About OVO Energy

Ovo’s teams are given a budget to manage events within their department. These events are a great forum for recap and future planning to ensure collaborative working. To engage teams and support team working these events tend to include an activity to bring the team together. Examples include the HR Team completing an assault course, the Forecasting & Planning Team working together to escape from a room with Puzzlair, the Customer Service Team Leaders who enjoyed a night at Laser quest and the Customer Service team, of around 600 people, doing fancy dress treasure hunt around Bristol.

Ovo’s first community-based giving programme, Ovo Gives Back, was launched in Spring 2016. Through Ovo Gives Back, Ovo supports local charities that have been selected by everyone at the company. As well as providing a £20,000 OVO Foundation grant to each charity, OVO employees volunteer with the local charities each month. Employees also regularly fundraise for the charities, through half-marathons, bake sales and pub quizzes. Through regular mentoring and coding clubs, they also spend time educating children from disadvantaged backgrounds and unlocking their true potential. They launched their first primary school mentoring scheme in Autumn 2016. 28 people from OVO spend one lunchtime a week mentoring children from two local primary schools in Bristol. Both primary schools are based in deprived areas of Bristol. Ovo have been working in partnership with CoderDojo since October 2015 and have introduced over 130 children to the joys of code. In October 2016, Ovo offered coding workshops for young homeless people that work with Depaul to give them insight into a what it’s like to work as a developer and to also teach them practical coding skills. One of OVO Foundation’s aims is to lift young people out of poverty and help those who’ve experienced homelessness find their feet. In 2016, OVO Foundation inspired and funded the ‘Future Builders’ project, which gives homeless young people the skills and opportunity to refurbish a property that will then be their home. In October 2016, a group of young people started a construction course at a local college in Bristol. After learning new skills in the classroom, the group put their newly-acquired skills to use by renovating two properties that they’ll go on to live in Spring 2017 when they start their full-time construction apprenticeship.

OVO invested over £600,000 in their Customer Service department with their new reward initiative, OVO Reward Steps. OVO Reward Steps is a way of rewarding great performance and recognising people’s commitment to OVO within the Customer Service and back office teams. OVO Reward Steps has introduced significant salary milestones alongside clearly defined knowledge and experience criteria, giving people clear career progression in this crucial part of the business. Addressing attrition, sickness and a perception that people were not getting a ‘fair deal’, OVO Reward Steps resulted in a 4% decrease in sickness, 52% decrease in attrition and 39.8% increase in the company’s eNPS score for ‘Reward’. The success of this project in its first four months represents savings to the business of £409,762.