Our goal is to build the best broadband future and we're achieving this by focusing on three core pillars: delivering great customer service, building our Full Fibre network quickly, and upgrading our customers brilliantly.
We do this safely, inclusively, efficiently and sustainably whilst ensuring we create a great place to work for all our people. Our entire strategy is wrapped up with our company purpose - 'We build the connections that matter' - so everything we do is driven by this goal.
In doing so, we are not too shy to admit we have won some awards whilst building Full Fibre across the UK to keep everyone connected.
The FTTH Council Europe has named Openreach as the winner of their 'FTTH Operator Award' at their annual conference. The award recognises our significant contribution to the development and roll-out of FTTP in Europe, providing faster internet speeds, improved reliability, and a connection to future-proof technology for decades to come.
The scheme challenges contractors to strive for the best standards in the industry, awarding those that consistently perform to the highest levels with an industry respected Gold Award.
When working in places where there's traffic congestion and limited foot-space, our Streetworks team work closely with the City of London to make sure we work quickly and safely. We work hard to limit the impact on pedestrians and road users, and we're proud to be recognised for our consistently quality and conduct in this area.
Read about the City of London Considerate Contractor Scheme Awards
During the pandemic our mission was to keep customers and our people safe and keep the UK connected and open for business. Working with our Communication Provider customers we rapidly developed and implemented new processes. From a ‘priority staircase’ to prioritise customers in the most need, to 'Covid risk' questions to protect our people and customers, innovations to keep customers informed about our covid working processes and enable self-help to reduce unnecessary visits and changing processes to complete as much work as possible outside of customer homes.
Read about the European Customer Experience Awards
There’s nothing more important than safety, especially on the road. That’s why we’re proud that Openreach has been honoured at the prestigious annual Global Fleet Champion Awards, landing both the Large Fleet Company Driver Safety Award and the Road Risk Manager of the Year Award.
The judging panel, made up of academic and industry experts in occupational road risk, recognised our exceptional dedication to best practice in safe and healthy fleet mobility. Our priority is always to ensure the safety of our drivers, other road users, and members of the public while we’re keeping the UK connected.
At the ICS awards, we won ‘Best use of Insight’ for the Voice of the Customer framework and we were finalists for ‘Best use of Technology’ for our Contact Engine programme. The Voice of the Customer framework helps us put customers at the heart of our customer experience improvements. We try to quickly fix problems, while also coming up with ways to solve bigger issues in the supply chain. Our main aim is to reduce customer effort and improve the overall customer experience for both broadband service providers and end users.
At Openreach, we’re always working hard to make sure we offer amazing service, so we’re delighted that our MyServices partner app has been recognised by The UK IT Industry Awards 2021. The app, which enables our partners’ and communication providers’ engineers to work on behalf of Openreach, won the prize for Best Overall DevOps Projects in the Communication Sector. By allowing access to the same apps and IP capabilities as our own engineers, MyServices allows those engineers to run tests and close jobs to the gold standard of our in house teams.
Read about the UK IT Industry Awards
Safety has always been and will continue to be a number one priority for us at Openreach and winning these prestigious RoSPA awards is recognition of that. We won three awards, including the Information & Communication Industry Sector Award, Fleet Safety, and Best New Entry. The awards recognise our health and safety management programs such as the Everyone Home Safe and Well strategy, Hearts and Minds safety culture training, Life Saving Rules, and our road risk management system.
We undertook a benchmarking exercise with the ENEI to see how Openreach measured up, achieving a Talent, Inclusion and Diversity Evaluation (TIDE) Bronze Standard Award. This award reflects the strides we've taken in activating our employee networks, hosting successful events both internally and externally, and making sure that inclusivity is a significant part of our strategy. While we acknowledge that there is still work to be done in this area, this award serves as strong evidence that we are doing the right thing to ensure we’re open to everyone.
We're proud to be one of the UK's top 25 companies for the second year running, moving up three places and marked as outstanding.
We also won the Special Award for Learning and Development for our Openstreet training centres and finding innovative ways to continue delivering training throughout the Coronavirus pandemic.
The Fibre Network and Delivery team had an incredible night, winning the awards for ‘Best Business Transformation Initiative’ and ‘Best Large Organisation (over 5,000 people)’. In particular, the judges recognised the adoption of a bottom-up approach that encouraged a culture of ownership at every level, resulting in rocketing engagement scores and huge improvements in empowerment and trust.
To top it all off, the team finished the night by beating off strong competition from leading global brands, and was crowned ‘Overall Winner’ of the Business Culture Awards 2021.
Read about the Business Culture Awards
Openreach Learning and Development made the most of technology to help Engineering Modern Apprentices stay connected during the pandemic. When face-to-face learning was halted due to Coronavirus we quickly adapted our digital learning approach to enable apprentices from across the country to progress and achieve remotely.
Read about the Scottish Apprenticeships Awards
The Institute of Telecommunications Professionals’ Awards proved a huge success for Openreach, with five of our colleagues being recognised for outstanding work in their fields.
Three members of the Fibre and Network Delivery (FND) team were honoured, with Andrea Cavner winning in the Women in Telecoms category, Sarah Martinez Williams winning Outstanding Contribution to an Individual’s Development, and Alistair Viner winning Engineer of the Year.
On top of that, Ritika Mital and Huw Jones, both from the Service Delivery (SD) team, were also rewarded, winning the Christopher Mills Award and Mentor of the Year respectively.
Read about the Institute of Telecommunications Professionals' Awards