How Aussie Broadband balances culture with rising regulatory scrutiny

Jane Betts, chief people and reputation officer at Aussie Broadband, has spent nearly four years building a people function broad enough to cover call centre workforce planning, business integration and corporate affairs – all while regulatory scrutiny of Australia's telecommunications sector reaches levels she describes as unprecedented.

That scrutiny has sharpened since a routine firewall upgrade knocked out Optus's Triple Zero emergency call service for around 13 hours on 18 September 2025 in the Northern Territory, South Australia, Western Australia and parts of New South Wales – a failure the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) alleges resulted in more than 1,000 breaches of emergency call obligations and has been linked to deaths.

For HR leaders across the sector, the fallout shows how compliance failures now land on the people function as much as on risk and legal teams.

A people portfolio built for scale

Betts's remit at the ASX-listed telco spans the conventional people function alongside property, operational workforce planning for the company's call centres, business integration for acquisitions, and corporate and regulatory affairs and sustainability. "It's a busy, big role and covers a number of different things," she said.

She describes Aussie Broadband's culture as tracing back to its regional Victorian founders, who she said built the business on always doing right by the customer.

"They wouldn't oversell connections, they wouldn't compromise speed, and if they stuffed something up, they'd always fix it and be honest about the fact that they'd stuffed it up," Betts said.

Preserving that ethos since the company's 2020 ASX listing means constantly weighing competing interests, she said: "We think about maintaining the balance between our staff, our customers and our shareholders and trying to get that balance right so that our staff still feel that uniqueness of the culture."

Call centre staff sit at the centre of that balancing act. Betts said new starters go through an 8-to-12-week onboarding program backed by knowledge management systems designed to put the right information "at their fingertips" during a call, alongside ongoing quality checking and coaching.

Automation has taken over simpler transactions such as address changes, she said, leaving staff to handle more complex, emotionally charged calls – including customers experiencing family violence or financial hardship. That mirrors growing concern nationally over psychosocial risk among frontline shift workers, an area Safe Work Australia has been progressively formalising guidance around.

Regulation that keeps rising, not falling

Betts said the compliance burden on telcos is growing, not easing. "The one thing that no regulator ever says or does is say we should regulate less. It's always more," she said.

The sector's next major obligation is Australia's Scams Prevention Framework, which imposes governance, prevention and detection duties on banks, telcos and digital platforms from 1 July 2026, backed by penalties of up to $50 million per contravention overseen by ACMA, according to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority.

Betts said scam activity is a growing operational burden precisely because it straddles two harms at once: "Scammers will use our telephones to scam people to get money, so it's both financial and telephony they have to respond to."

The stakes of getting compliance wrong were underlined in June when Optus agreed to a $100 million penalty for inappropriate sales practices affecting more than 400 customers.

Betts said Aussie Broadband, which relies on the Optus mobile network as a wholesale partner, experienced some Triple Zero call impacts when Optus's network failed but did not record any loss of life.

She said the stakes of any outage go well beyond inconvenience for staff who answer the calls. "It's livelihood, and it's life. Those are the two things," she said, adding that no amount of training can fully prepare frontline staff "to be able to solve a problem that's unsolvable" when a network outage is underway.

Executive leadership under sustained pressure

Since Aussie Broadband's 2020 listing, Betts said, senior leaders including the chief financial officer and chief risk officer now spend an estimated 20 to 30 per cent of their time on board-related work on behalf of shareholders – a workload increase that echoes wider findings on the burnout crisis facing Australia's senior executive ranks.

Betts said HR professionals moving into regulated industries, whether from banking, retail or utilities, need to treat that governance workload as core to the role rather than a distraction from it. "You've got to actually understand what it is, and you've got to do it well, because that's what you have to do to protect the company's licence to operate," she said.