Virgin Media

Virgin Media’s Sales team recently hosted the first ‘Women in Leadership’ conference to engage women in our sales team. The event went really well and I thought I’d take this opportunity to share with you some of the highlights of the day along with our plans for taking forward some of the great ideas we heard at the conference.

Today (May 9th) is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (or GAAD for short) and it’s all about getting people talking, thinking and learning about digital accessibility. Every year, on this day, hundreds of organisations around the world hold events to raise awareness about accessibility and with this in mind, I wanted to share some insight into activity here at Virgin Media.

At the end of last year, the Retail Communications team brought out the sustainability edition of our quarterly in-house magazine, The Wrap. The new edition featured sustainability facts and figures along with stories on Virgin Media employees who are making a real difference for the environment and the wider community in which our business operates. Six months on, I thought I’d share an update on how the new-look magazine went down.

Following International Women's Day, we met up with Kate Crittenden, Head of Commercial and Compliance, to hear about a dynamic new internal community she’s helped setup to support women throughout their careers at Virgin Media.

I'm often lucky enough to be invited to various events and conferences to speak about the Virgin Media approach to sustainability reporting. Even after two years, our decision to ditch the hardcopy report in favour of a more engaging, behind-the-scenes, digital approach is still often commended as innovative and groundbreaking, which is great. Naturally, many of the people I meet at these events do not work in a digital business like Virgin Media, and they often ask me how our approach could work for them. It’s an interesting question, and one I thought I’d reflect on in a blog. Not only this, but having just launched the business and the community phase of the ‘Our digital future’ programme, it felt like a good time to raise the issue. So here are my thoughts on some of the key elements of our approach, and how they might be applicable to your company, no matter what type of industry you operate in…

Virgin Media are listening to what the UK thinks about ‘Our digital future’. Over the past few months we’ve invited digital pioneers and experts, MPs, business leaders and the wider UK public to share their views about the impact of digital technology on people, business and communities. Recently, we turned the focus of the conversation towards the issues that children can face online and we’ve had some really valuable feedback from our experts on the best way to keep kids safe, happy and healthy.

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is not big; it’s massive. As the world’s largest technology show, this is the event where everyone from small Korean start-ups to the likes of Sony and Samsung show off their latest gizmos for release this year. I was lucky enough to go there for the week and while I didn’t manage to see everything (it really is that huge!), I saw enough to make me realise that gadgets and technology are going to keep changing every aspect of our lives, at an ever-increasing pace.

At Virgin Media, we set out to take an open, transparent and inclusive approach to sustainability. We know we’re not alone on our sustainability journey, and that’s why we think it’s vital to involve our staff, customers and external experts in how we get there. As part of this commitment, last year we completed a stakeholder engagement programme – or a “big listening project” called We’re all ears - in which we invited each of the three groups to tell us what they thought about our progress so far and their expectations of where we should focus our efforts in the future.

We've had a busy couple of months! We've been working on the launch of a brand new programme to provide people across the UK with the opportunity to tell us what they think about all things digital. We’re calling this ‘Our digital future’ and we want you to get involved!