It’s pretty simple really. “Aussie”, to us, is an attitude. Not a race.
Occasionally, we get accused of racism because of the company name, or our promotion of our Australian call centre. Even worse, sometimes customers refuse to deal with members of our team if they have an accent.
None of this is acceptable to us.
There was no particular reason why we chose the name Aussie Broadband when we registered it in 2008. It happened when we amalgamated two companies – Wideband Networks and Westvic Broadband – and it seemed like a great name that would work for us.
Since then, we’ve seen people read all sorts of stuff into the name, depending on their background and world view.
So here’s ours:
“Aussie” is an attitude. We have staff from all sorts of backgrounds, creeds, gender identity, sexual orientation and abilities. The only reason we care about these things is that we firmly believe that the different experiences staff bring to our company make us stronger and more able to reflect our glorious, multi-faceted Australian society in all its richness and depth.
Our leadership team is about as diverse as it gets. We come from various racial and socio-economic backgrounds. Some of us are single and some of us are married. We have different sexual orientations. We have young children, teenage children, grown children, grandchildren. One of us lives interstate. We live in towns and on rural properties. We have family or friends who are Deaf, who have vision impairment, or have other disabilities. One of us has a chronic lung disease. Many of us volunteer.
Aussie Broadband staff bring a myriad of perspectives and experience to the table, but the one thing that binds us together as a family – and make no mistake, we ARE a family – is our absolute belief in our values:
think big
be awesome, not ordinary
no bullshit
be good to people
have fun
At every level, we bounce decisions up against these values every day in our business. They are like those bumper bars on a bowling alley – they guide everything we do. They live in the business, not on the wall. Sometimes we will inadvertently breach them, and in the spirit of no bullshit, we always try to fix that as soon as possible.
So guided by those values, racism has no home here. And we will not tolerate it against our staff. You may find an accent or several in our call centre. Rest assured, our staff are Australian-based and Aussie in attitude, and they are there to help people.
Tags:Culture
