WHEN I come home from work in the evenings there is often something waiting for me on the doorstep. It is a red rubber band left there by the postman. When my elder son was little, he would seize on these bands and add them to the giant rubber band ball he was making. But now I scoop them up along with the junk mail that has been pushed through the letter box and sling them into the bin.

Last week I got an email from a reader who takes a more assertive approach to stray bands. For years he has been collecting them in a pot but when the pot overflowed recently he emptied the lot into a large jiffy bag and sent it to Moya Greene, chief executive of Royal Mail. He pointed out that the little red bands carelessly discarded by her staff were an eyesore, a waste of rubber – and of money.

He got a nice letter back saying that she was aware of the problem and had passed the matter on to his local delivery office. In due course, he got a second letter sent by the local manager who confirmed that, for years, Royal Mail had been trying to make staff aware of the “inconvenient [sic] that the rubber bands cause our customers”. It briefed “all staff regularly about the problem in our cuddles” (or did he mean “huddles”?) and discussed the issue during “Work Time Listening and Learning”.

The letter ended by telling the reader to contact the manager directly if he had further “issues regarding elastic bands”, so he could “tackle the person responsible right away”.

In some ways, this wasn’t a bad letter. It admitted to the existence of a problem and appeared to take some responsibility for it. Yet what it says about Royal Mail, apart from the piffling detail that its managers can neither write nor proofread, is troubling.

If the company can’t get its staff to do something as simple as pick up litter despite years of bleating from the chief executive and line managers and despite the fact that it claims to revere sustainability, it has deeper problems than losing about £40 million a year delivering letters.

Royal Mail’s conversion to trendy management practices evidently isn’t helping. No amount of huddles – or cuddles – will ever crack the rubber band problem. As for the “Work Time Listening and Learning”, what has Royal Mail become? A nursery school?

Even the manager doesn’t seem to be expecting success as he falls back on a more traditional (though also flawed) way of getting people to do as they are told: find a culprit and give him a bollocking.

My reader isn’t the first to have seen red over rubber bands. The charity Keep Britain Tidy has calculated that Royal Mail has spent £5 milion buying four billion bands in the past five years, many of which litter the streets. There have been constant calls for an answer, including the suggestion that littering postmen get fined, but all to no avail.

Fortunately I have a solution to the problem, which I’ve just popped into a jiffy bag and sent to Ms Greene. It’s a copy of the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, which argues that the best way of reviving a sick organisation is to pick on one bad habit and change it. Thus, when Paul O’Neill took over at Alcoa in the late 1980s, he resolved to cut accidents to zero. Shareholders were first appalled but then amazed – in the process of improving safety, communication, trust, efficiency and profits were all improved too.

I wonder if rubber bands couldn’t do the same for Royal Mail. To stop them disfiguring the nation’s doorsteps would involve understanding why they get dropped in the first place.

I suspect the reasons are complex and many. The fact you often see postmen running to do the job in time may be part of it. It may be that Royal Mail, despite its protestations, doesn’t care about rubber bands because they are too cheap. But I am pretty sure that low morale, high absenteeism and, above all, poor management will have something to do with it too.

If Ms Greene were to declare that she had only one aim – to win the rubber band war – everyone would think she’d gone mad, especially as the company is preparing for privatisation next year. But if she kicked this one habit, she would unearth deeper problems and start to solve them too.

She would also be saved from all the faux-important stuff that chief executives so often get deflected by.

On the organisation’s website it says its aim is to “deliver a market-leading corporate responsibility agenda”. All I want Royal Mail to deliver is my mail – without a rubber band. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012)