>> WHAT WE'RE GOING TO DO THIS YEAR
Provide a complete account of every area of customer-related CR risk with specific targets and action-plans for each.
"At Virgin, employees matter most. It just seems common sense to me that, if you start off with a happy, well-motivated workforce, you're much more likely to have happy customers. And in due course the resulting profits will make your shareholders happy."
Richard Branson
Our vision for our people is quite simple. We want to create a place where people love to work, and a community of people who feel inspired to deliver a brilliant customer experience - every time.
As a new Virgin company, we must focus on laying the right foundations now which means putting our people first. We've got to make sure that we're looking after them and behaving responsibly as an employer. But we've also got to ensure we're acting responsibly on their behalf and helping them feel proud about the company they work for. Get these things right and everything else follows - which is why our workplace responsibilities are our number one priority.
The first thing we've had to acknowledge is that the creation of a Virgin culture doesn't happen overnight, it takes a lot of time and effort. We've been through a really rapid process of organisational change that's included the integration and harmonisation of ntl, Telewest, Virgin.net, Flextech Television and Virgin Mobile, together with a major re-branding exercise.
It's been a rollercoaster ride with all sorts of challenges. Fortunately, we've also got a great bunch of people who have continued to demonstrate their talent, passion and commitment throughout - it's just a case of making sure we're harnessing that potential.
We're focusing hard to work out where we most need to make improvements. We'll be in a position to provide a full set of specific targets and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) next year. But we can already provide you with a clear sense of our key priorities which, this year, are based around the need to: Engage Our People.
How are we doing that? We're focusing on the following challenges:
We can't expect our people to do a good job if our systems and processes don't work properly and can't generate accurate data. Given that this affects employees' pay, we need to get basic things like the accuracy of this right.
We want to give employees useful, easy-to-understand information whenever they need it. So, for example we've recently launched a new, simple-to-use tool called 'Ask Us', which all our people can use to find answers relating to things like personnel issues, payroll, expenses and benefits.
Creating a place where people love to work includes the need to look after their physical environment. We've made good progress at repairing and refurbishing a number of our main sites and will continue to work on this.
We're also working creatively to cut a lot of the mystery out of Health and Safety while making sure we provide the right sort of practical support to employees. We always think about our audience and what they need, whether it's delivering our divisional strategic plans to senior managers (with detail if needed), meeting employee representatives, providing our operational teams with simple, jargon-free, guidance or launching our 'Speak-out' (whistle-blowing) reporting line.
Unfortunately, accidents do happen, and when they do, we make absolutely sure that things are reported so we're able review each case, take the right steps and learn from it. It's important to us that, at all levels, everyone knows what they need to do to work safely and where to go for help and advice.
We're working to make sure salaries are properly benchmarked so that we pay fairly across the business. We also want to ensure that our employees have access to a range of benefits including: healthcare and critical illness cover, dental insurance, personal accident insurance, life assurance, a pension plan, bonus and incentive schemes, a sharesave scheme, childcare vouchers, discounts on Virgin Media products, and access to the Virgin Group Discount Scheme, 'Tribe', giving around 100 discounts on products and services from the Virgin Group and beyond.
We have already started a 'job levelling' project to develop a framework that clarifies where roles fit within the organisation based on market pay ranges. We'll have more to report on that next year.
The need to develop and maintain a diverse workforce is a crucial feature of our employer responsibility. We're starting by fully auditing and benchmarking ourselves on issues such as gender, age, disability and ethnicity so that we can set specific development targets.
The ability to sensitively manage organisational change is hugely important when your business goes through the sort of rapid and turbulent change that we have. We'll be putting questions in our 2008 employee engagement survey to understand how employees really feel about working at Virgin Media and the difficult and sensitive restructuring challenges they've faced. This is another area that requires close attention to our values if we are to maintain fundamental behavioural improvement.
We want to make sure our people hear everything they need to hear about, right away. We do it in an informal, conversational way that means everyone understands where we're at and what our plans are. Our intranet allows us to set up regular online web chats with our senior team (many of whom also write their own blogs) and provide employees with the opportunity to give immediate feedback on any messages posted by our leadership team. This is complemented by lots of face-to-face interaction across our sites.
Engaging our employees means we've got to listen to and act upon what they tell us. We're committed to letting employees have their say. So, for example, we've set up a forum called 'Voice' which gives employee representatives the chance to tell their managers how they're really feeling. Together with regular polls on our intranet, as a precursor to our employee engagement survey, this is really helping us, as a business, to understand how our people are feeling.
We've also put 1,200 employees through a 3-day development programme called 'Lead the Revolution' to help them understand our new culture and behaviours and help them effect change in their area. This has been followed up by a shorter version that we call 'Revolution Take-away' sessions that give all employees the chance to go through the same process.
We've got a responsibility to nurture talent within our business. We've set up a performance management process called 'Your Story' which ensures that everyone sets clear performance objectives for the year that can be reviewed every six months. We're also conducting a full scale talent review to work out where all our rising stars reside in the business and we're designing a new leadership development programme for 2008. To support this we have an online people development tool called 'Springboard' that ensures everyone, whatever their role, has the opportunity to reach their goals.
We want to ensure we're doing all we can to encourage wellness among our employees. Our Business Division, for example, recently trialled a specific wellness campaign designed to provide employees with a variety of activities including massage and beauty therapy, holistic therapy, back care and nutritional workshops, stop smoking support groups and skin cancer screening demonstrations.
We've provided advice to all employees on 'body, mind and diet' through our intranet. We also tried out some 'napping' pods at our Wythenshawe office which gave employees the chance to recharge their batteries and take a nap. Given the success of the pilot, we're looking at ways of introducing similarly innovative ideas to other offices this year.
To provide extra support when people need it, all employees and their families have access to a 24 hour, confidential employee assistance line which gives them independent advice and counselling when they need it. We also provide other forms of insurance support for individuals suffering longer term issues around their wellness.
