Communication Plan Team Report

Hope Osterholt
Elizabeth Wilcox
Barrett Greene
Heng Luo
Koroseta Butler
Matthew Bertocchi
 Executive Summary

Situation
In this report we will discuss strategies that will help align UPS’s external and internal narrative
regarding the issue of employee dissatisfaction. Our company prioritizes employee treatment. In
our mission statement, we state that employees are our “most important asset.” The external
narrative, however, portrays employee dissatisfaction through a potential labor strike, petitions,
and employee hostility. The events shown through the media have provided an opportunity for
the company to implement strategies that would help work towards satisfying employee needs
and aligning the internal and external narratives.

Background
After conducting research on UPS employee treatment, it was found that about 90% of the UPS
work force voted for a labor strike to take place nationwide in June 2018 (Sign the Petition,
2018). UPS responded to this potential labor strike by coming up with a two-tier wage system
that would pay new delivery truck drivers $15 an hour and senior drivers $30 an hour (UPS
Teamsters Take on Two-Tier, 2018). In the new contract, delivery truck drivers would also get
paid higher wages for working weekends. Although UPS has addressed issues with wages, it has
yet to act on other employee concerns such as a petition for air-conditioning in delivery truck
vehicles through an absence of public statement releases addressing the major employee issue.

Analysis
Analyzing employee issues shown through the media and relating these concerns back to our
internal mission helped us identify the lack of transparency between upper-level management
and our strategic business units. The lack of transparency had resulted in employees resorting to
petitions and over a significant majority of employees voting in favor of a labor strike over
wages (Sign the Petition, 2018). Labor strikes tend to be a result of employee grievances that
culminate and by resolving these grievances early-on, UPS will likely see alignment in internal
and external narratives.

Recommendation
In order to create transparency between upper-level management and employees, our team would
recommend using a monthly survey system. These surveys would possess three valuable
characteristics to ensure effectiveness in increasing transparency. Firstly, the survey would be
anonymous. Anonymity would help enforce a safe space for employees to communicate honest
feelings about the work environment. Secondly, they would be implemented monthly to track
satisfaction. Thirdly, the surveys would be geared towards measuring levels of affective and
continuance commitment.

Response
Communication with our stockholders and would be maintained through press releases of our
initiatives along with newsletters. The survey system would be implemented immediately and
consistently through Survey Monkey, a survey platform with a monthly fee of $32. The return on
investment is predicted to increase by over 8.3% wither the utilization of the survey system.
Introduction
UPS has often failed to align our internal and external narratives together in order to ensure
employee satisfaction within our workforce. We have recently failed to accomplish this goal
once again through mistreatments of our employees both economically and environmentally. Our
goal is to ensure that the UPS employees are thriving in their work conditions, and we are ready
to meet these demands through internal changes by acting in a financially sound manner. After
researching this external narrative problem, analyzing the effects that it has on our shareholders,
and internally communicating, we have developed a response that will bind our two narratives
together ensuring shareholder satisfaction.

Situation
One of the main areas where our company fails to bridge the gap between our internal and
external narratives is with employee treatment. We pride ourselves in the fact that we consider
our employees to be our most important asset. However, we recently have failed to mean what
we say in our mission statement. The main problem we face here is that our employees are
unsatisfied with their treatment and pay. For example, there has been threats of strikes, mention
of the employees being unsatisfied with overtime, harassment, and lack of air conditioning in
their trucks. This just shows how we are failing to keep our employees satisfied in their place of
work. For example, more than 93% of our employees voted to have a strike at UPS in regard to
an unfair contract. This can lead to problems within our company that can even spread to affect
our company's key stakeholders. This will be further discussed throughout this report.

Background and Analysis

Potential Labor Strike of UPS

In June 5, the Teamster Union, which represent about 260,000 UPS employees, announced that
over 90% of UPS employed member voted for strike regarding lower level pay, weekend work,
and harassment (Sign the Petition, 2018). This announcement of a potential labor strike is going
to be nationwide due to the employee disagreement of UPS’s next five-year contract. If UPS
cannot satisfy its employees during the contract negotiation process, the potential labor may
become reality.

Unsatisfied wages
UPS implemented a two-tier wage system on new contract that a new UPS driver will have a
wage of $15 per hour will older employees have 36$ per hour based on this wage system.
Whereas those new part-time drivers are not satisfying with the wages

Recently, Amazon increased its minimum wage to $15 for all employees (Wiener-Bronner &
Isidore, 2018). Unlike our two-tier wage system, our starting wage is $13 per hour in 2018, and it
will gradually increase to $15 per hour in 2022 at the end of the five-year contract. So, ups part
time employee feels unfair and they demand a starting wage of $15. The article released this
week from teamster union says that over half UPS employee voted no to the new contract even
though UPS still passed this contract (UPS Teamster Union, 2018).
Purpose of two-tier wages system
The two-tier wage system aims to allow UPS to create a position called hybrid driver. Hybrid
drivers are part time drivers who will be utilized to deliver packages and work inside hub with a
lower poverty wage and working on weekends (Bradbury, 2018). In addition, two-tier wage
system helps to avoid the excessive overtime and weekend premium pay to full-time employee
who work normally from Monday to Friday.

Poor Working Condition

Meanwhile, some articles mention that UPS did not air-conditioning trucks and deliveryman and
drivers are suffering from heat stroke. Even though a petition was signed over 210,000 times, but
UPS still has no plan to equip air-condition to their trucks. Meanwhile, Teamster union said that
they have been negotiating this problem with UPS for a long time, but it always gone due to a
larger issue coming (Visram, 2018). These employee treatment issues are leading to a potential
labor strike causing dozens of problems in business operating.

Current challenge
The current challenge is that our employee treatment issue against our internal mission. UPS is
stressing on the rapid growth of e-commerce. It seems like this will bring UPS a more massive
volume growth; however, UPS’s delivery system still cannot catch up this tremendous increase
of package volume especially when on holiday like Cyber Monday, Black Friday, Christmas.
Our internal narrative plan notes that we currently invest millions of dollars to build
infrastructures in order to improve delivery efficiency and capability. However, employee
treatment issue is also critical that need to be dealt with and requires us to spend lots of extra
money. Otherwise, the nationwide labor strike will take place for employees’ career
benefits. UPS need to figure out a way to satisfy employees with wages and additional work
time like Sunday delivery.

Potential problems
Bad Employee treatment will cause a series of problems. For instance, consistent employee
treatment issue will lower job satisfaction, and the worst consequence is the labor strike. The
research shows that there is a clear relationship between job satisfaction and organizational
performance. Also, job satisfaction determines organizational performance (Bakotić,2016). UPS
is currently expanding for acquiring higher capabilities, but the predictable low job satisfaction is
against our internal mission.

Moreover, if the potential labor strike becomes real, everything happening next is destructive to
UPS as an industry-leading company. Since customers are the second largest stakeholder who
are negatively impacted by labor strike, small business and individual customers will make a
change to other shipping companies because UPS cannot satisfy their needs and wants. Amazon
who is our major customer will accelerate its own shipping program (Shipping with Amazon) to
reduce the reliance on third party logistic companies (Meldner, 2018). These problems will
directly cause a huge regression on our market share. In addition, labor strike will temporarily
stop operation and cause massive amount of financial loss. If we look back to 1997, a 15 days
ups labor strike caused $780 million loss. Meanwhile, spreading out of negative exposure by
media harmed UPS brand reputation and left a lasting concern that it could happen again.
Key stakeholders
According to information in hand, we identified the first three key stakeholders and put them into
a salience model. Employees are the most significant stakeholders who are impacted by
employee treatment issue, and they are definitive because they have the highest power,
legitimacy, and urgency. Customers are the second largest stakeholder, and they are dangerous in
this case because the low job performance of unsatisfied employees will negatively affect the
customer experience. Finally, competitors are the third stakeholders who will be positively
impacted by this issue. They are dependent because they have high legitimacy and urgency but
low power regarding receiving more customers withdrawing from UPS.

Opportunity

Figure 1

Despite having tons of problem, we still have many opportunities to grow as a company through
our employees’ engagement. As Figure 1 shows, employees are over 20% more productive and
profitable when they are engaged in their work, as well as receiving 10% better customer
reviews. Considering that we had 93% of our employees sign that they are willing to strike if
things don’t change, it's fair to assume that a large portion of our company aren't nearly as
engaged as they could be. The three main criteria for for determining an employee’s engagement
come from communication, fair wages, and work environment. UPS has had a gap in our
narratives for employee treatment in all three of these categories causing our employees to be
actively disengaged. If we can get our employees more engaged, it will dramatically increase the
success of our business.

Recommendation
After analyzing the research we’ve gathered so far, we were able to come up with a few
recommendations to help benefit the three stakeholders affect by the employee satisfaction issue.
In order to bridge the gap between our employees and management team, we are implementing a
monthly survey system. To benefit our employees and create transparency throughout our
company we will make the survey anonymous to ensure honest and reliable responses. Once the
results have been analyzed, we will implement a newsletter informing our employees,
consumers, and competitors of our progress. The newsletter will help us better communicate
operations and new trends to our stakeholders from the change of methods in upper-level
management.

To benefit employees, we will be implementing the monthly survey to help close the disconnect
internally (between employees and upper-level management). To benefit consumers, we will be
providing the results from the survey and publishing them in a newsletter to inform consumers of
our internal progress. To minimize the effect competitors, have on our company we will be
expressing positive progress to the media to reduce the opportunity for competitors to act upon.

Response
UPS has come to an agreement with Teamsters Union workers to implement a tentative five-year
contract that our corporate leaders felt confident will meet the needs of our employees. The
contract outlines a two-tier wage pay between part-time and full-time union workers. UPS has
also recently announced that we will be hiring 100,000 new employees for the holiday season
(Bomey, USA Today). By implementing this action plan and contract, we will be reducing the
work that employees believed they were not being compensated for as well as raising wages.
Hiring new employees during our highest time of shipping demands, our employees will be less
stressed due to job sharing (McMackin, UPS Pressroom).

However, early in September, Louisville UPS workers were urged by Teamsters 89 President,
Fred Zuckerman, to vote no to the contract, and said that the negotiation chairmen are not
listening to what the employees need (Schneider, Courier Journal). The steps that we are taking
to align our internal and external narratives needs a strong communication plan in order to
successful gain the loyalty of our employees and consumers.

Communication with Stakeholders

First and foremost, we must communicate with our employees and our consumers that these
actions are being implemented so our employees know that we have heard and are making
improvements to meet their needs. Our consumers will then be assured that now and during the
holiday season they will be provided with quality service and happy employees. Communication
methods such as press releases of our initiatives should be released immediately to notify the
public of our plans and how these initiatives will guarantee satisfaction amongst our employees.

Since there is still some backlash with the contract that is currently in place, it would be
beneficial for the organization leaders to hold an open forum with Teamster Union workers to
fully understand what they are still missing from the tentative contract. We believe that this form
of open and direct communication will assist in finalization in implementing a permanent
contract for the next five years.
Furthermore, we plan to implement monthly surveys to measure and track employee satisfaction.
This would provide the opportunity for employees to express their concerns and state specific
areas to dissatisfaction anonymously. Surveys will be beneficial for the company overall to
prevent any future employee satisfaction issues.

Timeline
The timeline for implementing a survey system is immediate, yet ongoing. We must create and
send out our surveys to our Teamster employees by the end of this October. By November we
should have received a number of responses that will aid us in identifying areas of dissatisfaction
within our employees. Additionally, communication efforts urging our employees to take the
surveys are critical to successfully administering our prospective objectives. Communication
should be continuous to our employees considering they are most affected by our actions with
the issue at hand. The more communication we implement, the more trust our employees will
have in UPS.

Moreover, our surveys will be monthly, and employees should be seeing results from these
surveys. In order to have employees keep taking the surveys we must communicate how we are
responding to their feedback. This can be done by releasing newsletter on the UPS Pressroom,
which will also assist us in gaining consumer loyalty and eliminate competitors in taking
advantage of our companies current damaged brand.

Budget
The two-tier wage system was put into place on August 1st of 2018. This system has increased
the wage expense. Hiring new employees has also increased expenses, which has also worked to
increase expenses invested in training. A budget for surveying would also be in place that would
have a monthly fee of $32 a month through Survey Monkey, an online cloud-based software. A
budget would have to be arranged for analysis to evaluate results and create an action plan for
how concerns can be resolved and communicated to stakeholders. Calculating the price of the
surveys and the increase in productivity that will come from employee satisfaction UPS should
see a return of investment of 8.3%.

Return on Investment
We foresee the return on investment being much higher than 8.3% considering the decrease in
employee turnover rate and elimination of potential for a future labor strike. Turnovers can cost a
company on average $30,000, according to a Bloomberg article, and labor strikes can cost
organizations millions. UPS will be overall much more profitable in the long run by taking the
steps to implement a survey system and persistently acting to meet our employee’s needs.

Increasing budget =In 2017 they were $10 per hour

Cutting back or paying for overtime or just paying more
Saturday and Sunday wages → helps with reward to employees and meets
the time - demand for influx of packages to be delivered to customers
ROI = (Gain from Investment - Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment)
Gain from Investment = Increasing revenue through
Cost of Investment = hiring new employees
= pay increase
 = advertisement and PR
= time to hire and train new employees

Conclusion
UPS has had a misalignment in their internal and external narratives involving employee
satisfaction. Implementing the actions above will benefit us by creating a more positive media
presence in the short term, and in the long term causing us to be more financially stable through
our 8.3% ROI. It is crucial to implement a monthly survey to all of UPS’ employees in order to
increase their engagement which will in turn enhance our business outcome. When our
employees are satisfied, it will cause our customers to be more satisfied with their service, which
will finally lead to the media presenting our narrative in a positive light. In order to ensure that
we meet our goal, it is crucial to begin implementing the steps to listen more attentively to our
employees immediately. I urge you to consider our recommendations and act on them swiftly.
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