How Will People Remember Us?
This isn’t an outbreak of philosophical musings but a hard, practical question. One that all infrastructure contractors should ask themselves. We always need to be conscious of how our organisation and people will be remembered after the project is finished and what sort of legacy we are leaving behind.
We want our company logo to be a reassuring sight when people see it associated with highways or rail projects.
We hope people will say of any project Osborne Infrastructure delivers that: ‘The disruption might have been a bit of a pain, but it seemed better managed than usual, and I always knew what was happening. And the result was well worth a bit of inconvenience.’ That’s what we strive for as a minimum.
And if there’s any way to prevent all disruption by combining offsite and out of hours working that’s what we’ll do.
It should go without saying that work is completed accurately and to a high standard. The legacy of that is an asset that needs minimal ongoing maintenance with no need for any rework.
The Community Legacy
Alongside the legacy of high-quality assets that are a pleasure to use we also aim to make our mark in communities.
We do this through positive and conscious programmes that aim to deliver maximum tangible benefits for local communities. Naturally, this means engaging communities to identify the initiatives that they see as beneficial and working collaboratively with our customers to align with their social value objectives.
We prioritise the use of local SME partners and engage new providers through our procurement processes and ‘meet the buyer’ events. This approach helps to ensure that part of our legacy is economic wellbeing. These events are always held close to the project location. We aim to help build a network of thriving local businesses that recruit locally and contribute to local economies.
The final part of the legacy is to use projects to showcase the exciting careers available in infrastructure. Giving young people access to sites is obviously difficult but we partner with local universities and colleges to talk about the work we do and to identify and encourage young people to be part of the infrastructure community.
As an organisation, Osborne has a clear objective: “By 2024 we will reflect with real pride on the projects delivered and on the people that have delivered them, and the economic growth that has been stimulated as a result of these”
