New Zealand Post has beaten hundreds of postal services worldwide to win the people management category at the World Mail Awards.
The award, to NZ Post's retail division, was presented in Copenhagen this morning for its human resources programme Workforce Planning Initiative.
NZ Post retail group manager Michelle van Gaalen said "smarter people processes" provided long-term, sustainable benefits.
"We are operating in a business that is changing quickly and like postal organisations worldwide, we're affected by the increasing use of technology for communication and bill payments," she said.
"On the balance sheet it may have been easy for us to simply lay people off to achieve savings, but that would have been short-sighted and unsustainable."
Ms Gaalen said the initiative was a "unique approach" that mixed workforce planning tools and smarter working methods.
"What we did was provide tools and resources to empower store managers to make smarter team decisions around matters like people to customer ratios, rostering and backfilling, essentially leading to better cost management in-stores," she said.
"By making these changes we have achieved better management of our people and resources and we have tripled our targeted savings."
