Performance summary

Employment developments

We are proud of our company and the direct and indirect employment we provided to more than 53,000 people, on average, in 2021. Around 70% were our own employees and 30% were those employed through delivery and other partners. As we strive to be an inclusive company, we provide, for example, employment to around 1,600 (2020: 1,600) people with a distance to the labour market.

PostNL Headcount own employees Total number of PostNL employees
2020 - 2021

At year end, the headcount of our own employees was 37,365. The drop in headcount in 2021 was partly due to the sale of our Cendris Customer Care entity, which employed approximately 1,700 people. In line with the growth at Parcels, we were able to hire around 500 new employees throughout the year. At Mail in the Netherlands we saw a gradual decrease in the number of employees, which began when Covid-19 measures were eased towards the summer. As the labour market became tighter we were able to partly offset the decline in capacity by increasing the average contract hours of mail deliverers, although this remains challenging. We also realised efficiencies in our operations. Workforce management and capacity planning continues to be an important activity in our social domain.

Continued focus on the health and safety of our people

With the pandemic continuing through 2021, our focus remained on the health and safety of our employees, and the employees working indirectly for us. We continued to adjust our processes to new government measures and guidance, and this approach was effective. Our services have continued without interruption throughout the pandemic, and employees have indicated through surveys that they appreciate what we are doing.

PostNL Absenteeism Percentage
2020 - 2021

Covid-19 continued to impact absenteeism. With the health and safety of our people a priority, a reduction in absenteeism due to illness was not one of our goals in 2021. We advised our people to take a precautionary approach and remain at home if they had any Covid-like symptoms. While this is done in the interest of the health of our people, it also impacted the service levels we can deliver. We continued to adapt the organisation throughout the year, responding immediately to the fast-changing government measures. Our internal dashboard showed that the relative number of Covid-19 cases within PostNL in 2021 was lower than the Dutch average. We continue to monitor these developments on a day-to-day basis and take (additional) corrective measures if and when needed. We are very proud of the commitment and flexibility of our people to adjust their work rhythm to frequent changes, which was crucial to run our operations across all our locations throughout 2021.

Employee engagement

PostNL Employee engagement Share of engaged employees
2020 - 2022

In a tight labour market, strong employee engagement is essential if we want to be successful. As well as better employee retention, motivated people are key to being an effective company and offering customers the high-quality services they demand. The average employee engagement score in 2021 was 84%, similar to 2020. Our performance is slightly above the benchmark figure in the Netherlands. While we evaluate the underlying scores in many different areas, the score in our survey in October was slightly negatively impacted by work pressure due to staff shortages at specific locations.

The detailed results of our employee engagement surveys help us understand best practices and areas for improvement. Our drive to improve employee engagement is illustrated in the target we have set for 2022, which at 82% is 1 percentage point higher than our 2021 target. We have linked this to the 2021 target rather than performance, because we again saw that our 2021 results were positively influenced by the temporary impact of Covid-19.