Working together with Childnet International and local students

Ben Brown, our Responsibility Manager here at Sky talks about his recent experience working with Sky’s senior leaders, Childnet International and students from a local school to tackle a challenging issue.

It’s great when you go home at the end of a day feeling truly inspired. After spending two days with 

20 top Sky leaders working with students from Lampton School that’s exactly how I feel and I’m more convinced than ever about the power of collaboration, given a common challenge. 

As Responsibility Manager within the Bigger Picture team I work right across Sky to address the particular responsibilities we have in our day-to-day business as an entertainment and communications company. To bring this to life, I’ve worked with our Talent Development team to create a module that gets our senior leaders working on a specific challenge focused on an important material issue. We call this ‘living it’ and the challenge aims to deliver real value for a community partner whilst giving participants an opportunity to practice their leadership skills. From my perspective, it also helps to embed understanding and ownership of a particular issue amongst leaders who represent all different parts of Sky. 

What has got me feeling inspired is the latest ‘living it’ session which saw our leaders working with Childnet International and students from the 6th form at Lampton School, Hounslow. In mixed groups, the Sky participants and students were tasked with coming up with strategies for how Sky could help Childnet to deliver some key objectives around its promotion of Safer Internet Day 2013, and child safety online. The young people challenged and inspired our leaders and collaboratively they developed some outstanding plans that will deliver real value for Sky as well as delivering to Childnet’s objectives. 

A ‘winning’ team was given 4 hours to deliver one key element of their plan and as a result Childnet now have 2 engaging YouTube videos that they can use to promote Safer Internet Day. I hope a personalised promotion from Sky News presenters Eamonn Holmes and Charlotte Hawkens will help encourage people to get behind it. 

Have a look at what they created here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/saferinternetday2013

And to find out more about Safer Internet Day 2013, and to get behind it visit: 

http://www.saferinternet.org.uk/safer-internet-day

We’re working hard to make sure we support our customers to keep themselves and their children safe when using Sky TV and Sky Broadband. To find out more about how we support customers visit www.sky.com/security.