Transitioning to new ways of working in the midst of a lockdown with Amy Chew, NSW Health

Eoin Higgins 
Welcome everybody to A Better World of Work podcast.

This is a podcast where we talk about all things work. Instead of talking about work in terms of best practice, theories, books and articles, what we want to do is talk to people who are changing their world of work on a day-to-day basis, and hear different stories from the world of work about how people are changing and influencing their world of work for the better. 

 My name is Eoin Higgins. I'm your host for today's podcast, and I'm joined by my co-host, Sorina Catuna. Our guest today is Amy Chew. Hello, Amy.

Amy Chew 
Hi. How are you?

Eoin Higgins 
Amy is working for New South Wales Health, which is the Ministry of Health in the state of New South Wales in Australia. Amy is the director of property and workplace experience for New South Wales Health. We obviously want to talk about your interesting story about implementing new way of working at New South Wales Health and how you guided that. Before we get into our conversation, it might be helpful for me and our listeners to lay out the terrain a little bit to understand the context before we get into the conversation. 

New South Wales Health is a large healthcare organisation in Australia. Pre-pandemic time, your organisation was in the process of relocating to a new headquarter approximate 30,000 square metres, with a capacity for 3,500 staff. You are bringing those folks from different existing office spaces to house them under a new purpose-built building. So a huge, huge programme of work! On top of that, you were adopting a new way of working. In the past, if I'm not mistaken, New South Wales Health offices had either different traditional ways of working or activity based ways of working, but this new office space would be all around a model of activity based working. 

I'll just share a little bit with our listeners about what is it when we say activity based working so that they understand that difference. We can spend the whole podcast talking about what is activity based working so I'm just going to go on a very high level just to understand the distinctions.

With a traditional working model, staff and employees are assigned desks or offices, and they share spaces like common areas and meeting rooms but you don't share your individual work space. That's yours as it were. In an activity based working model, meeting spaces, collaboration spaces, individual work points are all fully shared by employees and leaders, and that was the model that you were moving to fully for New South Wales Health at your new space at  One Reserve Road. Is that right? 

Amy Chew 
That's right. 

Eoin Higgins 
On top of the move, you had this interesting challenge - you're moving to a new way of working, to a new location in the midst of the pandemic. You managed to get this new office building opened up on time in the mid of 2021. You pulled that off, which was a major feat to do it in the midst of the pandemic when there was so much uncertainty. It's just an amazing achievement for you and the rest of the team there.

Amy Chew 
I think the pandemic certainly gave us an advantage with the rapid change for people. We are very fortunate in the lead up to the move in 2020. We had done a lot of change work, getting everyone ready, because we had essentially ten different agencies within Health moving together as one. It is not just about the physical aspect of changing the way you work. There is also the cultural aspect - hang on, I am working with different people around me, maintaining your own sense of identity, but also just how it was going to look like, you know. We were also asking people that had offices not to have offices, all those sorts of things. 

 At the same time, a lot of people were still working on desktops. To put a figure on it, I would say at least 60% to 70% were still on desktops and not on laptops. We had a rapid transformation leading up to the relocation. It was even more rapid in that first half of that year when we realised what was going on. People needed to stay at home to work so we were fortunate that we were fast in our technology transformation. Firstly, we had gone to our ICT providers to get a lot more laptops very quickly. Then we rolled out Teams and Zoom and all these sort of normal things that we use today. They were pretty obsolete two years ago. I think getting people to use some of that new technology - we are all quite fortunate that in some ways the pandemic came, and that all had to evolve. Everyone had to change very quickly.  

Eoin Higgins 
So it was a major cultural and behavioural change and obviously, the physical change in terms of all the work that had to happen there. You also have this digital transformational change in terms of technology as well that you had to do all in tandem in a holistic way.

Amy Chew 
I think, in the end, we have all had to be really agile in the way we think. We had all these things - personas developed on how people would work and we rolled it out with your help.  We wrote up on managing outcomes for managers to be able to manage staff without staring at them sitting there doing their work. It was really important for everyone to feel comfortable that we could work this way and there were no issue with not being there in the office. 

It meant that a lot of the things we had planned in terms of getting ready for a move such as site tours. We had to do a lot of digital transformation ourselves. We turned our tours into virtual tours that let people have the opportunity to walk around the building, and play around with different room spaces, what they could do and what the purpose of the spaces were. Because here we are, we were introducing a new space to someone. That it is like moving into a new house when you haven't even seen the house at all. Like it's pretty crazy, right? 

For myself and my team, it was a pretty awful time in that we were trying to respond to what the public health orders were. Also, we had tower leases ending for a lot of people. People were not allowed to be in offices where they had to actually physically move out of to pack and not able to go back into the new office to unpack. We had to organise, create lists to put things away and take photos to make sure it is secured and we moved them across. We slowly inducted people into the building in batches of what was okay for physically distancing at that time. I think we did tours of 15 to 20 people at a time. It was exhausting because we have to induct people, give them an access card to come in, show them around on where to unpack their stuff and go home again, or sometimes people will stay on. We had a mixed bag of people coming through. 

Eoin Higgins 
So whereas normally you could batch in like a much bigger cohorts, you had to make it only 20 to make sure people can remain COVID safe. How did people generally respond to the overall approach and this new way of working initially. How was that take? 

Amy Chew 
I think it was good in the sense that the building itself lends itself to a lot of space. When you don't have a lot of walls, things are a lot more open. People felt comfortable in coming into the office because physical distancing was possible. In terms of activity based working, it was quite a personal thing for me. I really didn't want signs everywhere around that says how do you use this or how do you use that. We have shared the etiquette around how people should use spaces. We wanted people to be able to actually have that conversation with each other around how they should be working, and not have a sign saying do not talk here, do not use your mobile phone here, do not this or do not that. 

 Amy Chew 
It’s really a culture where I guess we wanted to empower people to make their own decisions around how they wanted to work, not to be passive aggressive but to be able to just have that conversation. In the end, you're sitting around different people, potentially that you may not have sat with before, even though they may be in your same team. Also at any other day, you could be sitting next to someone different. It was important to get people comfortable with it. Till today, we still have people sending an occasional email to us saying, this person is sitting in our area and we would replied that we don't have area, we don't have zones, we don't have sticky tape lined out where you can't cross over. We have to deal with this carefully as we do not want to start an email war. We just have that conversation with them to remind them on what the etiquette is and hopefully, they can work it out amongst themselves. We try and get people to sort themselves out rather than getting involved too much.

Eoin Higgins 
Obviously, you’ve laid out your etiquettes and designed your space to support an activity based way of working. You've tried to set those expectations which allow people to be empowered and trust them to make the right decisions to use the spaces and work into the way in which it has been intended. 

This leads me into what I think is one of the most interesting pieces of your story, Amy. When we were in the midst of the pandemic, there were people in the media or industry sectors that were beginning to look at sharing models of work, and starting to question whether or not they were a viable one in a pandemic situation where you have to work in COVID safe ways. Some people were even making some predictions that perhaps fully shared working models were going to be a thing of the past post-pandemic but you took an interesting angle. At a time, when some organisations had people coming to the office, to work in COVID safe ways, they were physically demarcating spaces and saying you can't go here, or maybe removing chairs from every second desk and so on. You took a different approach, right? What was that approach, and how did you come to that? How did that work for you?

Amy Chew 
I think initially the conversations were occurring around Hangout on activity based working, it's not going to work. You can't share spaces that other people are using. I heard crazy stories of some workplaces where they were only allowed to walk clockwise around the floor because you couldn't walk past someone with your faces facing one another. So what we had, it was great because we had the support behind us. We just thought that this doesn't make any sense. In the end, if you are in the office, you are not allocating a personal toilet to each person, a personal kitchen or a tap to a person. Unless you say you can come into the office and work and don't use these common shared facilities, then how is this going to work? 

We did a quick check on the rules because every state was slightly different. New South Wales, at the time, required 1.5 metres as the space that you had to have between people. We measured our desks and if you sat exactly in the middle with the desk beside you, it's 1.6 metres. So our view was staff can sit at the desks. In the end, people shift towards each other anyway. There are a lot of buildings that put 'X's where you could not sit, and everywhere you went, there were benches you could not sit down on. We didn't do that in any of the spaces. The only thing we probably did was just put the little dots in the lifts where people could fit. What we did instead was increased our cleaning regime. Basically, activity based working actually helps us work in this environment, because ultimately, you pack your stuff up during the day. That lends itself to making it easier for the cleaners to wipe down all the surfaces at the end of the day and when you come back, it is the same reset. At the time, I think very much in the early days, deep cleaning was a big thing. Now, we know a lot more about COVID-19 and how it spreads, deep cleaning is not something that is done here in New South Wales anymore. 

With activity based working, it helped that when someone with COVID came into the office, we were able to know where they have been because their access card tells us what row they have been in. We encouraged people to use the lifts, which have also been programmed and let us know where they have been. We would just clean that area and say don't sit around here, sit somewhere else. The ability to move around and work where you needed to was really useful because it meant that if you had your own assigned desks, you would be going to back to that same point with all things. 

We also had, on top of a normal workforce, a surging workforce, or people that were actually responding to the pandemic itself. We were pretty much the co-face in the daily press conferences that were held around COVID, which were in the foyer of our buildings. We would essentially be watching the news live and responding as required to whatever the latest public health order was to make sure we did the right thing. We also make people feel safe and understand what was okay and not okay to do.

Eoin Higgins 
Because I would imagine, obviously, as you say in New South Wales Health, you're responsible for setting the orders right in the way in which people need to be in the public, being in a safe way. You also had specific orders for workplaces. It was obviously so important that within New South Wales Health you were operating in a COVID safe way.

Amy Chew 
Suddenly, under the scrutiny, because you'd have media now, everyday.

Eoin Higgins 
Wow. When I speak to folks, particularly when I was getting at the initial point of returning to offices and enacting strategies, there were two things on people's minds. There was obviously the COVID-safe physical safety aspects of keeping people safe, but there was the psychological safety element that people were concerned, depending on their level of risk, how they feel, or depending on their life circumstances, if they have somebody at home who is immunocompromised and so on. They have different levels of personal situations. That psychological safety and giving people the assurances that they can be safe in this way  of working is so important. Given that you have taken, I wouldn't say, a radical approach, but it was definitely a different approach from the main, how did people respond to it when they came back to the office. 

Amy Chew 
I think there's a mix and every day we are getting more and more people returning. It is a tricky balance because in this building, we have got people that probably never stopped coming into the office as we were deemed as essential workers. Throughout the pandemic, even when people were locked down, we were permitted to come into work.  There were also a balance of people who have never come in at all and people coming in everyday.

There is also personal responsibility. If you are able to function day to day and drop your children off at school and do all those things, why can't you not be responsible for yourself in the office? It is not our job to hold your hand, do everything and make your decisions for you. That's worked really well because we have taken that stance from the staff. 

We've given every desk a plethora of sanitation wipes and antibacterial things. Certainly, our people's background is in health so we were queried on the percentage of alcohol in wipes and lots of things. We have had mechanical ventilation checked in this building to make sure it has got enough exchange and make sure the areas are healthy for people. We have done all those right thing and  share those information and to help each of the managers to communicate. 

Ultimately, we can create our building, make our buildings safe, and have everything in place but you talk about the sort of the safety, the mental safety. We gave people information by showing them the data that Mondays and Fridays potentially are the lowest occupied days and might probably better to come in on these days if you feel concerned about coming into the office. Being flexible about start and end time by giving people the opportunity to start work later than 9 o'clock which has peak hour traffic, but come in at 10 o'clock. Giving people that option and being really flexible about it gave people the opportunity to make their own decisions on how they want to come in. People will engage with and respond in kind, they will also not fight back as much. 

Eoin Higgins 
Yeah, that's actually a really nice segue. Amy, when you were talking there about people working in more flexible ways and giving them empowerment. That is obviously on the top of mind for a lot of folks now.  As you know, hybrid ways of working is very topical for a lot of people, and like activity based working, you could talk at length about what is it you know. Generally, Australia is very similar to the rest of the world and we can see increasingly there is expectation in the level of flexibility in general from staff and employees.  

They want a level of flexibility now and a level of empowerment that they didn't have pre-pandemic and they want to be able to make choices and of course, there's a range of different ways to approach that.  What you were talking about there was one of those things, Hey, you don't all need to come in at 9am, right? If you have other life commitments, or you want to stagger teams, it’s better for New South Wales Health because it gives you more flexibility there, and it's better for them. What has been your approach overall? You are responsible for workplace experience now. What has been your general approach to hybrid working and how has that been working for you?

Amy Chew 
It's been a number of challenges. I think the main one that I think a lot of people that look after facilities and sites is around safety for people. A lot of people have. We also had new starters. A lot of people have just started with the business during you know the pandemic and probably haven't connected with people as much. From a practical point of view, if there was a fire in the building, where would you go? Where are the fire escapes? So we had to evolve a lot of things by going digital. We’ve got a digital e-learning session on what to do when you hear the beep for a fire alarm because a lot of people haven't been in the building, and they're suddenly in the building. That has been really important from a safety point of view. 

 We also created a virtual online induction as well so people know what to expect. We do continue our induction for new staff on site, physically showing them around the facilities. Obviously, we give people the option if they don't feel comfortable with that and they can do the virtual one so that's been really good as well, and people have quite responsive to that. I think it is about broadening our ways of reaching people. We communicate with people and QR codes are the rage now so everything has a QR code. 

The other thing that has evolved and helped us is just dashboards and data. I didn't realise how interested I'll be in data as I am now, being able to give people ideas about occupancy or how people are connecting with us. Many of the digital screens now have a QR code linking to certain pages and we can understand how effective things are at something and certainly pre-pandemic, we wouldn't be so interested in all this data. Now, constantly, you can't help people to change or help people make decisions when you don't have that data to support. It has been really important for us.  

Eoin Higgins 
So what you said there, I'm just curious now. Could you give us an example of one or two ways you’ve found to use the data?

 Amy Chew 
I guess it is understanding how often, and the movements of people from different areas in the building and exploring how they are accessing information, how effective we are in doing what we are doing. I think they are the main things. It’s giving us information to improve the business which is a separate thing. Now, we’ve got about probably 4,500 people in this building and not all of them come every day. Maybe we can do more if the attendance is going to be increasing. 

We can see the trend of not only just how many people coming in the building, but how many distinct people are coming in. Both of those lines are tracking up. Once we get to a plateau, we can make the decisions around or maybe have other parts of New South Wales Health move into this building and work together as well, and save a lot of money in that sense. So in a strategic mindset, we've got all this information that can help us make strategic decisions around not just accommodation, but even pool vehicles. Who's using a pool vehicle these days? Collecting all these information and building dashboards in the last few years is all I do, which has helped me, yes. 

Eoin Higgins 
It's great! You are talking about utilisation and building capacity and so on. I know we have seen in recent years, particularly with the pandemic, an explosion in more and more sophisticated tools as to how people measure around desk utilisation, how it's done, and desk booking systems. Some of them are really quite interesting. What has been your approach then? You've got a lot of this data and evidence coming in about access and utilisation? Have you been looking at booking systems and a desk booking systems?

Amy Chew 
No, not in this building. The building has a lot of space and I think looking at the utilisation, we're very much far from needing this booking. We saw desk booking as another thing that people have to do and it's another thing that people won't do, so how accurate is the information anyway? Unless you have someone standing at the gate saying did you check in, did you book the desk, did you say that you're here, so we moved away from that. I was surprised actually because initially we thought we would have people saying hang on, I want to book a desk. Also, a lot of organisations that did have desk booking were making every other desk unbookable. We have already said to the people, make your decision and if someone sits next to and you don't feel comfortable with it, just move somewhere else. That is not a big issue at all. 

So, we didn't actually get a lot of requests for desk booking but we did factor in, not so much on desk booking, but an online dashboard where people could state their intention to 'I'm going to come in every Wednesday, generally, or every Thursday, Friday' so that other people could see. We actually built an app but we didn't use it in the end. There were two things we were preparing for which are if things got worse and what would happen? In the end, I guess our utilisation has been steady and is steadily increasing, Now, I think everyone has learned to sort of understand a lot more about COVID-19 and how to live with it so I think we are okay.

 Eoin Higgins 
I think that could be a whole other story for another day. There is so much conversation at the moment coming from staff groups, like I want to be able to know that if I do come into the office on a given day, will somebody else be there because that's part of the reason why I'm coming in. It seems like at the moment for New South Wales Health that doesn't seem to be a thorny issue. If they become one, you have the system ready to go if you do need it.

Amy Chew 
I think the businesses are so different. We have groups within New South Wales Health that say they might deal with procurement or IT or with policymaking, and we have left it up to them as we cannot mandate a two day for everyone or a three day work week for anyone. We have left it up to the businesses to decide on how they work, because each of the businesses would have different ways of how they do things, how they socialise or how they connect. It's very interesting as some groups have said, come on one day a week, or come two days a week. 

Certainly in our teams, we have that conversation and we juggle it around our own lives. Everyone is quite open about that which is a really large shift. For example, I took my daughter out of after school care, and now, we are on a waiting list and I can't get her back on. There are some days where she has activities at school, and there are other days that we actually have to get back in time for three, so the team knows that I will go race off from work either when I was in the office, or from home to pick her up then I will be back and we continue working. I think being open and transparent about that as a manager or a leader, and as a team, you can have those conversations and be happy as long as people are completing their outcomes. It's doesn't really matter if we are sitting down in front of the computer showing that we are available for the next eight hours. 

Eoin Higgins 
I think you have touched on something for me. One of the challenges with the way in which we had to work has blurred the lines a little bit when we are at home a lot more. For some, it is a challenge about when does work ends and when family life begins, but in another way, I think it has really humanises us, I have been on calls with people where a senior manager has one of their children walk into the shot to have a word in their ear. Now, pre-pandemic, that would not be acceptable and yet now, that is okay. It is okay if you have to go because we understand more about each other in a human sense so I think that has been a real positive. 

Sorina Catuna 
It is very interesting, Amy, the way you said that people have their own conversations in their own teams, how they set up their schedules, how they meet up in the office, when they come together, and when they are not at home working in this hybrid way. I was just wondering, how about cross collaboration or cross functional collaboration, when that has to happen with other types of teams, how do those conversations happen and how do you make it happen so that people can come together and work this way? 

Amy Chew 
I think we have been working closely together and that's where technology plays a big part. It’s also about feeding information to people about coming back and connecting that is not just about focusing on work. That connection time in the office is about true collaboration. I think even when we talk about activity based working, some of the spaces that we had designed that would have worked two years ago, perhaps we'll need more collaborative spaces now because the intention coming into work is not about those focus areas but more on collaboration space because now. We can focus at home. 

To help with people collaborating, we have a whole side programme around training people up to use the functionalities in the technology they have. We have Teams, we're teaching people to have an administrator on zoom, have someone running the meeting in the background and make sure that everyone has their videos on, how to display themselves on video and make sure that people have the tools they need to actually engage with people virtually online. You will find that there are lots of studies shown that some people are probably more vocal in the meetings in a live forum and are probably less vocal in a virtual form. 

Now the balance is about getting around neither a pure at home environment or a pure office environment, but it is that half-half environment. That is where the collaboration has been really challenging. Someone on a call might feel a bit left out or vice versa so it’s about teaching people how to actually run meetings. It sounds a bit silly, but using technology properly or having that conversation with people to say this is a face to face meeting. This is something that I would love - for meeting invites to have a response, especially whether you are coming in person or virtually is really important so that people can prepare accordingly. 

I’m sure many of you have probably had the feeling I had, when there are 20 people involved in the meeting and I have booked a 50 person meeting room to make sure there is enough physical distancing between the 20 of us. In the end, there is only me and one other person who are the only people in the room. These are the things we are learning more about how to manage and also from the flip side, teaching people the etiquette of what they should do and how they should use space accordingly for what they need to achieve. 

 Eoin Higgins 
So it sounds like heaps and heaps of learning that you had to go through this huge change as we mentioned, to be able to relocate everybody under one building. To do that in the midst of a pandemic was just an amazing feat to begin with but to look at how you can still use activity based ways of working and continue working in that way, all the way through to pandemic, It's so impressive, Amy. 

Now, it feels like you are on the cusp and on the frontier of another outset of learning about how are you going to bring hybrid ways of working to life now, what are you going to learn from your experiences, but it seems like a lot more in the world of workplace experience for you to continue with.

Amy Chew 
Definitely. Our team's focus is all about the employee experience or workplace experience, and we want people to be able to focus on their jobs. Our job is to make sure that they are supported, and they don’t have to worry about that. Even talking to a colleague just earlier who I've seen virtually but not in real life for probably at least a year, she was saying that when the teams first moved into the new building, there were lots of questions or complaints around how spaces are used but since everyone has come back to the office, there's not been a peep about the facilities. No one has queried anything because I think people are appreciative. Well, I hope they are anyway, of the space that they have. 

Not everyone is able to work from a different location and they need to come in maybe for personal reasons, or there is construction going on at home or what not. We want to be able to be available and supportive for people to be able to do their work, no matter what they are doing. 

We're doing things internally as well. We call it an O Week, similar to like when universities first start in the beginning of their semester. They have a learning programme for people to come in, meet and greet and know what clubs they can join that sort of thing. We have done that for our office to try encourage people to come back in and people really enjoyed that reconnection. It is shifting the mindset that coming to work is not just about working, it’s coming to work to connect and care for each other and yourself because we all need that break. It’s not sustainable to be at home every day.

Sorina Catuna 
Exactly. Yeah, I think everybody is quite deprived of the social connection after the pandemic.

Eoin Higgins 
I have one final question for you, Amy. The podcast is called A Better World of Work where we are trying to talk to people, who are in their own way creating a better world of work in their area of influence. What does a better world work means for you? 

Amy Chew 
For me personally or for me in my workplace? 

Eoin Higgins 
You can decide, whichever resonates for you most strongly. 

Amy Chew 
That’s a tough one. I think it'll probably be a personal view rather than from the workplace. Being able to do what you need to do in your own time that suits you. It goes back to activity based working in some ways and that changes daily for me. For example, at the moment, my husband has COVID-19 but the rules are, we are allowed to go in the office now so on certain days, I might be at home and I am also able to take the opportunity to get out of the house to be away from him, which is being able to be really flexible with what we need to achieve on a daily basis. 

So being able to have a plan, have a goal of what you want to do at the end of each week and not be fixated on what that might look like day to day. With the pandemic coming and how we have all had to evolve in the way we work and experiencing changes on day to day based on your circumstances, everyone needs to be more accepting and open more whether it is your own or other people's circusmstance and being flexible around that. I'm not sure if that is the clear answer to the question but hope that helps.

Eoin Higgins 
What it says to me is how we view things personally influences how we make decisions. It sounds like you want to empower and you want to be empowered to be able to make those decisions and have the flexibility. It feels like that is what the way of working is at New South Wales Health as well so you can influence that.

Amy Chew 
It is challenging though. I have a team with different roles. Some of the team have to come in every day to complete their roles and certainly, I feel a responsibility to come in to be present for them and be supportive. Maybe I don't need to, I'm not sure this is something that I have put on myself. Maybe I need to even think about having that conversation with my team. Do you actually like it better when I'm not here? Perhaps they do, or perhaps they enjoy me being there. In my mind, I feel like I need to be present and sometimes that is at my own detriment where I am trying to fit lots of things in one day. Even just talking now, it has made me think, maybe I need to reassess what I am doing with certain things because I think it changes all the time. Previously, maybe that's a legacy thing where I feel like I need to be present for my team. Here I am saying, I don't need to see you to do your work but I am not actually doing it myself. 

Sorina Catuna 
It is changing and it's not a thing that just happens overnight, right? Because you want to be there for people to give them support all the time and then you feel that maybe if you're not there, they cannot do certain things, or cannot maybe make decisions faster than usual. Indeed, I think that is a conversation that needs to happen at a team level, including with the leaders to just see what is best for the team and how can we work, Basically, thinking about outcomes at the end of the day!

Amy Chew 
Coming back to your point, Eoin, around when I was talking about a better workplace question. I think it’s also that the workplace that we go into work now, it's not about seeing people as your colleagues but we are seeing each other as people. I think that's a really big change that we know a lot more about your colleagues than you did before. I think that has really shifted and it’s probably beneficial that everyone is a person, whereas before you saw each other as more of an office colleague. 

Eoin Higgins 
Yeah. I think there is a whole lot of podcast about bringing your whole self to work, what that means and how you can do. So maybe that is a story for another day, Amy.  I just want to bring it to an end now and close it up. I just want to say thanks so much for your time. 

It's just been a really wonderful conversation to have not only hear about your personal practices of leadership and how you have gone about that but also, a really wonderful story at New South Wales Health and a fantastic project that you have been so heavily involved with  the rest of the team there.

Amy Chew 
No worries. 

Sorina Catuna 
Thank you so much, Amy.  

Amy Chew 
Yes. Thank you for having me.