Z Energy has been announced as a 2017 Aon Hewitt ‘Best Employer’ for the third year running, achieved during a year characterised by executing one of New Zealand’s biggest acquisitions.

This annual award recognises the best employers across Australasia based on employee engagement scores and people management practices.

Z’s General Manager of People and Culture, Sharlene Taylor, said the company had put special focus on maintaining engagement throughout the challenging process of bringing two companies together, following the acquisition of Chevron New Zealand last year.

"Historically the biggest risks of mergers and acquisitions are the risks of staff disengagement, when companies put two businesses together and hope for the best.

"Z took this risk off the table with an unconventional way of merging two cultures and people, taking a broader perspective on how we defined success of the acquisition.

"Throughout the acquisition Z had a mantra of one company, one team, one strategy and that’s what we consider success to be, not just achieving financial synergies. This is extremely hard to achieve, if not impossible, without putting the focus on the key area of people integration," Sharlene said.

Z attributes some of its success to its investment in senior leaders ahead of deal, to make sure the business understood the Chevron New Zealand culture and what was important to its people.

"Understanding the culture enabled us to take our existing and new people on the journey to becoming one integrated company, therefore keeping our people engaged and passionate about working at Z, even as they experienced large-scale change," Sharlene said.

"Engagement is critical to a high performance workplace, so getting a good result at these awards, now that we are a much bigger business, is really important to us."

For the first time Z Retailers, who operate Z’s more than 200 service stations on the company’s behalf, have also been recognised as best employers as a separate entity, reflecting work that’s gone into engaging Z’s 2,000 retail site staff.