- So our next speaker who's Dr. Sean Gallagher and he's the director for the Centre for New Workforce at Swinburne University of Technology. We're gonna be doing a Q&A session with Sean. So once we start our Q&A, just to let you know, we are recording, so if you are not meant to be here or you said I'm working from home or something today, just be aware that you will be on the recording, but you're gonna come up with a lot of fantastic questions. Sean's one of Australia's leading experts on the future of work and it's his research but also his opportunity to speak to so many workplaces across Australia and be part of this emerging discussion, which makes what he has to say so relevant. And remember, we're gonna be doing two Q&As, we're gonna be doing one directly with Sean and then we're gonna be following up with a panel after our pharmaceutical presentation. So let me introduce Dr. Sean.

- Morning everyone, how's the volume? Excellent. Morning everyone, it's terrific to be here. Thanks very much for the invitation from the ACT government to be here to talk about Healthier Work. And I certainly acknowledge what Damien said is that we have workforces in which there are workers that don't have access to hybrid working and those that do, you probably would remember the headlines recently of Elon Musk and him forcing all of his head office workers back into head office. He didn't want to create what he called flexibility divide, where those in head office had access to, you know, working from home or coming to the office where those on the factory floor had to turn up every day. Now he's kind of right, he's half right. I actually think that yes, it's important to avoid the flexibility divide, but not go back to the future in order to do it. Workers, knowledge workers in particular, the horse has bolted, the gate is open, flexible working is here to stay particularly accentuated by a very tight labour market. So we need to continue on our journey with knowledge workers and understand what hybrid working looks like for them. At the same time as starting a conversation with our frontline workers. What are flexible working arrangements for them? Now today I'm gonna focus much more on knowledge workers, that's not to mean at the exclusion of frontline workers. I might sort of throw in a little bit on frontline workers here and there, but it really is about how we get people back together. Now a little bit of a, a proud worthy moment for us, our work that we've done. So Chris, no doubt has sent through to you the report on the left hand side. Put that out late last year and it looks at how do we make hybrid working work. More recently in June this year, we published a report in partnership with Deloitte and at the time Natalie James was one of the co-authors with me on that report. She's now secretary of the Federal Department of Employment and Workplace Relations and yesterday they had the second reading in Parliament on their new IR legislation. And it enshrines flexible working rights for those that have been traditionally excluded from traditional office work, Monday to Friday nine to five. So in particular it gives rights to, you know, parents who have school-aged children to those with caring responsibilities to older people. In other words, what remote working has done is that it's demonstrated we don't need to be tied to an office in order to do our work. And that's had an enormous benefit in terms of allowing access to people who traditionally have not been able to come into the office. So it's great to see that our work has shaped national debate and is about to, well it's in a bill, let's hope it gets through parliament in its form, but it really demonstrates some of the benefits that remote working has. I'm not gonna talk about benefits not working from here I'm gonna talk about what we need to repair from remote working in order to get to hybrid working. Let me say at the outset, hybrid work is hard. It is the most complex work setting we have ever known and it's my job today to help you understand the problems, understand what we now know what works and what doesn't. And to help simplify this complexity to provide you some structure, some actionable insights as to how you might start applying hybrid working to your organisation. There's no blueprint, there's no one size fits all. It's going to be unique to every single organisation and I can help you providing some guardrails and some insights as to how that works. So hybrid work can be healthier work, require a lot of work in effort to get there, but it is worth doing because hybrid work, get it right is gonna be better than anything that we've had. I'm gonna talk to you about the problem and what we've learned in the first half and then the second half actionable insights. And in terms of the problem, I'm gonna focus on the impact of remote working on workers and the impact of remote working on our organisations. So let's get started with workers. As I mentioned we put out this report earlier this year and it's quite lengthy. We surveyed workers right across the economy to understand what has been the impact of the pandemic on work and worker expectations. And I won't go through all of it. I'm gonna highlight the three standout findings as far as I'm concerned. And we learned three remarkable things. First of all, as I'm sure you all know, Australian workers are exhausted. More than one in three are working more hours now than before the pandemic. And we think that that is an under report. We think it's more than that. And we see this in terms of when workers are working, How did Damian said, you know, there's a big bump from 5:00 to 8:00 AM et cetera, but what we're finding is that one in two workers are working outside their standard hours at least weekly, including one in four doing it daily. And the number one reason it's workload, it's not because they've taken up time throughout the middle of the day to do caring or go to the gym and Pilates, walk the dog. It's because of workload. Work has actually become less efficient, and I will certainly dive into that a little bit later on. There's been a huge increase in the expectation of flexible working even in the time throughout the pandemic. Three, sorry, four in five want flexible working, which is up from three in five only six months ago. And frontline workers increasingly want flexible working as much as their flexible working colleagues. And as you'll see in the legislation that Nat has just put to parliament through yesterday, that flexible working is now a baseline expectation for all workers. This is a really important. Flexible working is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end and for workers that end, better wellbeing enabled by work life balance, what does flexible working actually deliver to a worker? More time and more control of it in theory, which is why flexible working is so keenly sought after because they see it as driving better wellbeing outcomes. And you know, when you look at it, two in three are prepared to forego a payment in order to have flexible working at a time of rising inflation and living costs. We think that's pretty remarkable. Yep. I wanna focus now on the impact of remote working on organisations. On the left hand side there is all the healthy network structure of an organisation. Most organisations looked like that before COVID. The black bonds are connections between members of teams and the teal are connections between teams across the organisation, strong bonds, weak ties. Both essential for the effective operation and culture of an organisation. Strong bonds are really important in terms of productivity within your teams, but you need connections across the organisation for dissemination of knowledge, for culture, for innovation, for creativity. This is what remote working has done. It has, the type of technologies that we use to connect and work with one another. Have been fantastic at keeping us connected with our teams. They've made work much more linear, much more transactional at the expense of connections across the organisation. And this is having enormous impact as demonstrated by research put out by Microsoft published in the journal nature. This has impacted our collaboration networks in our organisations. There's less diversity of perspective in solving complex problems. So people are just solving problems within their teams rather than drawing across the organisation because they're no longer connected to those people. There's reduced transfer of knowledge how workplace learning occurs. Sure you can learn from your colleagues about how to do something specifically, but the know-how of within the organisation, the transfer of IP that happens through those weak ties. This leads to a reduction in the quality of output of organisations which impacts productivity and innovation. I wanna show you this research recently published also in the journal Nature. It's done on the MIT campus and I put this up here, but also not just for you as businesses and organisations, but also for the ACT and Canberra as a CBD. So this is the impact of isolation on weak ties. Literally from the day one that MIT went into lockdown you can see a gradual decay in the weak ties across MIT. Now you can imagine MIT, one of the best research universities in the world, the connections across the organisation are critical in order to do the research that they do, but you can see a gradual decline. Over that period 4,800 connections between people across MIT decayed and disappeared. Connections with close colleagues didn't change 'cause of the type of technologies that we've been using. But as soon as the campus reopened, bang to the day, weak ties started to regenerate. This is partly why it's important that we need to bring people back together into the office but also back to our CBDs. Those connections are really important and part of the vital economy of our cities and across the country. So you can see that there's a partial regeneration of ties almost immediately and over time that will increase. And not just those who might be in the office or across the street, but more across, you know the CBD, Those who are not co-located are less likely to form. Really important in terms of you know, human interaction, those serendipitous encounters which are critical. Our research has shown that our current approaches to flexible working are really not working. They're not sustainable. We had the opportunity in August last year to compare three cohorts of workers, Sydney and Melbourne were in lockdown, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth were not. We could compare those fully in the office, those fully remotely, at home. Those going between the office and home. When I talk about flexible working, I'm not talking about remote, I'm talking about workers going between location and compared to those cohorts who were in a fixed location, I found that flexible location workers were less productive, they were less able to collaborate with their team, they felt less connected and a lower sense of belonging with their organisation, and counterintuitively they were less able to take a break, which kind of defeats the purpose of flexible working. Flexible working is too complicated, but asking workers to figure out where am I gonna work? When am I gonna do, be it there? Who's gonna be there when I'm working? Is it worth coming in, should I just work from home? What do I do? It's too complicated. Our research that we've been, you know, working with organisations at the firm level we've been doing, helping them understand flexible working crystal clear workers will die in a ditch over flexible working. They want it but it is stressing them out. Too complicated. So to make flexible working sustainable, we have to simplify it, and that's my role today. So this is where we're going. Gone from pre-COVID, remote, this is what hybrid looks like. It's far more complex than anything we've seen before. That's all right. If you take the best of the office and combine it with the best of remote, that's still not hybrid. There's more to hybrid than that. There are more patience, more degrees of freedom. Here's another way to look at it, the increasing complexity in how we organise work. So before COVID, the, in terms of time and location. Location was in the office, time was standard hours, most people Monday to Friday, nine to five. Remote, so we flipped location but it's still in one location. The hours became more complex. Not just standard but also non-standard. In hybrid it's not only office in anywhere, it's also hybrid in-between everyone online but also time, you know, standard and non-standard. It is incredibly complex. So asking workers, even team leaders to figure it out is very difficult. We need some structure in terms of how we do work and that's what I want to talk to you about, but first you need to repair the damage that remote working has caused. I came across this photo in my Instagram feed recently and it sums up everything that has been caused by remote work. The way that we communicate is a little broken. 70% of all meetings keep workers from doing the tasks that they should be doing. So 30% are probably worthwhile. 70% of them not worthwhile. Worker on average spends 62 meetings per month. That's a lot of meetings. Remember part of it is also that, the right intentions, we wanted to have a lot of connection, people isolated, so we went on to, you know, lots of Teams and Zooms now become the default. I'll explain to you why in a moment that Teams and Zoom meetings are actually not appropriate for a lot of the work that we do. But collaboration has also become broken. There's been a proliferation in tools like Slack and Teams and and the Atlassian Suite of you know, Think that we're collaborating but we're really not. We're just coordinating actions. We're just sharing information. Meaningful collaboration is value creating for the organisation. It's complex problem solving, it's dealing with a crisis. It's those really hard decisions. It's when people have different views, different mental models on how to approach something. Collaboration is where you converge on the meaning of complex information. It's where you all converge. You come to consensus around and get to one mental model as to how to approach and to make a decision on how to act. Help make sure that we have the right time. I put up this slide because everyone loves it. This is research outta the UK and it shows damage or the benefit of having meeting free days. Now I'm not here to say you have to have meeting free days, but it does demonstrate the importance of having meeting free period. In red is highlighted productivity, you can see that two meeting free days a week, done on many companies across the world, leads to a 70% increase in productivity for the work. You can see that whole swath of different factors, positive, from having meeting free days. So in terms of organising workload, making work more effective and efficient, carving out time in your weekly schedule for work that doesn't require meetings, this is protecting cognitive space within your calendars for deep thinking, for focus work, for that those hard tasks that require attention and not to be distracted by meetings. Meeting free days doesn't mean you can't talk. Remember when we used to work in the office, you know you might have had a day without meetings, you didn't sit at your desk, you interacted with your colleagues. You said, you know, "How do I work on this? Have you got any ideas on this?" So the normal flow of work, but keeping your diary free of hardwired meetings but repair, sorry remote working has also damaged us as people. My line is that we've all become 2D avatars of ourselves, we've become smaller versions of who we used to be. McKinsey has has put out this research which is, first of all it's concerning on one level, our professional networks have diminished, which I think most of us would, but more concerningly those workers are not motivated in rebuilding them. Sort of all become a little bit isolated, smaller, just want a transactional, do our work. Partly I think because workloads have gone through the. Work is less efficient. It's like "I don't have time to do that. I just do what I need to do and get it done." And we need to reengage with people as humans in the work. What used to be one of the main job satisfaction factors for workers was workplace buddies. That is now not rating any. We need to bring back the human in work. So we need to repair damage caused by remote working. We need to restructure work across location and we also need to think about repurposing the role of the office in hybrid work. So in terms of repairing work, I've done this decision matrix for you and about what is the objective, what's the business objective of bringing people together? Is it to convey information? Is it to converge on the meaning of complex information or is it to connect with others as people, as humans to build relationships and bonds? So the context is important. Familiar is if I'm working with people that I know on things that I've done a hundred times, familiar. Novel, am I working on something that I've never done before and/or working with people I haven't worked before, novel. And so to convey information, most of the time we should be using asynchronous media, emails, documents, Slack, whatever it might be. Not a zoom meeting, not a Teams meeting. Trying to make sure that we're using media for the appropriate purpose to actually make work more efficient. We're wanting to converge on the meaning of complex information. That's where synchronous connection is much more important. If a familiar context, you know virtual is probably fine or some hybrid arrangement, but if we're dealing with a crisis or if we come together, you know right across, you know, bringing workers from various organisations to focus on a really complex challenge, I'd be doing a lot of that upfront work in person. Converging on the meaning of something is really importantly work done together in person. Of course connecting with people you might have established, you know, an established team or a relationship, a long term relationship with a client. Most of that time is probably okay virtually, but to build trust and relationships it really needs to be done in person. Kind of obvious, but we've forgotten how to do it. The next is to restructure work. So you know, if I stood here two and a half years ago or whatever it was February 2020, and I asked you "What's the role of the office," you all would've looked at me as if to say "what's he on? What kind of a question is that? The office is where we go to do work." But we found out through remote working that a lot of the work that we used to do in the office is better done outside the office. A lot of routine task based individual work, asynchronous, loosely coupled, that's actually better done outside of the work. Deep thinking focused work. So the role of the office increasingly becomes where people come together. Not just to you know, to collaborate, to connect but really do meaningful interaction work required in order to, you know, to succeed. And I'll give you some examples of that in a second. But we're starting to structure work according to location, according to what works best where, in terms of the research and if we get it right it can be a boost to productivity as well as enhance creativity and innovation and drive culture in our organisation. This is the hard bit but it's worth doing. We've developed what we call a task relationship grid and it looks at work through the level of human interaction required in order to do that work. Now I've included social connection, relationship forming as work, it's critical. We must do that in our organisations and that's what we do when we come together in person. That becomes one of the primary roles of the office. At the other end, you can sort of see a gradient across there, is that loosely coupled work. Coordination, individual work across but in between. So you know, unstructured collaboration, collaboration diversity, you know that fast messy complex work when you're working in ill-defined problem spaces where you have to converge on the meaning of stuff, that really should be done in person where possible. And a lot of teamwork however can be done, you know. But certainly hybrid and remote as. Here's some examples of you know, the type of activities that each of those relationship types. So think about activity based working but through human interaction and share the slides later so you don't have to go off the detail right now. But there's also diversity in hybrid and you know, each of you are thinking well how about my organisation, you know, a lot of my team are really remote and but we only come in a little bit or I go the other way and most of them in the office and some remote you can actually set up what I call like different flavours, different diversity of an hybrid. So let me just take the two extremes. So one might be, you might call yourself an office first hybrid working organisation, and come through? Yeah, so on the right hand side is you can see that dialled down remote and dialled up the office. But of course it comes back to we now know what's the type of work that we should be doing remotely. So if you have one day remote per week, make sure that when you're at home you're doing deep thinking, focus work, et cetera, that shouldn't be done in the office. At the same time, if you're a remote, sorry that's an office first, sorry If you're remote first and so you're less time in the office, more time remote. Shift the dial the other way so that when you come together you're only doing activities that can, are required to be done with people together connecting meaningfully. The last is to repurpose the office. Now it sounds a little bit weird, but the office should be much more than just where we can collaborate and create. How do we, you know many of you think, you're looking at the cost of your office space. How do we switch the office from being a cost to being a strategic value driver for your organisation? So instead of coming together to collaborate, how does the office align to your mission? So think about, "Oh this space exists to accelerate product development in order for us to be the market leader in our segment, which aligns to our mission." So that the role of the office, it almost takes on a persona, right? In a way that it hasn't done before and it strategically aligns to your mission. How do we think and repurpose the role of the office? One way to do that is the activities that you do. And this is about the rituals. We all have values and behaviours in our organisation, but what are the rituals that bring it to life And particularly those rituals can change our behaviours in the office and change our mindset about the role of the office. So for example, start, these are rituals that you should only do when you come together in the office. So you change people's mindset. Starting a day with a white boarding session or brainstorming for instance, making sure you've got monthly meet and greets with new employees. Sure you have major project kickoffs in the office and as I mentioned before because those weak ties have diminished and workplace learning has suffered, yet we're not going completely back into the office. We have to be a bit more intentional and purposeful around workplace learning. So having rituals that drive workplace learning, you know like the last one there. A quarter have a stuff up session, bring people from various teams together, say "What didn't work this quarter, what did you learn?" Not only is that important in terms of disseminating knowledge and information, trust and psychological safety and builds those connections. Need to be more intentional and purposeful about this in a way we haven't. So a structured approach to hybrid is hard work but it helps simplify the complexity of hybrid work. By repairing the work that happened during remote, we can make hybrid more effective, provide better wellbeing outcomes. Restructuring makes flexible work much more sustainable and takes a lot of the complexity out of hybrid work. It's really critical that in any approach to hybrid, it's not top down. Remember this disruption is being driven by employees. Make sure you co-create your hybrid work approach with them. 'Cause then everyone owns it and then everyone can make sure it delivered. Certainly in the report about setting up a hybrid working charter with your, what are the principles, values that will guide you in the decisions that you make around hybrid. That it's, you co-create that with employees, that everyone owns it, you can use it then as part of your talent and attraction, you know, part of your employee value proposition to other, or to other workers. Skills and capabilities. I haven't gone into that today, I'm very happy to talk about it. But think about two things. How do we work in hybrid, what's changed? I say hybrid hasn't changed our jobs but it's changed, changes how we do them and how there's a lot of capabilities around that. And as leaders, how do we empower people in a hybrid. Test and learn. This is really critical in the sense that no, there's no set and forget, there's no blueprint. Hybrid is going to change and you know the world is gonna change. Set up experiments with your team. Okay these are the rituals we're gonna try for the next six months. Let's see how they go. Let's all commit to them, let's all develop them together, let's commit to them and then in six months time we will review what's worked, what hasn't, what do we keep, what do we refine, let's iterate and do it again. That way you're minimising your risk that way you're constantly responding to the dynamics of not only your organisation, but also the operating. And you know, as we're trying to bring people back into the office, people think, oh maybe it's free coffee Tuesdays or things like that. Sure. And/or the latest kit and fit out. People is the new amenity in the office. People will bring back people. Having work that requires people to meaningfully connect with one, gives everyone a compelling reason as to why they come to the office, they know why they're there and that that will help drive connections across the organisation, rebuild your social capital and ultimately make it more meaningful for all of. And you put out a lot on LinkedIn, please if you keep up to date with the latest, you can find me drop stuff there. But the questions.

- Gonna throw everybody and grab one of the panel mics. Thanks very much Sean. I actually don't know where to start. I actually know I'm here for everybody else's questions, not mine. There were so many points in that and I came along this morning thinking, it's not about starting this process, it's about what next and and how do we continue it, and we're all at different stages along this continuum of are we hybrid, are we flexible? But it's not just about remote working as you said. Questions, we're gonna take some questions, however, just a point in the room if you're watching online, these questions will be asked into microphones, although we can hear you in the room and we need to make sure everyone online can hear, so burning questions right down the front, let's start down here at the front and if you can just introduce your name and maybe your organisation before your question as well.

- [Lou] Lou from TSA Management. Thank you Sean that was really quite insightful. I just wanna ask question, particularly with the ACT government who's currently encouraging their workforce to work from home because of the light rail construction which basically destroys the city life. What would you be suggesting to Damian West?

- Let's just start with a light question there.

- Look, there are clearly going to be various reasons as to why, you know, be it another outbreak, be it light rail, whatever it might be. I think the key thing here is to, it's an ongoing discussion with your workers and mindful that if that's a requirement and it's difficult to get to work because of some, you know, barrier, whatever it might be, what are you gonna do for the next six months? Test and learn. So we have a much better understanding and I was sort of doing black and white between office and remote, but we can also look at synchronous and asynchronous means. Certainly you can start today on going through everyone's work schedule and saying we don't need these meetings. We need to protect people's time to do deep thinking and focus work. But we also might need some times where we deliberately come together, and it might not, you might not be able to get to your workplace because of construction, but maybe identify another site where everyone can come together once a fortnight, once every three weeks or whatever it is. And it may not necessarily be for work, but to maintain and build that human connection. So you're recognising that we don't know, well March 2020, we didn't know what was gonna happen to us. We had to respond to that, but at least now we have a much clearer way of understanding complex.

- Test, and learn and experiment. We've all become social scientists as managers and business owners haven't we? We're going up the back and then we'll come over here.

- [Ruth] Ruth Wilson, National Museum of Australia. Thank you, that was a great presentation. Right at the start you talked about the disparity between workforces that don't have a choice about hybrid work or not and I wondered if you've come across any insights that might help manage that equity issue, thank you.

- Great question, and this is, I won't, I was gonna say it's a sleeper issue, but it's increasingly becoming sort of come to front burner. Remember, they don't want flexible working, they want better wellbeing outcomes. Flexible working is the party enabler. And when I look across the data, across the entire workforce, frontline workers want wellbeing as much as their head office colleagues, I did, you know, survey data and you know, based on the analysis, you know, when you ask people, what's the main thing you get from work forever and a day, it's been pay. Wellbeing is ahead of pay now and there's no distinction between frontline workers and between flexible workers. But the thing is with flexible working and why it's so dearly held on to and tightly held by workers is it's the only thing that they have under their control in order to drive better wellbeing outcomes. Employers on the other hand have a whole suite of levers at their control. Flexible working is one, more meaningful work, manageable workloads, you know, providing support around, you know, being, you know, ensuring better mental, physical health, et cetera. There's a whole range of things that employers can do. And so one of the things that I've seen with, so with, it's an organisation called VicTrack. So you know, lots of rolling stock and you know, tracks et cetera and signals and people that have turn up to work sites, obviously they need to be there at a certain time. So, you know, and at a certain place. What they have done is they've taken out pain points in the work that they do. So taken out a lot of the crappy admin work and they've sort of automated that a little bit and done a few things like that. In other words, making work more meaningful drives better wellbeing outcomes. But the most important thing is to start a conversation with your workers across the board. You know, flex, you know, frontline workers, they know that they can't, most of them, do their job from home, you know, but at the same time they want to be engaged about, well what does flexible working mean for me and how does it drive, how can I get better wellbeing outcomes, including through flexible working but through other means.

- Gonna head over here if, should we, do we need to change this term frontline, with, in a hybrid workplace? We've got frontline, sideline, backline, the lines are blurring aren't they? As you showed over there. Now, let's head over here for a question.

- [Sue] Hi Sue Williamson, UNSW Canberra. Thanks Sean.

- Hi Sue.

- That was a really fascinating presentation. I'm really interested in the shift that has happened from working to home to hybrid working and with working from home, the research showed that there were so many benefits around productivity, wellbeing, work life balance, all that sort of stuff. But you are finding that flexible workers are less productive and efficient I think it's really fascinating. And I know that you went through some of the factors that contribute to that, but do you have anything else to add because yeah, it's a great point.

- So a couple of things. So again, make the distinction that remote working isn't flexible working in this study. So sort of the logistical challenge was impacting productivity, but if you look at productivity for remote working over the course of the pandemic in the first six months is when we saw the real value of remote working. That's when we saw the productivity increase. But as work has been, you know, consumed with more meetings throughout the day and you know, a lot of other things, actually seeing a drop off. You know, productivity is unit of output per unit of time. When you look at unit of time as a day, productivity looks about the same, but if you look at it per hour, it's really going down. And as I mentioned, so one of the key things, so about more than one in four workers is not being compensated for working outside standard hours because of their workload. We think that they're not claiming over time that their employers don't know that they're working outside of their standard hours in order to get work done. We think there's a massive under reporting. And you know, as employers you have an obligation to know when your workers are, even if they're working at 3:00 AM you know, it's, under the fair work system, it's an implied that they're working at that time at your direction. So there's an obligation of you to know but also having a much clearer view and sounds like you've done great work in understanding those different peak times. You know, it's good to know that worker is working at 5:00 AM but that might mean that they're actually owed overtime, even if they took time off in the middle of the day to take, you know, after life. Remote working is good when it's protected and not sort of taken over by a lot of other inefficient ways of communicating. But also how do we make sure that we structure work in, flexible so that when you're working remotely you're doing the work that is, there's a comparative advantage of doing that work when.

- Hey down here for another question.

- [Colin] Hi Colin McGuire from the Pharmacy Guild of Australia. Just interested, you mentioned the legislation going forward at the house and talked about the cultural and co-design aspect in relation to developing flexible working, remote working. I'm just really interested if you see any dangers, you said a top down approach, legislation's top down, can you see any, you know, dangers, a divide between, you know, employers and employees into the future on what has been a really natural journey for most?

- I don't know that the legislation is necessarily top down. It certainly provides a framework for flexible working, but one of the things that the legislation aims to enshrine is giving the employee bargaining rights with the employer. At the moment it's sort of, you know, it's a nice, it's sort of a nice to have, you know, flexible working is a nice to have and that, you know, we would certainly encourage employers and employees to talk about flexible working arrangements and you know, of course, some employers are gonna be genuinely, you know, helpful in trying to get that but many employers say, nah, it's, sorry, it's, you've gotta work with us. What this legislation does is saying that for certain groups of workers, you know, parents with school aged kids, parent carers, a number of others, that if the employer and employee don't get to, you know, a situation that works for both, then the employee can use the Fair Work Commission stick. So it is really about trying to, you know, democratise that bargaining a little bit more but having that threat to the employer. And you know, these days, you know, as I said at the outset, remote working has been fantastic for access to work for a lot of people that wouldn't normally do Monday to Friday, nine to five in an office. So how do we make sure that we protect that dimension of work as we go into.

- Sean, we're gonna take one more question before we break and we're coming down here for it. Somebody that had a question, yep.

- [Lucie] Thanks Sean, a lot of good information there. My name is Lucie Hassall from the Centre for Invasive Species. I have a observation and then also a question. Observation, moving from remote work and then back to the office, what I found during the work remote period, I've learned a whole lot of things about people's home life that is then hard to come back to work.

- Things she can't unsee is what she wants to say.

- [Lucie] And so I just wonder if that's a phenomenon that's unique to my organisation or whether it's something that is widespread. And secondly, I love the idea of an example charter and do you have one to share? So just if you could comment on the observation and then.

- Just quickly for everybody online, the amount of laughs in the room tell us that that first observation was shared. I'll let you answer that second question.

- You know, I can certainly provide you some framework around the hybrid work data as well as some details for you and maybe if we can exchange contact details I can get that to you. You know, in terms of, it's of course it's hard to unsee things but maybe come at it from the position of empathy and that okay, someone might have turned up on camera, their bed wasn't made and their hair was messy and looking less than professional. But we've all been through our own journeys over the last two and a half years and for many of us that was very traumatic. You know, having lived in Melbourne for all of those two and a half years, although now I live in Sydney, it was something else. And you know, we in Melbourne, we became to be much more, sorry I'm welling up because it was really traumatic. And so just be mindful that everyone's been on a different journey and you know, as the positive they let you into part of their world that they might not have. So see that as a vulnerability that should really drive better trust and psychological safety with it.

- Did you get a T-shirt, I survived Melbourne 2020, or the Scars?

- Everyone knows 263 is the number.

- That magic number that we'll all put behind us as we move into the the future of what's next. And what's next for us is we're gonna be taking a short break of just a couple of minutes and let me tell you how this works. If you're at home, you're actually gonna have a little screen that says "We'll be back in five minutes." If you're in this room, I'd encourage you to stay where you are unless you need to use the conveniences. You may or may not have time for a cup of coffee and we're gonna be starting in precisely five minutes time with a really fantastic presentation from the team at the Pharmacy at Guild of Australia. So come back and join us in five minutes time. We recommence, if you're joining us online, that was only about six or seven minutes, but when you're online and nothing's happening, it's normally feels about 20 or 30 minutes. So in the room everyone's going, "Wow, that was a quick break." Let's get a few more people taking your seats, and Sean, I've already sent a text back to the office, Sorry, no, I jumped on Slack, no it was actually Teams. And I sent a Team message back to the office and said, find a day where we can have a meeting free day. Please do that. Let's have a meeting to sit down and work out when we're gonna do the meeting free days. No, I'm in the private sector so we don't meet about meetings. That's for another, another sector, which I won't mention. I can't, been there done that, I've done my years. Come on, I'm from Canberra, I know what it's like. So we've had a fantastic presentation this morning, hearing not only from Damian the ACT government's position, their new research and their commitment. We're gonna be hearing from Janet a little bit later as part of our panel around what the ACT government is doing around this new idea of the hybrid workplace and reconnecting and engaging with employees. We've heard from Sean some great research there, but also he's putting it into practise and has seen things like hybrid work charters and co-designing with staff and making sure that people are the new amenity. So if you put in a job ad you'll actually get to work with people. You won't be stuck with robots and you won't be stuck on a desert island not talking to anybody, our people are really great. That's what I would love to see. And but then you have to deliver as organisations to say, oh, we've got a great culture. Yes, but what does that mean? How do you actually communicate that? And that comes down to things like your employee value proposition and we talk about how do we retain staff and so how do we not only find these people, but how do we keep them? And hybrid is one of the ways that we're doing it. One of the organisations that has has been doing this and they've been more than fumbling their way through. They've got plans, they've actually had outcomes, they've co-designed with their team and they're doing a really fantastic job of actually doing it and the next person, but I'll let her actually tell her story, and the next person I'd like to introduce is Rochelle Burdge, who is people, culture and operations director at the Pharmacy Guild of Australia. And they must be doing something right because my notes say that you've been here since 2007 at the Pharmacy Guild. So I wanna know how you keep a staff member loyal that long, but you are leading the charge and have a really great case study of how you've created a hybrid working environment. So thanks Rochelle.

- Yes, 15 years, grown up at the Guild. Thank you so much and thanks to Healthier Work for the invitation. Mel and I had a meeting with them a few weeks ago and obviously we said something right because they invited us here to speak today. So thank you for letting us share our story. All right, firstly, I would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians across the lands on which we meet today and remotely. Here I share an artwork that was created for us at the Guild. We are on our Reconciliation Action Plan journey and this artwork was created by Maggie Jean Douglas to celebrate and launch our RAP and it tells a story of our healing journey as an organisation toward reconciliation. Okay, so a couple of disclaimers. We aren't a fancy tech company, we're quite traditional, we're about to turn a hundred in a couple of years, so I'll talk a bit about that. So the cultural changes that I'll share today are actually quite significant for us and we are still learning. We don't have it perfect and we're still working through it together. So hopefully our learnings today can spark a thought with you. And this morning I'm gonna take you through the journey the Guild has been on over the last little while, it's called our centenary trail, as I said we're nearly a hundred. Our centenary trail so far has been quite a significant restructure and reorganisation of our operations, but more so it's actually been a huge cultural change for us. So pre pandemic, we all knew there was an appetite out there around this flexible working thing, although nothing like the rapid shifts we've seen since 2020. The Guild has the same story as many. Pandemic and health emergency hits and then we find ourselves forced to test this emerging remote working trend earlier unexpectedly and everyone at the exact same time, which wasn't part of the plan. Again, like most organisations, this was a time where a people first approach has never been so important. This served us really well through 2020 and beyond. Our first priority was our people making sure they were safe and mentally okay being at home. And our second priority was making sure we were set up for remote working for goodness knows how long at the time. We've all been through it in one way or the other, and I'm not going to harp on about the pandemic, but I also don't wanna understate the sheer significance of the change here. No one wished to have a pandemic to fast track these changes, but we like many others, decided to try and learn how this could shift our business positively and for the long haul. I'm gonna quickly take you through a bit of our centenary trail, and I promise this context will soon make sense to you, especially in the co-design area as part of this study on flexibility and practise. Firstly, our why, a number of reasons, budget shifts, efficiency reviews, as well as keeping up with the rapid market change and staying competitive as an employer of choice. However, at the time we also had lower than average staff engagement scores, and the general workplace vibe wasn't great and this was something we were really keen to change. We adopted a flatter, more agile structure and we shifted the way teams work together. We've adopted a high performing teams model through our consulting arrangement with leading teams. We use terms like dynamics and mechanics. So dynamics is our culture, our behaviours, our relationships, and our communicating. And our mechanics are our strategic plan, our KPIs and our processes. And we believe that one cannot effectively exist without the other, and with a balance of both, you're on your way to high performance as a team. True co-design, co-design has been mentioned quite a bit and I'll mention it as well. What made this different, this centenary trail restructure journey, was leaning into what we experienced from the pandemic and adopting that people first approach across everything we set out to achieve. The way we went about our restructure was to talk to each and every one of our staff and ask them what did they like about their role and if they had a magic wand, what would they like to change and what do they wish they could be doing or perhaps a skill set they weren't using or discovering. We overhauled our structure to empower our staff to use their full capabilities and grow. Nearly nobody was in the same job after we finished this restructure. We didn't have a finished product in mind, but it did become clearer as we progressed. So when we asked our staff, we really listened and we actually built it together. It went beyond, you know what we needed to do. Uncertainty is uncomfortable and we've learned to get quite comfortable with the uncomfortable at the Guild where we don't have all the answers in front of us. Our employee engagement scores rose significantly over this period and our values were front and centre including trust, genuine care and compassion. We're also simplifying our operations, our governance and our processes wherever we can, focusing on continuous improvement. We've been trusted and empowered to challenge and try new things and we've had an uptick in collaboration and knowledge sharing. Then of course flexibility, which seems to be the topic of the day. So linking back to this topic, and I loved the the speaker earlier this morning, Dr. Gallagher, I picked out a couple of keywords from the report when I read it. Co-design, flexible working culture, amplifying collaboration, connection and belonging and my favourite, keep flexible working less complicated. These are all things that we have tried to practise and are still ourselves learning. For me these are ways of thinking. They are actually cultural changes underpinned by that trust, empowerment and respect. I believe this journey has allowed us to truly test the waters in practical ways in the world of hybrid and flexibility. So I'd like to take you through some of the lessons we've learned along the way. So firstly, communication, while we experience the lockdowns our way of communicating shifted. It was more deliberate, meaningful and regular. We couldn't rely on those corridor conversations anymore. And this funny little piece of software that I was personally resisting trying to use called Teams, was now the single best way of communicating and collaborating for us. We received feedback from our team in Melbourne at this time in 2020, that they'd actually never felt more included or more informed than they did when the Canberra offices were in lockdown, so this was eye-opening. To sustain this shift, we've continued to adopt the software such as Teams as our central way of communicating no matter our location, email still has a place, but with the interactive capability of something like Teams, it helps us feel included in the conversation even if we're not physically there. It also gives us avenues like creating fun channels to connect with each other if we are missing those corridor chats. Especially keeping in mind our full-time remote staff. And when I say mindful inclusion, this means that our remote staff are no longer an afterthought at meetings as perhaps they once were. I know our remote staff pre 2020 regularly had to deal with sound issues, not having the attachments, staff not knowing the tech and not even being dialled in in the first place. And this happened much more often than I care to admit. At every meeting it's now normal to have a link included to share our screens and include those online. It's no longer an afterthought to have the remote staff dial in, and if you happen to be working from home on a day of an important meeting, which happened to me this week, it's very easy to be included. When we have large meetings, even when over half of our staff are actually in the office, we're still on Teams. This actually gives us an even playing field to contribute we find, when there are 50 or 60 of us on the call and we record them for our part-time or absence staff to catch up on. Of course, as Dr. Gallagher said, there is and always will be a place for in-person connection and it's about finding that balance through planning or an agreed charter around how we'll continue to find that sweet spot. All of one or the other is just too much and we'll exclude large portions of people if we take that approach. Another communication area is setting those clear expectations and communicating your plans with your team or your leader. We have set up structures and expectations to set our status on Teams. As well as informing our teammates on what our plans are for that day or that week or how they can get ahold of us. We take into account the impact of our plans on our teammates and what's happening in the office. I like to describe us with the those new terms as an office first kind of approach. So is there an event or an opportunity to collaborate that we need to prioritise, and we call this way of operating respectful flexibility, and we encourage our staff to make regular use of flexible working arrangements. Behaviour. In my opinion, I think this is one of the biggest challenges we've encountered and I find that it isn't spoken about enough. Around behaviour this was unpicking our traditional beliefs and behaviours relating to how a workplace should operate. Unless you've just encountered a corporate workplace for the first time in the last two to five years, most of us were raised in the nine to five office space world. A world where you'd get in early, stay late and potentially work through lunch. Where if you weren't in the office you were either sick or you were on leave. And the assumption may have been not to disturb you if you were working remote for the day because you must be working on something very important to feel the need to actually be at home. I'm generalising, but it is something to think about. Even after we've seen firsthand that we can operate under a full-time remote work model. There was, and maybe still is that urge to get back to the way things were because it's what we knew, it's what was comfortable. And we at the Guild are focused on learning from and taking the bits that worked well and introduce it into our ongoing operations. Behaviour, language and perceptions of expectations were honestly one of the biggest hurdles to overcome for us. And in some ways we're still learning. Language is so important when faced with a huge cultural shift such as this. Teams and colleagues do play an important role in language. For example, saying, I don't know where Rochelle is today or Rochelle isn't in, instead of Rochelle is remote today and you can catch her online. Language can plant the seed of doubt or confirm that your teammate is just working as usual in a different location, which we accept. And our leaders have a big role to play, not only using the language appropriate for our new way of working, but also role modelling. For the first little while we would actually catch our leaders when they displayed respectful flexibility, and whenever they put their own balance first. We'd ask them to share it, post about it or even just say it loudly as they were exiting the building to pick up their kids or logging on later. This was important early on as for most of the staff, it's actually seen as permission to adopt the flexible framework we've created. Be flexible with flexibility. The first thing I'm asked by other organisations and even recently over the last few weeks on this topic is how many days are you guys in the office at the Guild? And we find that really hard to answer as we haven't really defined it like that, unless you do have a rigid HR type arrangement, which means something different for us. We held some workshops in late 2021 with our staff around our working environment and what we wanted it to look like. Our first workshop, no joke, we spent about two hours trying to define flexibility, hybrid, flexibility was it the same thing, we were all really confused and we actually weren't getting anywhere. So this is where we got to when we stepped back and just tried to stop overthinking it. Flexibility is fluid and dynamic. It's the ability to balance our life and our work while maintaining our wellbeing. It's more about finishing the work, not so much about where and when we do our work. Our flexible workplace is fostered by trust, performance, accountability, and transparent communication. And most importantly, flexibility is for everyone. If flexibility is the how, then hybrid is the what. A hybrid workplace acknowledges that there is more than one physical location where we can work. Early on we tried to write a new policy within the rapid change and we spent so much time trying to get that perfect. And the cool thing was through our centenary trail and our other events that occurred over the last couple of years, we actually ended up seeing it play out in practise and now we're catching up with the documentation, reflecting how it actually works, not how we may think it worked in theory, and I've highlighted inclusion here as well, to lean into the indirect benefits of working this way and bringing the human in. We've put the choice back on the person to connect and work in a way that is more comfortable for them. Leaning into our differences and getting the best out of ourselves. And feeling safe and open to be clear about our own needs. For example, as an introvert that may be more comfortable to speak to a crowd over a screen than in person, which is me, or a parent whose stress levels decrease by having that opportunity to just work flexibly around the school pick up and drop off times. We invited our staff to do this profiling with us, which helped us understand our individual preferences and how to connect best with each other. Flexibility is certainly not a one size fits all and I think it's kind of better if it's not. Okay, so reading through the Humanising the office report, these are the four pillars that kind of stood out to me around how we've tried to simplify our approach to flexibility Enablement, it's the equipment that's set up, the connectivity, it's the software, the know how and the support available to help us connect in when we need to. It's a one size doesn't fit all approach, it's people first, from both a role and a person perspective. A flexibility arrangement is going to look different from person to person and role to role, which we've heard today and we've found it near impossible to have everyone adopt the exact same arrangement and style, it just doesn't work. Planning, which locations will get the best out of me during the week? What's on that I need to consider? What connection or collaboration events do I need to prioritise and will my plans have an impact on my team? And lastly, communication. Use the tools available. Let people know where, when and how you're working. Again, we call this respectful flexibility and set the expectations importantly. We have our own little bit of data, not as fancy as the previous presentation, but still quite important to us. I'm keen to show a little bit of our engagement data, which gives us a great insight into the different areas we were keen to measure, especially why we were on this journey, especially around the areas being flexibility and work life blend. So the following slides detail data that we've actually collected from our staff. Okay, so this chart here shows our engagement data from January 2021 to now. So in around June 2021 is where we started our restructure. Our overall engagement score has gone up from 55% to 84% and the grey pillars reflect our scores in the area, "I am supported to choose if I choose to make use of flexible working arrangements." So it's sitting at 96%, I'm not sure if we can go any higher than that. And this chart shows "The guild demonstrates that our people are important to our company's success" in the grey and that "I would recommend the Guild as a great place to work" in the yellow. Our engagement score is again shown there in the line to achieve this kind of momentum and real change during a time of such disruption and upheaval was so incredibly heartening and showed us that we were heading in the right direction. Other areas of feedback is what the staff have told us and our board members, our national counsellors as we call them, tell us. They say that the vibe in the office is just different. It's lighter, it's happier, it's more connected. And we're actually seeing people get up and share their thoughts and opinions in collaboration sessions or meetings that perhaps may not have felt confident enough to do it before. The data is one thing that you can see and you can touch, but you'll have to take my word for what we can feel because it's a bit harder to pop on a slide. Right, quick wrap up here. So a bit of a summary. Our lessons learned was our communication, behaviour and language and being flexible with flexibility as the main lesson. Our people first approach, true co-design, inclusion and obviously a strong focus on wellbeing. Having a lasting impact, our increased employee engagement and wellbeing, our recruitment and retention, improved processes and operations and what's next for us. We are catching up on our documentation and our policies, maintaining sustainable momentum is important and then further embedding change into our operations for us at the guild the last takeaway we've learned is this is not a flexibility project or a discussion around the definition of hybrid working, which I don't wanna discuss again. This is a culture shift, a behaviour change and a rebranding. And the change is messy and uncertain and those small incremental changes really do make an impact in the long run. So thank you for allowing me to share this with you.

- Thanks very much, thanks very much Rochelle. And here's the great thing about this. You get to jump in number three for me. Yeah, over here, three from the left, three from the left for everybody playing at home. So I'm gonna invite a few of our guest speakers up here for the panel. So any questions you have for Rochelle, this is where we're gonna be asking them from. But we'll also get to ask questions of Janet Wilson, who's the executive branch manager for the ACT Government Centre for Leadership and Innovation. You can, lucky seat number one, Janet, yep. And I'm gonna invite Sean back and I'm also gonna invite Rochelle's colleague Mel up here to come and participate in this discussion as we have a bit of a panel chat. And Mel is the employee experience manager, people culture and operations and with the Pharmacy Guild of Australia. Have you been there 15 years as well? Have you drank the Kool-Aid?

- Twelve.

- Twelve, ah, but you stay there because of Rochelle, is that, are you guys anyway, I will talk about that later.

- She's my boss now so I have to say yes.

- Yeah, of course, of course the answer's yes. But I'd actually like to start this discussion over at your end of the, of the platform there, Janet. ACT government, anytime you do something, it ends up in the paper. So we've actually watched your journey, like you don't get to do anything in secret, right? Because every time an adjustment is made, somebody has an opinion, but you have thousands of opinions, you have thousands of people. So tell us a little bit about the journey that you've gone through with the ACT Government around the flexible or hybrid working situation that you've got.

- Thank you, can you hear me okay? And yes, I have to say I have responded to a lot of media requests over the last while and done a lot, journey, but it actually has been going on a lot longer. I've been in the ACT about two and a half years the moment, so right through. But this work actually started well before me, so it started about seven years ago. And look where it started was really small and experimental. So it was really around a little trial that the team were doing around introducing activity work and they were doing that on a really small scale with about 25 office space workers. And really that was just about is there a way that we can leverage digital technology and change? And there was a few other things going on with service as well. One of them being things like being able to pay for your parking with your card rather than having to feed in lots of coins to pay for that. So there's just little things going on at the time that wanted to have a play around with. So we did that trial, got some feedback and what we heard was that staff loved it. They absolutely loved it. So we trialled a bigger group of about 150 people and again, we heard this stuff about how it was working. So that was starting to just do activity, not. That moved forward into sort of starting to look at how our buildings were enabling people to work flexibly. And at the time we were starting with ACT Public Service was growing so we needed house people. And so we've got a new building in 2020, circuit that some may have seen and that's an activity based sort of area. So we were sort of making sure that we could bring people into that space that there was lots of spaces for collaboration, spaces for quiet thinking work as well, desks that people could book. So it was sort of a journey from something quite small to thinking about things like, which now holds five different. So it's, that building opened up. I always get this wrong for some reason, I don't know if your sense of time is still a bit mucked up as a result of COVID, but I think it was only actually early last year and my team will be thinking "you've got it wrong," but about early last year. And so we moved into that building, we've got technology that enables us, the desk and we can monitor how many people are coming into the building. We've our own laptops that we carry in, we've got lockers to be able to put our keyboards and things like that, so we basically go in, you sit somewhere different every time and it's a great way of working like that. But we also work from home. So we're for myself and my team, we tend to come in about one or two days a week. But it depends on the work that we are doing. But across the service what we are really trying to do, and I think you'd probably hear that the ACT is quite progressive on this and we're deliberately being progressive on this 'cause it's a competitive differentiation. But really we're saying absolutely hybrid is here to stay, we are not slipping back and that's absolutely, we not doing the days of nine to five in the office are over. So now it's about embedding it and making it really work. So we've kind of got to that point that we got to do this experiment, we've got to do it on mass during COVID and now it's about embedding it. And that's where we start to need to focus on capability. Reminding people that this is the direction we're going in and making sure people are, managers are invested in this well and that we're measuring it. So, and that means, data today.

- Right, thanks Janet a very good intro into I guess an area in which a number of Canberrans work, in the ACT Government affects all of our lives, but also the constituents and taxpayers are gonna say, "How do we get the best quality out of our money? And it's comes back to the people and where they work and how they work is certainly changing. Can I ask you a quick question, Sean? If you're a small or medium business sitting in this room, where do you start, like if you had to pick one thing from your presentation or one thing that Pharmacy Guild have talked about or ACT Government, what would be a really good stepping off point for that small or medium business to say "We're starting this journey, I should do it right, I should start with."

- Your people, that's it. I think that's the most important first step is engaging with your people, understanding their expectations around how they wanna work. You know, I think it's really critical but it's more than just engaging with your people. It's an opportunity for employers to very clearly, but kindly make the point that there's an equation at play here and that yes, we need to meet employee expectations while at the same time balancing the needs of the organisation. We have to get that equation right. And I think that it's become a little bit lost in flexible working. We're working with a couple of ASX top 50 companies and one of them, you know, 'cause they've got a lot more money and they're able to do things more quickly and and so forth. And they write very early on in the pandemic like June, 2020 or something like that we're already, you know, surveying their staff about how many days a week back in the office and they sort of, you know, they sort of categorise workers into three different buckets and you know, mainly remote come in to the office sometime, you know, others were sort of half and half and others were mainly remote. Well, they created a rod for their back because that is now what the workers expect. They didn't at the same time say "Okay, I want to understand your expectations but we have to make sure it balances organisational need." You know, one of the things that I think is really critical in terms of, you know, be it small, medium, large size organisations, let work dictate how work gets restructured. Let work, you know, that is what is required to to focus on rather than, you know, you don't see it through a property or a tech or a a you know, people lens. It's really through. And so work is meeting the needs of the organisation, meeting the needs of the employee but starting a conversation with them and creating expectations on both sides.

- Let me jump over to you Mel picking up on Sean's point that you've gotta speak to people and you know the ACT Government started there as well when you started talking to your people and you went through this co-design process of "Okay well it's not about us doing it to you, it's about us doing it for us." What were some of the things that you didn't expect came out of some of your discussions with employees? Was there anything you go, "Wow, I didn't expect to hear that," Or "is that the truth? Like what are we doing?"

- Full disclosure, I wasn't in people and culture when it happened.

- Well you've heard the stories.

- Well I'm part of the co-design I guess in a lot of ways so the conversations were about what we were currently working at and what we were currently doing and what potentially we wanted to be doing. As we said before, I've been at the Guild for 12 years. I was in the business area, worked closely with students, loved what I did, didn't hate what I did but I did a psych degree in a previous life and really wanted to work with people. So in the conversation with Rochelle and Cole, it was what do you wanna do? And I said well if anything comes up in the people and cultures space, that's where I wanna be. And lo and behold, about six months later I'm now the employee experience manager. And I think that happened for a lot of people. I think I had a conversation last week, where we had an all staff meeting about culture, 50% of our staff is new. And then we also had to put our hands up as to whether we're doing the same role that we were doing the last time we had it 18 months ago. 74% of people are doing a new role then.

- Two questions, one, as employee experience manager, do you have to always wear fluro and be like bright and happy?

- Yes.

- And the second one is the term employee experience manager wouldn't have existed three or four years ago and definitely not at the Guild. So what does an employee experience manager do? And if that role is to exist in ACT Government, what would they call it? But I'll come back to Janet in a minute.

- Yeah, it's about probably helping people with their employee life cycle. So talking to people every day, I don't spend a lot of time at my desk, I feel as though I don't get any work done. However, my work is very people focused. So I walk around to everyone's desk, make sure everyone's going okay, have a chat, check in. But it is about being that point person and making sure that the place is, coming. Working closely with Rochelle in our culture space. Yeah, I think it did exist before me but because we didn't have the structure set up well, person before me probably wasn't able to take hold of it and I'm only just getting hold of it now. But yeah, I think it's a really important role. I think if you can have somebody in that role that, I'm not happy every day and I, but I probably do wear fluro most days. But having somebody that just checks in with people and just checks in to see not only how their day's going but how their work is going.

- Important in a hybrid workplace, important in any workplace. But you need the people people don't you, and Rochelle did you wanna talk about the people person in a hundred year old organisation doesn't need to be a hundred years old to know everything, do they?

- And I think Mel's understating her role a little bit as employee experience manager because we are both people people and we put the human element in what we do, you know, and we are empowered and trusted to change things up. So even the way we're recruiting is so different in the last six months we've nearly done away with panel interviews, nearly and just really talking to the person and their experience in an informal way and we're finding we're getting a lot more out of that and Mel's been such a huge, huge part of that. So she is understating the impact she's having. Even the term people and culture was hard at the Guild to get away from HR. And I just think people and culture is just such an important message even to have title or in a team name, you know, to send the message that people are at the heart of our organisation, we are knowledge workers, we're nothing without our knowledge and our people. So even just those little name rebranding changes actually just constantly sends that message that that's really.

- PR, could we, 'cause then you, so you know.

- It's different.

- But that's completely different. But talking about PR, how important is the employee experience for attracting new staff, Janet? It's a big question. Is the ACT Government's new approach to hybrid going to solve our skills shortage and our vacuum and get people back from overseas And attract, like can someone work in Tasmania for the ACT Government?

- Oh I knew I get landed a question like that or Queanbeayan Yes. Look and I gotta say the name of the job with the employee experience background is executive branch manager for the Centre for Leadership and Innovation. 'Cause that's everything we're after as well. Look, yeah, I mean yes you can kind of work from Tasmania but you know, really what we're trying to do is make a great place to work here in the ACT Government and we've really been pushing, there's some complexity in the way that recruitment's done across the service. So we've got lots of different directorates who have their own approach to doing things. But so for myself, my team is growing at the moment and largely because of this sort of work programme. And so the sorts of things we are doing when we're putting jobs out there is really highlighting the value of hybrid, thinking about how we connect people when they come in. Talking about the team experience that they're going to get when they work with us. And then similar to you that when we actually do the interview, we have some processes we have to follow but actually we're making the opportunity for the applicant to interview us as well and to talk about what they're looking for and really not check, checking our assumptions about what people want. So in fact just two weeks ago I was running some interviews, us highlighting the hybrid work from home, work from home, this person actually said, "But how are you gonna onboard me?" And I was like, oh I didn't talk about that. So of course we do a lot of the onboarding in person, but they were concerned that we'd actually gonna just do it all remotely. So these conversations are really good because we've gotta check our assumptions that we are not only gonna work remotely. And I think that's one of the things people are getting confused about with the ACT Government. It's not pure remote, we're doing hybrid so it's different. In fact, going back to the point about, is ACT workers being asked to stay home because of the roads. We're not being asked to stay home because of the roads, we're being told or being suggested to, I guess to avoid peak hour, I'm in at 10 o'clock rather than trying to hit the road at 8:30 in the morning. So there's some nuance to it I think that sometimes in the media gets a little diluted.

- Yeah, it's, I think it's great. Canberra's finally gonna have a peak hour, like it's so good we're growing up, you know, we've got our Kia and Apple now we're gonna, it's gonna take a whole hour it get to work and before it only taken half an hour it is really good. And, but a question about the quality of work. So one of the things that ACT Government has to do is maintain that quality of work. Sean, in your information it actually says, you know, remote actually the quality started dipping and then some of that Microsoft research maintaining that quality is dipping. Do organisations like ACT Government have to do a maintaining the quality in a hybrid environment? Like do they have to do a training course on how to work better in hybrid, how do we skill people up?

- I think it's a really, you know, a great question and you know, I won't necessarily tell Janet how to do a job, but in terms of the skills, so let me give you, so in terms of, so we're working in a more distributed way and that has implications both for leaders but also for individuals. And so from a leader perspective, you can probably appreciate that it's increasingly how do we empower teams? How do we build team wellbeing? How do we ensure that our, that my role as manager is increasingly more about relationship leader. How do I facilitate, how do I support, how do I coach their really critical skills? I will note that Telstra, which is a large organisation, has recognised that managers aren't capable of doing that and they've actually split the role of manager in two. They have a leader of people and a leader of work and that is why it's really hard and you know, so there's a lot of requirements about that. But on the, for the individual side is how do we support individuals to work that they're, you know, we're asking them to manage themselves in ways that they've never had to do before. And so I'm part of Swinburne Edge, which is, you know, a bit of the commercial arm of Swinburne University, we do a lot of b2b, l&d and the top three selling short courses at the moment for individuals, Excel, 'cause the Excel guru isn't across the office from me anymore and I've gotta figure out how to actually make it work. Number two is business writing skills. 'Cause I can't rely on my force of personality to compel an outcome. I have to actually be a little bit more sophisticated in my writing, and number three is project management. How, you know, helping workers manage themselves, self-empowerment, self-management, workers are much more in almost, you know, I don't wanna over, you know, exaggerate, but increasingly workers are becoming, you know, what's the word I'm looking for, I don't know. Anyway, the kind, blame the diet. So they need to manage themselves. So coming back to all that, it's really the how and you know, given the increasing complexity of the dynamics.

- I'm gonna take some questions from the floor, if you've got one just raise your hand. I've got a question, how well are universities, right now in 2022 set up to create the next workers of the hybrid economy? Because before this they've been teaching skills or they've been giving degrees, but how well are they equipping the next generation of workers for Australia to solve our greatest problems? Sorry, do you wanna take your badge off just before you say.

- I'm sort of looking at Sue over there. It's, I think it's mixed if you really want my answer. Look universities are are doing a very good job in work integrated learning. So making sure that increasingly, you know, students, undergrads have a work experience as part of their learning journey, that's a good thing. I'm not so sure that those experiences actually relate to, in, you know, new ways of working. I think it's very traditional and it's, you know, I might be wrong and I'm certainly not, I don't know what's going across the sector. One of the challenges that universities are facing at the moment and you know, I don't think any campus is really in looking good at the moment. No one's coming back to us, it's desperately grim, it really it's dismal, and so my university, I won't, I'll save the editorial, but it has mandated staff to come back three days a week. And so I've been helping them out and work through this. It's interesting, what I think is missing is that we're starting to think about hybrid working, but we need to think about hybrid learning and the students aren't gonna come back to campus because why would I come back to campus to sit at a lecture that I can do online? So in the same way that we're recognising that certain types of work should be done when we're together in person, same with when we're remote, we need to start thinking about that in terms of learning so that when I'm on campus, I'm, it's not dissemination of knowledge and things like this is actually how do we have an experiential learning opportunity on our campuses? We repurposed the campus, we make a compelling reason as to why you come to the campus. And that that actually is, I think not only helping deliver better learning outcomes, but it actually is helping them understand hybrid work.

- I'll take questions if we've got questions that are burning, or I've got a couple more before we head into our next section. Rochelle, your customers are your pharmacists. So you work for the Pharmacy Guild and you support your pharmacists as a membership based organisation. How has the impact of the quality of work that you've provided to your members been affected by adopting your hybrid practises and going through this journey? And you've got the centenary trail and the bits and pieces, what you said the council members came in and said our head office just feels lighter and different, but what about the end users and for you that's your pharmacists?

- Yeah, so our, we're a member organisation and our members are community pharmacy owners across the country, and look, when the pandemic hit in 2020, our workload went through the roof to support these people across the country. They were on the frontline. They couldn't go, "Oh I'm gonna do a work from home day today." You know, we were, we felt that even though we had the privilege that we could do that. So that genuine care for what we were doing was just so, so important. And you know, in terms of the quality of our work to, you know, harp on on us a little bit, you know, even the, the RAP programme that was developed and you know.

- That went well didn't it-

- And we've got, oh, I can't comment on it, I just, you know, anyway and you know, getting vaccines in pharmacies, you know, that was just huge. I can't take any credit for it but just the wonderful team that we work with. And it was just that drive to actually make that real difference to the health outcomes across the country with a group of people that really believed in it. And I guess, you know, moving forward, it is about what you do, what you do remotely and how you can still make that that difference, and as you say, our national counsellors, they are community pharmacy owners themselves. So to hear them saying that, you know, the vibe in the office and things like that is huge. But that vibe actually turns into quality work 'cause when you're collaborating with people, you trust each other, you can challenge things that aren't going quite well, maybe and give them real feedback. I really think, I mean that's the formula of creating really quality work. So I think that environment piece, for us flexibility isn't the top, it's the environment. It's the culture that's the top. Flexibility is like a byproduct. I really think that we believe that that's how we get some calls.

- Thank you. I'm gonna leave you all with one thing that I'd like you to have a think about and answer this question, and I'm gonna start with you Janet. Sean actually said if I stood here two and a half years ago and asked you to say what was the role of the office, you'd go, "This guy's bonkers, of course it's the place where we come and work." In, if we have to cast ourselves forward and we look back at this presentation go, "Oh wasn't that nice 10 years ago we were talking about this thing that is possibly here to stay." The ACT Government hybrid workforce plan, or the what does the 2032 version of us look like in terms of, you know, when it's not gonna be, are we still gonna be experimenting? Are we still gonna be kind of making it up as we go along or are there going to be changes that have become part of the furniture? And again, I'm asking you to be a futurist, and not commit to these things, but I'll start with you Janet, I'm gonna go to the Pharmacy Guild, and I'll finish with Sean.

- Look, I think some of the things we're already putting in train at the moment I think will be absolutely embedded and we'll be interested to see how they go in 10 years time, that feels like so far away. We've setting up flexi offices across Canberra at the moment, so we're in, we've already started the build on some of them, the refurbishment of them. So they're places across Canberra from Gungahlin in the north down to Tuggeranong in the south. That mean people can go to work in different spaces as well, rather than just their, I can't really call it home office, but the office that they would usually attend. So these places that are gonna have really great places to work, lovely views, that sort of thing that allow people to move into a different space. Whether it's for a day because they're having some renovations done on their home or whatever it has to be. We've also got a family friendly space in the city centre. I've got three kids at home today who have all got a pupil free day. It would've been great if I was, happened to be working in the office to take them in. So that would've worked really well. The other thing, we've got built an innovation centre in the city centre as well. And that is a purpose built space to bring people together, to collaborate, to innovate, to actually give them a reason to come together. And we are helping peoples learn how to do that. 'Cause as Sean said, people gotta relearn how to do some of this stuff. So in 10 years time, I think those spaces are gonna be absolutely buzzing. We're gonna be seeing tonnes of innovation coming out of the service and I think, you know, our productivity will be growing and I'm hoping, I'm really hoping that we manage to bring those workloads down. And even you never know, working days down.

- The Pharmacy Guild turns 110 in or 112, I know you guys have, you know, it's your the centenary plus ten trail, that'll be the new programme you've heard it here first. What long term changes what will be the next thing that you'll be looking at, do you feel Mel and you're allowed a crystal ball this , there's not, it's not like it's being recorded and you can watch it.

- I think the physical space we've done a little bit of work on, but we'll probably be looking at changing some of those spaces to be more collaborative or inviting. It's probably a bit white walled, a bit less collaborative. We've got lots of new furniture, but we possibly haven't set out the areas in the way that works well. But probably my vision is just a really connected workforce where people feel valued, that they're genuinely cared for, that they're part of something that they can be proud of.

- Genuine people shift, Rochelle.

- And some of our other, you know, areas that we're looking at is we've created, along with our staff a bespoke, kind of agile project management framework because our work is, we are a little bit different at the Guild, so we're acknowledging that and championing that. So we have our staff included, you know, again, that co-design element and we've created something really special and we're just now testing it. So, you know, 10 years time, you know, working across teams will just be a no brainer working, you know, on different projects with different leaders. All these things that are a bit conceptual for us at the moment that we're kind of dipping our toe in, you know, that that would just be the crystal ball for me, that we'd just be working that way and it would just be so normal.

- Continue to be a people lab, just continue to test an experiment. Sean, so 10 years time you've just been elected as the Australia's first Minister for Hybrid Working. The Albanese government is in its third term, fourth term, and you have to make some decisions. What, what's Australia gonna be be doing? We're way past COVID we're onto our third pandemic. What's going to be happening?

- We're pattern seeking storytelling animals. When we first walked the planet, well before civilization, it was our ability to see patterns in nature. The, you know, the frequency of the tides, the seasons behaviours of wild animals. To understand what that was and to tell stories about it, to share it, to create knowledge. Dream time is a very beautiful example of that way of propagating our understanding of patterns that we've seen and stories that we've told. It's our ability to navigate uncertainty that defines us as human and it's as relevant if not more relevant now in this era of unprecedented change that's gonna continue going. So in terms of hybrid work in 2010, sorry, 2010, what is it, 2030, 32.

- It'll be 2032.

- I, you know, increasingly, and this is crystal balling, perhaps it's a more of an aspiration. I'd like to see the office as being, this is the place we come to figure out the future. This is the place that we come where we have everyone in the organisation, how do we, remember everyone has a view, has a window onto the future. And the jobs that we have allow us that unique understanding. If you're in the call centre and you're on the phone all day, but you've been noticing that there's been a slight change of tone in the people you've been speaking to or a little less interest in some of the stuff you're doing. That's telling you something that you probably need to know, a little bit of disruption that might be coming your way. Or the person in accounts payable, you know, 30 day debtors has now gone from 30 to 33. What's that telling us? As well as the CEO and C-suite, they also have a view onto that world. But how do we harness that as an organisation? How do we harness that future facing potential and to synthesise that into opportunities for us? And I'm kind of hoping that increasingly that's what the role of the office is going to be, is where we come together as an organisation to figure out the future.

- Thank you very much and I'd like to, on behalf of the Healthier Work team and everybody here today, I thank Janet, Sean, Rochelle, and Mel for joining us on our panel session today.