Postal Employees

There is this supervisor where I work. He always rushes and runs around like a chicken with his head cut off, being rude and rushes employees except some of his favorites.
I have been observing him and tried to figure out why is this person so on edge and always in a hurry and being in rush, and I think it's because he is getting a bonus.
There used to be over 20 people working in my section but now it is reduced to 12 people. That was a few months after this supervisor came in so I have a feeling maybe this supervisor suggested the idea of reducing the number of employees. My guess is when fewer people can accomplish the same job that was accomplished by more people, that would undoubtedly result in profit. The profit would be a lot since there are 8 fewer people. So my guess is, this supervisor must be taking the bonus at the expense of the employees.
So my question is how does the 'bonus' work for supervisors?

MNPostmaster or Your NBA can probably give better answers, but there is no bonus for supervisors. That's a myth. Their pay is based upon NPA (national perf assessment?) or some nonsense like that. It's a matrix, that takes into account various scores around the country, such as national, area and then their actual office. It takes into account things like trucks on time, deliveries on time, hours used and lots of nonsense. Look it up, you can probably find it on google. At the end of the fiscal year it's tallied and their pay raise is based upon whatever the results of the matrix added up to. In most parts of the country that has been 0% (zero) for most of the last few years. Good place to check is probably the NAPS website. Now in some parts of the post office, they are required to set goals and then show improvements in those areas. But that's not supervisors at the PDC or local offices. Maybe for a Plant Mgr, PM or POOM at larger facilities but for your supervisor, nope. He also has no impact on how few people you have. Staffing is being cut nationwide in maintenance at least and it's based upon BS numbers, which have nothing to do with the actual need of the equipment to be serviced. That's why you see breakdown maintenance becoming the norm vs any kind of preventative maintenance. So I'd guess that's also involved in NPA somehow and for those way up the food chain, there probably are such things as yearly bonuses based upon "performance," however that's determined. Again go back to early posts this year regarding NAPS suing the post office over pay. They were asking for things like steps, the same as carriers get. They wanted to get rid of NPA because so many were seeing no raise whatsoever. So IMO the problem with staffing is above your supervisor's pay grade and might even lie in the fact that so many people can do almost as well outside of the post office with less abuse. So why work for the post office? Why stick around more than the first day or two?

I am sure that workhours somehow factor into the Pay for performance, and it has always been high on the list as the chosen way to deal with budget issues (but only for the craft employees it seems). That's the result of an organization that places too much emphasis on numbers compliance, and lacks the creativity to find real, practicle solutions to issues.

Before online retail and shopping really took off, it was obvious that first class mail was on the decline. At the station where I work, we clerks used to get several trays of first class letters and numerous tubs of flats to sort manually in the middle to late 90s. As those volume began to decline, it became obvious that we had more personnel than we needed; several workers used to cut out early using annual or LWOP. It made sense then to realign, cut back or consolidate personnel and operations to fit the requirements. Not long after that, it was the parcels that began to increase; not only within our own priority and standard mailings, but drop shipments, FedEx, UPS and Amazon came along.

The problem was, the cutting of hours still remained gospel. No one seemed to make the connection that processing letters and flats was a lot less labor intensive than what it takes to process packages, for both clerks and for carriers. You can live with a few less clerks in automation because the machines are so efficient and a few workers can prepare thousands of letters for a carrier, who only have to grab them off a cage and load them up. But in a station, a loss of two clerks can severely impact how quickly you can get the current deluge of packages ready for carriers to take to the street. You can save money and increase profits somewhat by cutting hours, but there's a law of diminishing return; If overtime, penalty overtime, and grievance payouts are increased too much as a result, your gains are out the window, not to mention the hit to customer service. They also did not seem to grasp how clerk and carrier hours are connected. The person at district who micromanages clerk hours for the stations pats themselves on the back because they cut a clerk job in our station. But now, it doesn't just mean overtime for the clerks remaining, it also means that up to 20 or more carriers might have overtime that day because they're waiting for distribution to be up.

Edited by user Saturday, January 9, 2021 11:42:23 AM(UTC)  | Reason: edited for clarity

Thank you for clarifying. Perhaps I should have said "Correlates" instead of "Represents".

We have not had an accountable clerk for over 2 years. We just toss our keys in the holder for our route and leave. Also, any keys not issued sit out on the workroom floor all day. They are locked in a closet at night

Truck keys and gas cards hang on a peg board, never locked up.

If we have a registered or postage due, we get a supervisor to sign for it.

Something you would have been appalled at 10 years ago. Now, security is a not thought about.

Exactly as others have said. On a scale of 1-15, they have a performance score matrix.
0-3 out of 15 = no raise
4 = 2%
5 = 2.5%
... and so on with ha max of 9%

I haven't seen ANY "work" unit in the country score above the 6-8 range. It's nearly impossible for frontline EAS personnel that touch mail. Back offices like labor, HR, IT, etc. might be able to max it out.

As far as cutting workhours goes, they are the largest part of operating expenses. Operating Expenses are the heaviest weighted score at 40% or 6 points out of 15. The district I'm in has earned 0 points in this category every year, so the most we can work towards is 5% doing everything perfectly. It is kind of sad to see postal managers destroy their work life balance, stress themselves out, struggle to get the mail out with no personnel, for a mere $1000 to $3000 at the end of the year. More times than not it would make zero difference to their raises not putting any effort towards the scores at all and working the mail naturally doing what makes sense rather than "chasing a number goal". The only score that should really get attention is Employee Engagement. All research shows your problems, including absenteeism, melt away after that. But for USPS it's just a talking point.

The supplies would fall under "Total operating expenses" or "TOE"