The U.S. Postal Service (usps)

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) processes and delivers mail to individuals and businesses within the United States. Last year, the USPS delivers over 206 billion pieces of mail to over 142 different homes and/or businesses.

The "Voice of the Employee (VOE)" became an important focus area due to recent unsafe hazards at USPS. Also, improving employee relations was set as a strategic goal to complete. Within my organization, surveys are sent to all employees annually to get a general idea of how employees feel about the workplace and to see how they feel about their manager. I recall one of the questions asked on the survey was if we as employees felt safe at work. Also, the text read that; "People are key to process excellence. They create innovative ideas, initiate and implement improvement projects, and apply tools and techniques to solve problems." (Evans & Lindsay, 2011). The Voice of the Employee supports improved internal processes by responding to the employees' needs. This in turns help to identify what actually matters to the employees and to the business as a whole.

The USPS utilizing the balance scorecard to measure safety based on the requirements of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the employee satisfaction. Employee satisfaction was measured by employee surveys which were conducted annually but could be traced on a monthly basis by each unit. The USPS realized that it must improve employee satisfaction in order to improve its internal processes. This was accomplished by providing training and growing their employees professionally.

Also listed on the balance scorecard was the VOB or Voice of the Business. It focus was to support improved internal processes. VOB was separated into two areas--one represented by a productivity measure and the other by a revenue generation measure. "Most organizations adapt the balanced scorecard to their own conditions, which is why it is difficult to assess the effectiveness of the approach across organizations. At USPS, they were responding to performance gaps in three specific and critical areas." (Evans & Lindsay). These areas provided indication of whether internal processes were improving which would have been a direct result of improved employee satisfaction. Lastly, the "Voice of the Customer (VOC)" lead to the desired Financial outcome, which in the case of the Postal Service is the correct amount of revenue to support the system. The VOC focused on providing timely and reliable delivery. In order to track this strategy a set of delivery service measurements systems were created. The VOC is a term used to describe the in-depth process of capturing a customer's expectations, preferences and aversions.

One advantage of the balance scorecard the USPS use was that it after strategic goal was