Performance: Focusing on employees as employees focus on business

Performance, an 8 ½ x 11 four-color, 32-page bimonthly magazine put out by Canada Post, wants to persuade tens of thousands of Canada Post workers to bring productive change to the most practical, everyday actions of letter sorters and letter carriers.

Leslie Bamford, editor of Performance, expects her magazine to do two things: 1) to lead change in the way Canada Post does business, to make employees far more caring about customers and more efficient and quicker in serving them, and 2) to turn employees into enthusiastic supporters of those changes.

The cover story of the January/February 2008 issue of Performance delivers good news about engagement: In 2007, Canada Post increased its engaged employees by five percent. This gain sounds modest, but it’s an amazing increase, especially for a company as huge as this one.

The whole purpose of Performance is increase engagement. Bamford tries to tell as many stories as she can about workers doing their jobs in new ways—not just line workers in the mail distribution centers, not just the tens of thousands of mail carriers, but everybody—managers, supervisors and senior executives.