European

BT

Summary

For some weeks now a young girl in a bright yellow raincoat has been a familiar face on our television screens.

As part of BT’s Why Not Change The Way We Work campaign, nine-year-old Nicola Bland has been questioning working practices from ‘why do we use so much paper?’ and ‘why do we travel so far just to talk about work?’ to ‘why is my daddy never home at bathtime?’.

While the primary aim of the campaign is clearly to promote BT’s products and services such as ISDN, email and 0800 lines, it has the potential for a much greater impact on work culture in this country. Dominic Owens, head of marketing communications for BT business, said: "We want to challenge businesses to take a fresh look, through the innocent eyes of a child, at how we all work.

"Why, for example, do we spend hours travelling miles to meetings when we could hold a videoconference instead?"

"The way we work is crazy and it doesn’t have to be this way any longer. People work in ways they do because they always have but we no longer need to.

"The rapid pace of technology is revolutionising the world of work and many businesses are already reaping the benefits of it." Many companies have already begun to reassess the way they work - placing more emphasis on flexible working and teleworking and investing in new technology which will enable employees to work remotely. But how is BT itself tackling the issue? Workstyle 2000 development manager Neil McLocklin says BT is challenging traditional working practices and remoulding them to fit into a changing world and take the company into the next millennium.

He said that currently within the company, 825 managers teleworked for two days a week and the hope was that within the coming year that figure would double.

"There are four main reasons for this," McLocklin said. "People actually want to do it. We have done a lot of surveys and found that people like working this way.

"People can work better in many ways. The normal scenario is for people to telework for two days a week. We have found that when people are able to do their quiet work [writing reports etc] at home, it improves productivity because they manage their time better. Also it saves us money and it enables us to practice what we are preaching."

Examples of the advertisements and associated photography can be seen at:

Full Dossier

Core Partners