Which of us hasn’t stood in a queue in the rain at a bus stop, and thought: “Do the bosses, sitting up there in the warm and dry in Cowley, really care about us?” as the minutes tick by and no bus appears. You can bet your bottom dollar that any departure signs at the bus stop are helpfully reading: “please refer to timetables” too.

“Well, I very much care,” says Phil Southall, managing director of Oxford Bus Company, “Because I use the bus every day myself. Until recently I lived in Kidlington: it was said that the buses always ran on the 2 service because I lived there! More recently I’ve moved to Bicester – I catch the opposition [Stagecoach] bus on the way in, and our own on the way back, to get a balanced view of how the services are operating. I’m passionate about delivering good customer service, and quality public transport.”

Of course, you would expect a bus company boss to say that. But Phil comes over as someone who is totally in love with his job – after we’ve talked in his office, he eagerly takes me on an engrossing tour covering every inch of Oxford Bus’s Cowley headquarters. Besides caring about his passengers, he’s keen to improve conditions for his staff too. Promoted to managing director just over a year ago, he recently told a trade magazine: “The most fundamental change I’ve made [since becoming managing director] has been to our approach to staff.”

“This building has an upstairs and downstairs,” Phil points out – and indeed we are talking in his upstairs office. “The approach was: if you’ve been naughty, you come upstairs, see a manager, and more often than not you got a disciplinary report. You might have ten such instances a day. When you tot that up across the business, morale was quite low: people felt that they were in a straightjacket, and couldn’t use their initiative. And because the managers were conditioned in that way as well, we needed to engage on a real culture change.

“So we developed a company vision – “one team delivering an ever-improving customer experience” - and helped staff relate to that. In addition all our managers went on a leadership development course, to show them how to get the best out of people. We now try not to resort to the disciplinary process, and that’s already paying dividends. We don’t expect everyone to be all-singing, all-dancing, and all-smiling from one end of the day to the other – all I ask of people is that they bring the best version of themselves to work.”

All of which suggests that Phil is a people person, rather than the sort of manager who spends all day glued to spreadsheets on a computer screen.

“We do have our financial targets to achieve, we’re a plc,” he comments. “But you’re only as good as your people.”

How, I ask, did Phil’s interest in buses first begin? “I’m one of three children, and when my parents were taking my older sister to school, apparently I used to make grunting noises in my pram, and point at the buses going past – this was before I could even talk. That developed into my parents buying me model buses, which in those days were in quite short supply. Also, my father was an accountant for a company that made bus handrails, so he had lots of interaction with transport companies. He used to bring trade journals home, which I used to read as a young, inquisitive lad. So that’s when I first got my passion for the bus industry.

“In due course I had to decide what I was going to study at university, not really knowing what I wanted to do, But I found a course in transport management at Aston University, which being a Brummie meant that I could continue to live at home.”

No doubt, I suggest, Phil always behaved impeccably on his school bus?

“There were a couple of incidents,” he laughs, “But of course I wasn’t responsible for them! Schoolkids will be schoolkids.”

Phil arrived in Oxford in 2012, when he was appointed operations director of Oxford Bus.

“I’d been to Oxford five or six times on day trips over the years,” he explains. “But what stands out is how much buses are part of the city. When I arrived here I was startled by the fact that, on a weekday, 55% of people in the city centre have got there by bus. That rises to 65% at weekends. If you compare that with, say, High Wycombe, where the figure is 7%, the difference is stark.”

Phil was promoted to managing director just over a year ago, and is in charge not only of Oxford Bus, but also Wallingford-based Thames Travel, and Carousel, which operates out of High Wycombe. Plenty of challenges lie ahead: Oxfordshire County Council has aspirations to rid the city centre of diesel buses by 2030, switching to electric power instead. But, thinking of the batteries that caught fire on the new Boeing Dreamliner planes, and smartphones that constantly need recharging, I ask Phil: is the technology up to the job of providing an all-electric bus service?

“That’s a very good question. There are two ways to go electric: one is to include a small diesel engine as back-up, in case you run out of juice: if a bus is running fifteen minutes late because it’s been stuck in Oxford’s traffic, passengers waiting to get on are not going to be happy if the driver says: ‘Sorry, we’ve got to sit here for ten minutes recharging the batteries’. So as a stepping stone we’re looking at these ‘virtual’ electric buses, and gaining experience with them first, before we go down the fully electric route.

“There is a problem with installing battery recharging points too – they could be visually intrusive, especially in Oxford city centre.”

And talking of ever juice-hungry smartphones, I ask Phil: does he turn his off once he gets home, and think about something other than buses?

“The phone is on 24/7, I get told off about that. And I do like to pick a place at random on a Saturday, and go off to look at their public transport offerings: a real busman’s holiday! But I do relax – I like going to the sun every now and then. Also, I have a passion for the Eurovision Song Contest, so I’m off to Stockholm in May, with my partner, and some friends. And I love pantomimes – I saw three over Christmas.”