Lebara partnered with Investors in People in February 2023 starting our journey with an initial benchmarking survey. Our goal was to achieve a people accreditation, but it was never just about a ‘badge to wear’. We are a business that is all about transformation and focussing on our people practices was and is an important part of this.
We were looking for an accreditation that would require us to roll up our sleeves and do some work. We wanted a framework that would help us identify what we were doing well and what we could improve to transform our people practices and help us make working at Lebara even better. This is why we chose to partner with IIP.
After our initial IIP survey, we developed our 2024 people initiatives and continued to ask for, listen to, and most importantly act on our staff feedback. This has become our mantra. After our assessment process in November 2023, we were awarded our ‘We Invest in People Silver accreditation’. Work didn’t stop with our accreditation. This was just the start of our journey and inspired by our assessment report we had more work to do.
Our 2023 initiatives were driven by HR and the Senior Leadership Team. Going forward we wanted to achieve even more by ensuring everyone knows and plays their part to work on change together. One of the related benefits and successes of the IIP process is that it has got us all talking more, sharing feedback and ideas, collaborating better, and as a result of this making changes. Our staff now know that we are committed to making work better and we have gained internal recognition and positive feedback from them that the work we are doing is making a positive difference.
Being advised we are in the top 20 Silver accredited organisations was a further recognition of the work we have been doing and gave us the final encouragement we needed to nominate Lebara for The Investors in People Awards 2024.
We are relative newcomers to the IIP community, so these are our first IIP awards. Although we are hugely positive about the people practice improvements, we have been making at Lebara, we submitted our award entries with both confidence and trepidation!.
Lebara was founded in 2001 but had a new beginning in 2019 following a change of ownership. Since then, we have been going through a period of transformation which has required a considerable amount of work from all concerned to build the successful business that we have today.
Whilst being IIP accredited gave us external recognition for the work we had done so far on our people transformation we really wanted to shout about how we are continuing to drive the people agenda at Lebara.
We entered Lebara in 3 award categories and were more than delighted (and a little emotional!) when we were shortlisted for all 3 categories.
Just to be shortlisted has given us all a huge sense of pride in the work that we have done and are continuing to do on our people practices. It also gives additional external recognition for everyone at Lebara which is important to us all because where we are now is a genuine collaborative team effort. Even the individual award which I have been shortlisted for recognises this team effort as I couldn’t have achieved this without the support of my HR colleagues and the Senior Leadership Team.
At Lebara, we are proud to have lots of talented individuals who make us a great team. This has been recognised externally in other business areas and we are really proud to say that we are a multi-award winning business.
To win at The Investors in People Awards would be a little different to our other awards. This could be an award for the whole Lebara team which would truly celebrate the collaborative effort and our people achievements to date across our global business.
As we are in the process of a change of investors, both old and new shareholders would also be extremely proud to win an award which shows that they have invested in a business with an excellent team and strong people practices.
Winning an award would also shine the spotlight on the Global HR team who have championed the IIP initiative from the start working closely with our Senior Leadership team, local management teams, and our staff to drive people change. It can be difficult for HR functions to demonstrate how they have added value to the business and utilising the IIP framework our HR team has been able to do exactly this and achieved great things. Winning a team or individual Investors in People award would recognise the valuable contribution that our HR team are making at Lebara.
Another benefit of winning an award is of course how this would further strengthen our employer brand. We are a challenger brand in the telecoms industry and we want to raise our profile as an employer too. We think Lebara is a great place to work but we want our potential colleagues to know this. We believe an IIP award in addition to our Silver accreditation would certainly showcase this so that we can compete for, attract, and retain the best people to make our business even better too.
An alternative, and short answer is that we would be ecstatic (and very emotional!)
At Lebara we consider our product to be the smarter choice. For Lebara partnering with IIP and joining the IIP community was a smarter choice too.
The IIP framework has enabled us to benchmark ourselves against other like-minded organisations in the IIP community. It also provides us with a way to better demonstrate the impact our people initiatives are having and targeting improvements in our survey scores has enabled us to really drive the people agenda at all levels from the top down.
Community is important at Lebara and we are proud to be part of the IIP community. The IIP community helps us to be inspired and hopefully inspire others to champion the people agenda. The 2024 Make Work Better conference was certainly inspirational and reinforced that we are working on the right things / moving in the right direction as we continue on our IIP journey. We also have aspirations to go for Gold (or even platinum!) in our next assessment in 2026 so being able to see what best practice looks like through other organisations journeys provides us with ideas and motivation to keep up the momentum.
For us, engaging in these awards is a further way to demonstrate that as a business we value our people and our people practices. All of the finalists have been doing amazing work on their people practices which being shortlisted recognises. Attending events like this is a great way to celebrate the work being done within our business and also the IIP community as a whole.
We have had a good look through the categories as a source of inspiration for our 2025 People and ESG initiatives. We have already considered in advance the 2025 award categories we might enter and are starting to think about actions we can take to make working at Lebara even better. We hope to keep up the good work and be shortlisted for IIP awards again next year and get a further opportunity to recognise the work being done by all of the organisations within the IIP community.
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