spinofflive
Joe Goddard (Image: Supplied, additional design: TIna Tiller)
Joe Goddard (Image: Supplied, additional design: TIna Tiller)

PartnersMarch 16, 2022

Home Screen: Finding the balance between staying connected and switching off

Joe Goddard (Image: Supplied, additional design: TIna Tiller)
Joe Goddard (Image: Supplied, additional design: TIna Tiller)

Joe Goddard’s work is all about keeping our connections steady, but his home life is all about balancing the need to stay connected with things that bring joy in the real world.

This story was created in paid partnership with Vodafone. 

When Joe Goddard started as the experience and commercial director at Vodafone in July 2021 he knew his role was to help guide customers through Covid-19. He didn’t know that after just five weeks in the job he’d be forced to spend the vast majority of the next seven months (and counting) working remotely under the restrictions of Covid-19. 

While he misses the collaboration and connection of the office, it’s given Goddard an acute awareness of how essential his role is in supporting Vodafone customers – especially its small business clients – through this period. Communication has never been more important as Covid forces people to connect in different ways through the power of technology. And it’s Goddard and his team’s job to make sure that experience is positive – and when it’s not they need to find the solution. 

“Our focus is on delivering great connectivity wherever you are – whether it’s while visiting customers, at the home office, sports field watching your kids play, or chilling out at the beach. We’re investing hundreds of millions of dollars into our mobile and fixed networks every year,” he says. 


Home Screen is brought to you by Vodafone. Technology is changing the way we interact with the world. Learn more about how Vodafone can help you to embrace new ways of working at vodafone.co.nz/workfreerange.


Goddard was drawn to Vodafone by CEO Jason Paris – whom he worked with at Spark – and Paris’s unique approach to running the business. (Paris famously spends hours on social media, answering individual queries and complaints from customers.)

“He’s really ambitious, but he does it in a really un-corporate way,” Goddard says.

Goddard is equally committed. Last year he set his team a target, promising if they reached it he’d get the number tattooed. They hit it. On 17 February, Goddard came through on his end of the deal – and now has 40 tattooed on his upper thigh. The Spinoff spoke to Goddard about what it was like to start a dream job in the middle of a pandemic. 

What was it like starting such a significant role in the middle of the pandemic, especially one that is intimately tied to supporting Vodafone customers through this crisis?

It was a crisis for a lot of our customers, especially small businesses. New Zealand’s a country of small businesses and the people who work for small businesses are also part of households. So they’re the lifeblood of our company. 

I got five weeks in the office before we went back into level four, which I was really thankful for. So I got to meet a lot of my team. It was really great to build up some sort of relationships with some of the people. 

One of the most rewarding things I first got to work on was an idea that we ran through social media called Pay It Forward, where we gave all of our employees a chance to give back to small businesses. It was a little gesture compared to what small businesses do for New Zealand, but the response – throughout our staff, throughout the small businesses that we spoke to – has been really great. 

What actually is your role? And how is it part of Vodafone’s ambit?

My team’s responsible for all of the telco products and how customers experience those. We’re responsible for data, and how we use that to help our customers is really important. We create the experience of how customers interact with our brand. And with marketing part of this mix, as a massive fan I’m lucky the Warriors sponsorship sits with me.

We operate in the telco industry where everyone’s got a mobile network, everyone sells the same things. So how you package those up to customers and the experience around it is the defining factor in the market, along with our front line staff. 

A Warriors megafan, Goddard is proud to look after the Warriors/Vodafone partnership (Photo: Ashley Feder/Getty Images)

What’s your bubble look like, who’s at home with you?

So I’ve got my wife, Amanda, and two kids, Zach (11) and Lily (13). It’s been challenging adjusting to working at home. I miss the social interaction of the office.

As our kids get older Amanda I are really aware of the influences of social media. And during lockdown, when kids are talking even more through social media, everything is magnified.

And it’s something we’re thinking about at Vodafone: we help put these things in kids’ hands, how do we help parents to help their kids? And it’s really important. I wonder about the long term effects across the world of lockdowns on kids. It’s not only the schooling, but social media especially.

Kids are constantly exposed to that pressure every single day. It doesn’t stop at three o’clock when they go home, even home can feel like it’s not safe. So, I think we as an industry have got a big job to help New Zealand parents with how they negotiate that.

Working in telecommunications, do you feel that responsibility for the way you’re keeping us connected, especially during the pandemic?

It’s a privilege. It’s a privilege being in an industry where New Zealanders rely on you every single day. That’s humbling. We haven’t been an industry that’s loved. Even so, when I look across my time in the industry, we’re doing things a lot better than what we did 10 years ago. 

However, New Zealanders’ lives depend a lot more on the services that we provide than they did 10 years ago. And then you’ve got other companies who have done things around customer experience. They’ve just lifted the bar. And we haven’t gone as fast as other companies. So we had a lot of work to do.  

But we go to work every day, knowing that New Zealanders depend on our service. Especially businesses and our corporate customers.

How essential to your job is your phone and that ability to stay connected?

It would make my job a lot harder and a lot more regimented without it. Our services go 24/7, so our customers need us every single day, every single hour. So the phone just gives me the ability and flexibility and freedom to be able to help customers all the time.

That could be a curse in terms of work life balance, but the time you save by being able to sort out customer’s problems over a phone, then going back into the office, I just couldn’t imagine doing it without a phone.

The fact that we get to carry around this connectivity, this access to information, the social participation in our pockets is pretty incredible.

Over the Christmas holidays our business goes on and I was able to make sure sales were okay, and make sure retention’s good, check on customer complaints. We go to a little village called Hatepe, which is just south of Taupo. There used to be no connection there, and so you’d have to drive into town to be able to get your emails. But it’s all connected out there now.

How good are you at balancing work and life when you have that permanent ability to be able to check your emails, check on sales, check on retention?

I’m getting better. For a time, I got addicted to how many customers we acquired the day before and how many we lost. I need to break the habit on those a bit more. Just little things, like turning off all notifications, making sure when you go down the beach, you don’t take your phone. You’re in the moment. So trying to be more present with the family and friends, and putting that little thing down is something I’m working on.

Do you have any specific tools that you use to try and take those moments?

A trick is to spend some time organising your day so you make that as efficient and as valuable as possible, and make sure that you’ve got the balance right. I’ve got to exercise every day. So making sure that that’s in my diary. The start of the day is about making sure that the schedule looks right, and at the end of the day it’s thinking about tomorrow.

What are your most important apps?

I use Spotify a lot. We’ve just moved over to Spotify Family, because my son always thought it was a great joke to, halfway through a run, to be able to butt in with The Muppets, so that was a big thing. I just have one playlist and I just keep on adding to it. My wife keeps telling me I need to move it into genres, but I just like one big long one.

I try to use [meditation app] Headspace every day. And so as long as I get my routine right, I get my head right. So just spending 10 or 15 minutes a day, doing a bit of breathing through Headspace. I try to get that in the mornings. So, that’s important.

Keep going!
Learning how to compost at the Community Composting Hub (Image: Supplied)
Learning how to compost at the Community Composting Hub (Image: Supplied)

PartnersMarch 16, 2022

Turning green trash into treasure at a community composting hub

Learning how to compost at the Community Composting Hub (Image: Supplied)
Learning how to compost at the Community Composting Hub (Image: Supplied)

At the Hobsonville Point Community Composting Hub, a web of Aucklanders, worms, microbes and kitchen scraps work in synergy to make compost. Charlotte Muru-Lanning discovers the scheme is not just good for the planet, but good for the community too.

Wedged between rows of mid-density urban housing and a swag of lush native ngahere in Auckland’s northwest sits the Hobsonville Point Community Composting Hub. 

On Wednesday mornings it’s bustling with activity. Volunteers from near and far are potting seedlings from the nursery, weeding between the rows of rhubarb and herbs in the garden, sweeping the pathways and digging food scraps from the local community into their compost bins. Not only does this make smart use of waste, it keeps it out of the landfill.

As a country, we waste a bewildering amount of food. Aucklanders alone send about 100,000 tonnes of food waste to landfill each year. Although food waste naturally degrades much faster than other household waste, it still has a significant environmental impact – especially when it’s dumped into landfill. Food and organic waste accounts for around 9% of New Zealand’s biogenic methane emissions and 4% of our total greenhouse gas emissions.

“Food waste is a huge problem,” says Judith Rosamund who manages the hub. But she reckons those potato peels and eggshells offer up a big opportunity too: when processed correctly, they can be a treasure. 

A Bokashi composting system in action (Photo: File)

At the Hobsonville Point Composting Hub, this road to treasure starts off through the bokashi method of composting, which all their community compost contributors use. The network of composters is facilitated by The Compost Collective, a project to increase the number of Auckland households engaged in composting . The collective, which offers advice on getting started and runs regular free workshops, is a collaboration between Kaipātiki Project and EcoMatters Environment Trust, and is sponsored by Auckland Council.

Bokashi bins work like this: at home, you collect your food scraps in a bokashi bucket – which is basically a bucket with holes in the bottom inside another, slightly bigger bucket – with a clip-on lid. Every now and then you sprinkle a small amount of lactobacillus powder onto the layers of waste, which essentially pickles your scraps like a kind of kitchen-waste sauerkraut. 

One of the composting team volunteers has brought his bucket into the Hobsonville hub today to add to the drop off bin. Donald lives in a townhouse and keeps his bucket in the garage, but says you could happily get away with keeping one on your porch or under the kitchen sink. Because of the collaborative way that the Community Composting Hubs operate, even if you don’t have a direct use for compost yourself, you can easily contribute your scraps instead of exiling them to landfill.

Today, Donald’s bucket is filled with three weeks’ worth of vegetable and fruit waste. Unlike regular compost bins which tend to start smelling pretty unpleasant within a few days, bokashi bins can go weeks without needing to be emptied. In fact when Donald lifts the lid on his, there’s just a faintly sour whiff, like yoghurt. As well as the plant matter, a liquid – known to adherents as bokashi “tea” – collects in the bottom bucket. This potent mix can, when watered down, be used as a fertiliser, as a weed killer, or to help clear the gunk out of drains. 

Wormy compost helps build healthy ecosystems (Photo: File)

Once dropped off at the hub, the fermented food scraps are added to a larger master bin where they go into large (aptly named) “composters”. The composters at the hub were funded in part by the Upper Harbour Local Board and Four Winds Foundation. 

The composting process takes about three months as microbial action works to break down the organic matter into teenier and teenier pieces. This also causes the soon-to-be-compost pile to heat up naturally – the heap next to us is currently humming away at a toasty 65 degrees Celsius.

Unlike the compost you buy from garden centres and hardware stores, the end product is living – just teeming with worms and ready to be added to nourish the hub’s own kai patch or to be distributed among the community. 

The very act of composting is an intervention that has the potential to change people’s habits and awareness for the better, Rosamund says. “Often, when people start doing this they begin to notice what they’re throwing out.”

Especially when you’re living in a city, it’s easy to become distanced from your impact on the environment. We leave our rubbish on the kerb and a stranger picks it up and takes it to an unknown location to be buried in landfill. Everything we flush or wash down the drain gets dealt with by someone else. Hardly any of us know what happens with the scraps we blitz into our waste disposal machine. It’s very much out of sight and out of mind.

In the first instance, Rosamund hopes that the physical presence of a bucket of scraps in the kitchen or the act of actively dropping off that bucket at the hub encourages people to waste less food in the first place.

But for the food that does end up being thrown away, Rosamund says “it’s not rubbish, it’s a resource”. Composting actually has the potential to rebuild our soil, which despite being a vital resource, is being destroyed at an alarming rate in Aotearoa. Urbanisation, infrastructure, industry, fertilisers and pesticides have stripped soil of its nutrients across the country. Composting offers a much needed replenishment. “Composting isn’t just about getting rid of waste, it’s actually about returning the nutrients and the carbon back to the soil so we can grow more food.” she says. 

Reducing food waste helps lower our greenhouse gas emissions, including emissions in the food production process, as well as emissions from the decomposition of food waste in landfill.

Environmentalism can often feel overwhelming, and that in the grand scheme of things it’s difficult to make a meaningful difference as an individual. Using a community composting hub proves this assumption wrong. Compost your food scraps and you’re helping to keep waste out of landfill, ensuring that valuable nutrients aren’t lost forever and reducing the production of methane in landfills.

At the moment Hobsonville Point Community Composting Hub takes scraps from a network of 48 households, but Rosamund says they’re keen for more and have the capacity to service 120 homes at the moment. Aucklanders interested in becoming part of the composting network can take part in a free hour-long workshop by the Compost Collective sponsored by Auckland Council as part of the council’s commitment to achieving a zero waste city by 2040. And there are a growing number of composting hubs all around the city for other Aucklanders keen to get involved. 

Not only is composting beneficial for the environment, as Donald says, it’s a way to connect to the world around you. “I’m retired,” he says, “so the companionship is very important mentally but also, it’s just great to see everything being broken down in the different stages.”

Being part of this process, a network of people, micro-organisms and household waste offers an expanded sense of community. “It’s sort of a bit of a connection in that you’re actually in a little way helping the Earth, and boy does it need help,” he says.

And while you’re saving the earth, it can be a lot of fun. “You just get such a kick out of worms having a party in your compost.”

But wait there's more!