At GO, better people are enabling a ‘Better Every Day’

In a highly stressed and fast-changing world, people expect more from companies and brands. For a company like GO, meeting and exceeding these expectations, is crucial. “We are in the business of connecting people to what matters most to them; of driving a digital Malta where no one is left behind. In a world where connectivity is a basic necessity, this is both a privilege and a huge responsibility. We have the opportunity to enable better and more connected lives,” says Mandy Calleja, Head of Corporate Communications at GO as she discusses what Better Every Day means to GO.

Just over two years ago, we embarked on a journey to rediscover our purpose as an organisation. Why do we exist? What societal problems can we help solve? What impact are we having on the community and the planet?

Companies ultimately exist to make a profit but once their purpose is defined and is aligned to people’s individual purpose, then the outcomes and impact are far greater. Profit naturally follows as customers increasingly choose those brands that reflect their personal values, and which genuinely do good for society.

Studies have shown that the more engaged employees are with the organisation’s purpose, the higher those individuals’ performance. Better performance will translate to a better service and happier customers, whilst employees improve through strengthened skills and increased pride in what they do.

In the previous articles in this series, I had discussed how technology is truly enabling peoples’ lives and how digital connectivity is supporting businesses and industries across the globe. Now we shall be focusing on what we are doing as an organisation to get better at facilitating this, how we are improving our performance and that of our people, to how we are improving our customer experience, our products and technology in the spirit of making people and businesses’ lives, better every day.

Every day, be it work, family, friends, or our own leisure, we all rely on all things digital to make things happen. Healthy and thriving communities can only flourish with reliable digital access, content and the necessary skills and knowhow for people to actively participate and contribute. We all experience frustration when our internet connection is disrupted and the impact this has on our everyday life. We also know the relief, when technology is on our side, and we are reconnected to the digital world, seamlessly getting back to our busy lives.

In order to ensure our communities remain connected to the best technology and that our customers remain supported, our people need to keep growing, learning and evolving in their skills. When our people become better, they can serve our customers better – with pride and increased confidence.

At GO, we have made it our everyday mission to be better. Our core business is centred around technology, but ultimately, we are a human company, built by people, for people and the community.

As humans, we know we can always get better at what we do but this requires a growth mindset by learning from the challenges.

At GO we constantly encourage this learning mindset and empower our people to achieve more. Because the better skilled they are, the better is their contribution to making GO a stronger and better-performing company. This is why a year ago we launched our GO Learning Academy, in order to inspire and support our teams to reach their career aspirations, fulfil their roles and to invest in their own learning.

Emma Gatt, Senior Manager – People and Culture, explained that the GO Learning Academy has three goals, applied across three types of learning to match those goals.

“The first goal is to build the skills we all need to deliver our strategy. To do this, we have priority learning programmes that focus on three pillars namely purposeful leadership, customer centricity, and digital excellence. The second goal is to ensure the training is technical and also functional.”

“The final goal is to build a learning culture where everyone is inspired to invest in his and her own learning, and to be celebrated for doing so. We leave it up to our people to define their own learning goals by utilising the Learnerbly platform, a cutting-edge digital learning platform, that together with a personal learning budget, and a series of webinars, will provide a treasure trove of opportunities for our people to indulge their curiosity, on subject matters such as how to make learning your superpower, how to be a healthy and happy remote worker, and more.”

The feedback has been incredibly positive. Our people have followed double the learning content made available in previous years and more than 80 per cent of people have so far attended GO Academy learning programmes. The GO Academy encourages a blended mix of learning, and each course is adaptable and made up of both specific technical and soft skill training aligned to GO’s purpose and values.

“Training is top-notch and we are bringing expertise from outside the company to deliver bite-sized, high quality, easy to access learning journeys curated in line with GO’s mission. We are also striving to develop a culture where our leaders and subject matter experts support, lead and celebrate this learning,” explained Gatt.

Our people are still genuinely interested to learn more and become better, as confirmed by a spike in self-directed learning. In the first six months of 2022, each team member has spent an average of 20 hours on formal learning through our virtual learning platform.

Our most recent training programme, which reflects the way we are developing different skills and competencies for greater external impact, centred around the climate crisis, which was delivered as part of our GO Green Strategy. This learning journey generated over 250 ideas on how we can all make a difference with our collective efforts to reduce our carbon footprint.

Our people remain our greatest asset and they deserve investment in their personal growth journeys and wellbeing. By doing this we are opening up opportunities to align their purpose with that of the organisation, we are improving their lives and, in turn, making the lives of all those around them, including those of our customers, that little bit better, every day.