An Post chief executive Mr John Hynes has warned postal workers the company needs to treble its profitability to ensure long-term viability.
He also told them the company had gone as far as it could go in improving its competitiveness with existing structures and partnership offered the only way forward.
He was speaking in Galway yesterday at the annual conference of the Communications Workers' Union. It was the first time the chief executive of a semi-state company has addressed a trade union conference about business strategy.
Mr Hynes was invited to address postal workers as a symbolic and practical step towards partnership within the company. He said partnership would not come easily and he himself had been a product of the adversarial way of doing business.
"We can't achieve any more as a business on the basis of how we operate now, or on the basis of technology," he said. The company had to get away from the centralised personnel model where everything was decided at the top.
It had to change from a company which paid people for "turning up at work" to one where people knew what to do and went ahead in doing it. If the company failed to embrace change it would suffer "a slow, but nonetheless lethal" exposure to competition.
At present An Post had a profit margin of 1.7 per cent of turnover, down 0.2 per cent on last year. Its competitors had profit margins of 4 and 5 per cent on turnover.
Unions and management were looking jointly at how An Post operated. A new draft business plan for the company had been given to the CWU to give it a chance to comment before decisions are taken by the board. Both sides have also agreed to use the new National Centre for Partnership to facilitate the partnership process.
The company is represented on a new steering committee with the CWU by Mr Hynes and his senior executives, including the new personnel executive, Mr John O'Hehir, who previously chaired talks in the ESB's Cost and Competitiveness Review.
Responding to Mr Hynes, the CWU general secretary, Mr Con Scanlon, said the joint partnership strategy was a new departure for the union as well. The union wanted a partnership strategy that was "not just one that is convenient because the company wants change, but that allows us to share in the benefits as well."