Up and down the country, households and businesses responded to the call. For organisations like Cornerstone, the UK’s leading mobile infrastructure services company, that owns and manages over 15,500 sites for Vodafone and Telefónica, all 250 of our employees switched overnight to working from home. It was a time where our processes, services and people would provide vital support for the UK’s digital connectivity.
Our sites had to continue to run seamlessly to provide critical connectivity across the UK. To do so, our extended family of several hundred suppliers required safe access to our sites, and needed to understand their current status, allowing them to perform their critical national infrastructure (CNI) work. On top of that, we knew that our suppliers faced, like so many businesses, financial uncertainty with their cashflow.
We quickly mobilised as a team, and through the pro-active use of technology and an innovative, challenging mindset, Cornerstone developed a suite of solutions to tackle our challenges.
Our priority was to contact all of our strategic CNI suppliers, creating both a verbal and visual dialogue early on. It allowed everyone to understand how they could work together to continually keep the UK connected. We did this by hosting weekly Supplier Surgeries on MS Teams, attended by 70 colleagues across Cornerstone and our supplier network. Our agenda led with Health and Safety, which was at the centre of all our decision-making. To make sure our suppliers were as informed as we were, the Surgeries were used to communicate:
To overcome the challenge of making sure the lives of those out in the field were made safer and better understood by the British public, we backed up our approach with tangible actions. We provided CNI equipment and jackets, created telecoms critical works van signage and CNI site notices. Leaflets were issued to explain to members of the public, where needed, that our people were key essential workers, performing critical services to the nation.
Recognising the potential financial risks to some of our suppliers, during these uncertain times, we took the bold decision to reduce payment terms and paid valid invoices more quickly.
PAT COXEN
CEO