donor kidneys in the United States and possible effect on patient outcomes. Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, 25(8), 1842-1848.

Kentnor, H. E. (2015). Distance education and the evolution of online learning in the United States. Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, 17(1), 21-34.

Kosar, K. (2012). The U.S. Postal Service’s Financial Condition: Overview and Issues for Congress. Congress Research Service. Retrieved from: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41024.pdf.

Kujacic, M., Blagojevic, M., Sarac, D., & Vesovic, V. (2015). The modified activity-based costing method in universal postal service area: Case study of the montenegro post. Inzinerine Ekonomika-Engineering Economics, 26(2), 142-151.

Schuyler Michael (2015). Troubles at the Postal Service. Tax Foundation. Retrieved from: https://taxfoundation.org/troubles-postal-service/

Shapiro, R. J. (2015). The Basis and Extent of the Monopoly Rights and Subsidies Claimed by the United States Postal Service.

Tesla, N. (2018). The transmission of electrical energy without wires as a means for furthering peace. Charles River Editors via PublishDrive.

United States Government Accountability Office (2014). U.S. POSTALSERVICE. Status of Workforce Reductions and Related Planning Efforts. Retrieved from: https://www.gao.gov/assets/670/666884.pdf

United States Government Accountability Office (2014). U.S. POSTALSERVICE.Continuing financial challenges and the need of postal reform. Retrieved from: https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Rectanus-GAO-Statement-5-11-Postal-Reform.pdf

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