Our reputation as a progressive and innovative employer not only helps us to recruit and retain an excellent workforce, it also enhances our ability to serve our customers and generate revenues and shareholder value.

During the year, we spent around £70 million on the training and development of BT people.

Because we want every single one of our 104,700 employees to be focused on delivering an excellent customer experience, a number of our training programmes tackle aspects of customer care. Examples include the My Customer programme, which aims to strengthen employees’ engagement with customers, and “back to the floor” exercises, designed to re-familiarise senior managers with the issues that confront customer-handling staff.

And because we believe that the quality of leadership talent in the company is essential to the successful delivery of our strategy, we have put in place a number of leadership capability initiatives, ranging from programmes for newly-appointed first-time supervisors to development opportunities for our most senior managers.

Of course, there’s no substitute for active participation and one of our more innovative approaches to people development is to encourage them to work in the community, for charities, as school governors, for community groups, environmental projects and so on.

In this way, schools and community organisations benefit from the time and efforts of our people. BT, in turn, benefits from the broadening of our people’s management and leadership experience.