Delivering a post pandemic workplace strategy with Liesl Westberry, Head of Service Optimisation and Improvement at City of Casey

Eoin Higgins 
Welcome everybody to the latest episode of A Better World of Work Podcast. I'm joined today by my co-host Hardeep Matharu, and our guest today is Liesl Westbury from City of Casey, local government in Victoria in Australia. Hey Liesl!

Liesl  Westberry
Hi, how are you going?

Eoin Higgins 
Very good. It's great for you to join us. Before we jump in,  we just want to layout the context of why we are having this conversation with you. You are working at City of Casey, a local government municipality in Victoria, Australia. It is quite a large area which serves over 340,000 people, so quite a large community you have to serve. In 2017, you opened a community precinct, Bunjil place, which I have been to a couple of times. It's a beautiful space for the community, but also for City of Casey's employees to work at. At that time, you adopted a shared working model - an activity-based working model - so no assigned desks and no offices. It's where people use the spaces depends on the activity that they are going to perform. Then in 2019, City of Casey set about revising the workplace strategy. Then of course, COVID hits, and the whole world and Victoria in particular is disrupted in a huge way, which we've all heard about. 

 The interesting story here for me was that rather than putting your workplace strategy on hold, City of Casey decided to lean into that even more to ensure that not only were you able to respond to the disruption in the short term, but also to think about a post pandemic workplace that takes into consideration a short, medium and the long-term workplace strategy that supports the employees in the way they work. A really fascinating story and we are delighted that you can help us understand and tap into your wisdom and experiences. So with that in mind, Liesl, maybe you just tell us a little bit about yourself your role and what you do at City of Casey.

Liesl Westberry
Sure thing, and thank you for having me. Like all other local councils in Australia, City of Casey is a hugely complex organisation. We have a very large range of services, we have different types of roles in the organisation and we operate out of many locations as well. For instance, our services range from roads, infrastructure to childcare, Aboriginal reconciliation, disability support, environmental conservation - the list goes on and on. In terms of the municipality area that we serve, we are a really significant growth council and there is about 40% growth in our population projected between 2022 and 2041. 

We also serve an incredibly diverse community as well. People in our community are from about 150 different cultural backgrounds, they speak 140 languages, they practice 120 different faiths, and we are also home to one of the largest populations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Metro Melbourne. So that is a bit of context around City of Casey. In terms of my role at City of Casey, I am the Head of Service Optimization and Improvement so my team looks after our service strategy, our business planning, business architecture, process improvement, and of course, our activity based hybrid working programme. 

Eoin Higgins 
Amazing. Such a range of diversity and that scope of community that you have to serve and so important, then that you are able to work in ways which continues to support that. I am sure we will get into that in a little bit later when we talk about what happened when the pandemic hit.

Hardeep Matharu 
Liesl, I'm just curious given that you have got such a diverse range of people within your region, does it also mean that your workforce itself is extremely diverse? Is it something that you have noted that has either changed over the years or has it always been a very diverse workforce that you have there?

Liesl Westberry 
Our workforce force is incredibly diverse and it has been incredibly diverse for a long time and continues to be. As a nod to the kind of services, we have operations crews out on the roads, we have community safety officers and maternal child health nurses. We have a wide range of direct service delivery people in our organisation as well as of course, a whole lot of knowledge workers running out of our offices as well. So yes, we have an incredibly diverse workforce with hugely different needs, particularly when it comes to things like workplace strategy and how we kind of leverage offices as well. So yeah, absolutely. 

Hardeep Matharu 
Wonderful. Great. Yes, indeed, I think that the diversity is a beautiful thing. But of course, as you said as well, it also means that you really need to laser focus on it in some ways because everyone's different and that is something that needs to be considered in the context of not just workplaces, but all forms of ways that you interact with them as well. Thanks for sharing, Liesl. 

Eoin Higgins 
So Liesl, maybe help us understand that context. Many of our listeners, I assume would know that Victoria had to go through some of the strictest lockdowns - two major lockdowns in 2020. It was really some trying times for a lot of folks, as were for many people around the world but I think Victoria in particular, did have some quite strenuous circumstances. That came in the midst of when City of Casey was just shaping up to think about workplace strategy. You are obviously trying to manage for the short term and to make sure the community remains served, but then had made this decision to look at it in the longer term as well. So maybe help us understand a little bit about the context and what led into that sort of leaning into the future in that way.

Liesl Westberry
Absolutely. The last couple of years in Melbourne has been a right oldtime in terms our lockdowns. As you said before, we opened a bunch of places at the end of 2017 and our organisation had always intended on keeping our activity-based working practices live. There was a review and a refresh of the workplace strategy scheduled for the end of 2019. As part of that review, I should note as well that we no longer call it a workplace strategy, it's our ways of working programme. The language shift was actually deliberate and conscious for us because we wanted to be clear that we wanted to think about how we work beyond just our workplace specifically. So in 2019, the team had already started doing some of this thinking and started engaging with our organisation about everything that we have already kind of learned in the last two years that we have worked in the new offices. 

Then, as you said, the pandemic hit and threw a spanner right into those works. I do have to be honest, the team's immediate focus was definitely not on considering how we build a hybrid working practice into our organisation on an ongoing basis. I think like many organisations, our focus is really on enabling our teams to work from home for a short period of time, with readiness to transition back to the office. We spun off a transition operations team which was focused on shifting our services and redeploying staff to keep our critical services going. 

Many of those services, I listed before, they are central services that we had to make sure our community was really well supported during this time and that had to be our primary focus. The team also supported our tech department in the deployment of Microsoft Teams, running training for all staff to get them onto the platform to enable employees to work from home as well. That was all kind of happening with the assumption of returning to the office in either May, June or July 2020 and returning to our previous service model delivery, and our previous offices with no real significant change pre-pandemic. 

 So it was actually about that time that there was a bit of a dawning realisation that we might all be in this for much longer than anticipated and certainly, that was the case for Melbourne and Victoria in the end. We were also recognising at the same time that in all of the flurry of activities, working from home and working remotely. We had actually shifted to remote working and we were actually able to do it quite successfully. It gave us the opportunity to have a conversation with our executive team in about August or early September 2020. We had great support from our executives that there might be a different way for us to work in the future and they were keen for us to take some more time so that we could more deeply consider what we wanted to bring to the future of how we work at the City of Casey. That is how it kind of unfolded -  it wasn't an immediate focus for us, but certainly came sooner than other organisations because we had started some of that pre-work as well. 

Eoin Higgins 
But I think rare in my experience, Liesl.  Your executives and the broader team were able to think of both things - to be able to continue to provide services to your community, and also think about the longer term and see what you can learn in the short term, which I thought in my experience was quite rare but help us think about that. You then jumped into the process of the actual developing this new strategy or a new programme, what was that like? What was the process like and were there any challenges that emerged or opportunities for you and the team?

Liesl Westberry
Great question, I immediately had to tackle with what were the challenges. There are always challenges and I will get to the challenges but I will tackle the easy bit first. As I mentioned, the team had started the process in 2019. We held for a little bit and then picked it up again in September 2020. 

I joined the organisation in September 2020 and I have the most wonderful team and across organisational working group who have been committed to this work for many years before my time and continue to be today. In terms of the actual strategy development or the programme development, our approach was heavy engagement focused so we did a lot of engagement. We wanted to learn everything that we could about our people's experience in working from home, what they loved and what was really working for them when they were working from home, and also what they didn't like so much and what they were finding challenging. We also wanted to consider things like productivity, leadership, employee engagement, and a whole raft of other elements that really contribute to our experience broadly at work. We were supported by yourself, of course. 

Through that work, we ran an all staff survey, conducted focus group workshops with staff represented from every department across the organisation, and specific engagement with our executive and broader leadership teams as well as some of those community-facing teams as well. I think, through that engagement, we learned things that are in line with what we are seeing in much of the rest of the world. Some of the statistics that I can rattle off the top of my head were that we had about 97% of our staff who wanted to continue working remotely in some capacity. The majority of those people, at that stage at least, thought two to three days a week was about right but that answer varied from no days a week to five days a week and everything in between.

Again, much in line with the rest of the world, people were seeing our office spaces as the opportunity to connect, collaborate and have people contact with their fellows in the organisation. There was a keenness to do individual, focus and process work at home, report writing or processing of requests kind of work. In terms of the stuff that people missed, they really missed connecting with their teams, and particularly others from across the organisation. We found that many teams were still able to have regular team meetings, but it was those dynamics in the corridor conversations that people were really missing - connecting with others in the organisation. They loved having to not commute and be able to chuck in a load of washing and do other things while working from home. These insights speak deeply to many of us.

As I mentioned, we were also trying to capture the learnings we have had since 2017. Since moving to the offices, we also learned through that time what people had been experiencing in the kind of previous constructive activity based working at City of Casey. We found through staff engagements that our largest office at the Bunjil place precinct, which had been the focus of the first round of this work and it’s staff working from our other locations (as we have quite a few other locations) that they did not feel as included or connected to this type of culture that we are trying to build. They also had trouble with wayfinding when they came into Bunjil because it just felt different to what they were used to experience in our other offices. 

The other thing that I think is probably worth mentioning is that we also found our original conception of four workstyles wasn't diverse enough to capture all of the variety of activities that our staff undertake on a day-to-day basis. Those were some of the highlights for us through that work. In terms of the strategy itself, given the complexity of our organisation, of all of those reasons we already mentioned, we really recognise that a one-size-fits-all approach just wouldn't work for us. We couldn't do that. So we developed a programme that was deliberately at a high level. We had broad guiding principles about how we work, how we aspire to work as an organisation. We had a three-phase maturity model with clear goals and measures for each of those phases and we had a delivery model and priority actions. 

That was kind of it in terms of the practice itself. The way that we operationalised it though, possibly moving past the strategy bit, was then about working with each team, and I mean, one-on-one, each team for the whole organisation. We facilitated team agreement workshops, where each team would then consider those principles, the broad direction and then work out what that would look like for themselves. They develop agreements themselves about how they connect, how they collaborate, how they want to use spaces, how they wanted to give each other feedback, how they want to make decisions, prioritise their work, recognise each other, and all those kinds of things. So I think that was the kind of the gold in what we did. 

In terms of the challenges, there was a lot. Let's just be clear, there was lots of challenges with this work. Nobody had a clear answer and nobody knew exactly what we were doing so it is one of those kind of big hairy problems that we were tackling. I think, not the least of our challenges was also that in Melbourne, the lockdowns continued right through 2021. Every time we got close to doing something to launch, another lockdown was announced and it would just throw spanners into our programme constantly. 

The other thing I'll probably mention, and these I've heard from other organisations as well - one of the things were we had people wanting to do things like mandating minimum requirements about what office attendance looks like. We had everything from people wanting to be mandating the team to be in for a certain number of days a week to people wanting to move internationally and never come back and so again, everything in between as well. This created leadership challenges and team challenges for us. There was the challenge of creating a sense of equity and fairness in a model that is deliberately based on the type of role in the activity that you are doing. We had to do some peripheral things like updating our workforce policy and a couple other things - having parameters while we also tackled the big picture, sought to drive to outcomes, empower our leaders in our teams and do all that good stuff.

Hardeep Matharu 
Sorry, if I could drop in for a second, I just have a question here. It’s very inspiring to hear your experience there. It sounds indeed like it was probably a marathon of challenges and hurdles to jump over, but it sounds like essentially you got there in the end. I think one thing that really comes to mind for me and I am probably thinking about this in the context of clients that I have worked with, is how did you manage to keep the senior leadership bought in throughout all this? I would have thought that there must have been certain perspectives that they would have had - an expectation in some ways things like minimum attendance and on the other side you have employees, I suspect that are looking for flexibility or perhaps this might not have been what they want to do. So how did you maintain that senior buy-in and engagement throughout? That would have been also quite jarring for the leadership too. How did you manage that?

Liesl Westberry
I have to say I think that I am really lucky. Our executive leadership team is amazing and you are so spot on. If the executive team and our CEO weren't completely on board and, in fact, driving a lot of this work, we would really be in a tricky spot. We are incredibly lucky with having an ambitious leadership group, with having some real, strong and aligned aspirations. We had lots of conversations with our executives and of course, that conversation that of 'go or no go' decision in that September time, do we explore this or not. Then in the December, we got their endorsement on the programme, the principles and the approach. We had feedback for a number of times and I have been called into our executive meeting when they have been grappling with things like who do we want to be as an employer at City of Casey? Do we want to allow our team members to live and work interstate and internationally, and what does that kind of look like? They are hearing challenges from their own leaders and they are hearing challenges in their own teams. 

It's the balance of finding something that is consistent that you can apply to a whole organisation while also nuanced enough that you can be individualised where it should. I do think we found a really good balance in it but it is tricky. I would absolutely echo with the kind of sentiment I think that sits behind your question which is also absolutely leader-led as well.

Hardeep Matharu 
Yeah, I will let Eoin take the question off as well and it just an observation that comes about is the one thing that you are kind of pointing to there that I feel is something I can relate to. I think clients that I have worked with have echoed it as well. It's this sort of this shift in, I would not say shift in power, but that seeking out more equity and I guess, equality in terms of how you've got both the employee side and the leadership side, compared to the past. It was much more leadership-driven and essentially top down to an extent, has become much more of a dialogue. There is an element there of trying to meet each other in the middle somewhere, ie, leadership in the organisation might need people to be in the office certain amounts of time because that is where engagement takes place and collaboration happens. Whether it is right or wrong, that generally works more effectively when you are physically present, at least on a certain level of frequency which is needed. 

On the other hand, you have got people seeking flexibility and finding that middle ground is where I have noticed that the COVID experience has allowed us to have that as a more open conversation. I have seen it with clients where you have got employees saying  'oh, the office is so far from where we are' and it was always far pre-COVID. Now they are able to say that and the management would say 'oh, maybe we should think about relocating that place that is more suitable for everyone'. That balance seems to be coming through and I think a little bit of what you have mentioned, at least seems to be pointing in that direction. 

Liesl Westberry
Oh, absolutely. I think the other complexity that might not be the same for all of your clients, but it certainly was the case for us is we are a local government authority. We serve this community in a particular place and so the conversation that we had was is it something where we want people to be able to work internationally. I know that a lot of organisations are looking at that but the connection to the people that we serve, and the place that we serve, we found that to be really important. We do think that we need to have people able to come in to the office able to connect with that community and able to experience this municipality so there is meaning in terms of the place connection, but also the balance of employee attraction and wanting to be a sector leader and an everyone leader. It's something that's really important there and it does open up a different type of dialogue which we have seen pre-pandemic.

Eoin Higgins 
Very impressive Liesl, for you and the rest of the team and the executives. From what you've outlined to me is, you've really looked at it from this holistic perspective. It is the overall workplace and not just the built environment or just the design of the office. You have looked what are the leadership practices, what are the behavioural and cultural practices we are going to need. Yes, what will the design of the workplace need to be, but you also mentioned how you have had to pivot in terms of what are the digital platforms that we are going to need, we are going to have to upskill everybody in teams. This is a huge piece of work and outlining that you have laid out the broad parameters without trying to be prescriptive and telling people.

As you've said, it's not a one-size-fits-all, you've got a huge diversity of roles and people that you have already mentioned. How do you give them a framework for them to operate within the team agreements and so on? It feels like you are getting the balance right and still doesn't make it is not easy, right? As you mentioned, lots of challenges. So what was the impact having that framework, having those parameters, but also having a level of flexibility and adaptability for people to make choices?  The pandemic rolled on. We thought we were going to get out of it in mid 2020, we didn't. Rolled into 2021. You're still trying to develop this strategy, serve the community and to deliver those services. Did the workplace strategy and all those things that you have laid out support that then and how was that into 2021?

Liesl Westberry
That's a big question, I feel. I'll do my best. You are right and none of this is easy and it’s lovely to have a chat and talk about all the things in retrospective. It certainly was not an individual effort by me or anyone, but this is an effort of a whole organisation kind of piece. In terms of how this has enabled us to respond, I think that this work has absolutely set us as an organisation up for the future. But to your point, our focus has remained elsewhere during the pandemic. This work has been happening in the background because as frustrating as it was for all the knowledge workers to be stuck at home, myself included, we were in our organisation and in every other organisation experiencing it, the safest during lockdowns. City of Casey has so many of those frontline workers in childcare, aged care, community safety and the like. So, our focus has definitely, in that time, is less focused on our ways of working and more about how we serve our community and keep our staff really safe in doing that and being that community safe of course. 

Absolutely, the work that we have done sets us up for the future too. Things like our hybrid meeting room technology, and we've done a lot in terms of capability building, in terms of how to lead work in a hybrid team, are shifts trying to lead work to outcomes rather than outputs? All that pieces means that if you have a sniffle that is ongoing kind of sense, you can continue working from home and dial in and not miss out. The kind of fundamental practices are there, it is not set and do not forget we are still in it. I am not sure that I totally nailed that question. I think it's mucky. And I think that's possibly reflected in my response there too.

Eoin Higgins 
Yeah, it is murky and lovely might be the word and it is a way to describe it and it is hard. As you mentioned, it's not you or your team, it needs to be a whole of organisation response, how you think about this and that iterative approach to keep it moving. That is why it resonated for me when you say you have changed it to our way of working programme because for me that has an iterative ongoing process. It is not a strategy that you set and forget and then off it goes. It's a programme that is ongoing and now it is a way of working that needs to be shaped and refined, particularly in these times of uncertainty where nobody really has the answer. Nobody really knows exactly how it is going to play out and in the ways that it is best to play out particularly for City of Casey. 

I have one more question for City of Casey, then I would like to ask a question to you, Liesl about your personal experience. I just wanted to think about how we are emerging now from the pandemic. We're still not out of it in any way but certainly emerging, in Australia in a way, which gives us a level of confidence about a trajectory for the future. What's your sense of the trajectory that City of Casey is playing in the role that the our way of working programme is playing to support that?

Liesl Westberry

Yeah, I think there is a lot. The trajectory of work, broadly, I think is shifting. To your point before Hardeep, around the type of dialogue that we now have in our organisations, the way in which we want to show up to work and the way in which we want to bring a work life balance to what we are doing. The types of things that enable that for City of Casey, many of the things that I have mentioned, things like team agreements, parts of that were absolutely activity based working and hybrid working agreements. Part of that is also good leadership, good culture building, good connection and collaboration. I

 think we have got a good foundation and we are looking to our leaders to keep those live with their teams ongoing into the future and adapt them if they need to. Because none of this is set and forget, it is still emergent with the leadership development and capability building on how we lead and work in hybrid ways. We are still learning and everyone is still learning it. How you are running hybrid meetings and dealing with people that you cannot see. All of those elements are still there so that development will need to continue for for all of us, as we learn more and more about how others are doing about and what is working really well and what is not.  

Some of the other things that City of Casey have done specifically as well - technology has been a great enabler for us for hybrid meetings and the like. We've also brought in desk bookings so that we can think differently about how we use our office spaces and we have reduced our numbers of desks which made me really twitchy during the pandemic, to be totally honest with you. When you have turned off for every second desk, and then you are trying to pull out workstations, it felt uncomfortable at that time. We have done that so that we can take some of those fantastic equipment to our community locations, picking up on some of the elements that I shared before. Previously, we had been very Bunjil centric at City of Casey. Now, we've really tried to embrace this way of working in all of our community locations. We have divvied up new desks, new tech equipment and all the existing tech and desks so it is a redistribution of it all to try and make sure that there is a consistent feel and culture across the organisation.  

I think the other thing that I probably haven't mentioned yet, would be also around our collaboration spaces as well. In line with what we heard from our teams when they gave us that feedback in in 2020, we know that people want to use our offices to connect and to collaborate and to see each other and experience people in three dimensions. If we left the offices arranged in the way that they were, that would be really tricky for us because it was primarily before we were doing individual focus and process work a lot of the time. Of course, have meeting rooms the like,  but they were always hot property. If we are shifting those offices to be more of that and we are trying to do that in a time when there is financial constraints, our communities experiencing hardship and we don't want to incur big expenses so we were not building walls or putting new meeting rooms in.

One of the things that we did was we took all of our collaboration furniture that was dotted around our office and we actually rezoned that all into one zone. One big collaboration zone that we could use to connect and collaborate and do all the good things. It's a pilot site, so we haven't had to invest huge dollars. We didn't have the huge dollars to invest and it would not be the right time to that anyway. So we have started with a pilot to see how it will work and if we don't go the way that we are thinking, we can still pilot in a safe way and we can still shift again further if the way the world's emerging doesn't go in the way that we are anticipating. 

As we've said many times, it does keep shifting. I think the last possible thing would be that's also helped us is our employees' digital uptake. It has also given us an opportunity to do things that I would recommend to everyone, which is revisit your employee value proposition and think about what type of employer you want to be, to people into the future as well. There is a lot in that but there's a lot that we still don't know. It's how we've set up enough but also give us flexibility and wiggle room to keep evolving it over time.

Hardeep Matharu 
That is great. I think just before we will start moving into asking you a bit more about yourself but what really emerges in terms of what you have mentioned there, seems to be much more of an openness to look at things differently or to experiment. This whole idea is not a set and forget, but it is really a test and learn type of an environment. 

What I've been reflecting recently and there's a lot of organisations, without even realising it, have built up a lot of organisational resilience as part of going through this pandemic and having to adjust things around it and essentially emerging as best as they can. Many organisations feel like it's been a huge shift over the past few years but some of the great things that have come out of it are that sort of appetite to try different things, to experiment or to pilot things. Of course, you are talking about governmental agency. It's quite a different working environment. There are private sector business where there is probably more comfortable doing that pre-COVID anyway but I think you have seen this happen all over the place and resilience is a great thing to come out of the pandemic. Of course, many things weren't great out of the pandemic but I think some of the good things were things like that the different attitude towards how we approach things nowadays.

Liesl Westberry 
Absolutely and yes, I agree. I think that we are all sitting here trying to find silver linings in it. The last few years have been horrendously tough and impacted all of us. It's the weirdest kind of shared experience that we have also individually experienced very differently. Yes, there is some stuff that we have been able to do and we are really proud of. We'll take the silver lining but it has been an absolute, an absolute stretch as well. I would echo both of those. Yeah, absolutely.

Eoin Higgins 
Maybe that is a nice little segue, Liesl.  You mentioned earlier on, you joined the City of Casey in September 2020 in the midst of a lockdown and at a time when there is a lot of disruption. It's challenging enough to join any organisation as a new starter. You're trying to find your way. You're trying to understand who the different people are and how it all works. What was your experience? How did you, in terms of the revised our way of working programme, and you intersecting with it at that point? How was that as an experience for you? What did you learn? 

Liesl Westberry
I found it really tough and so many of us changed our organisations during a lockdown so it's definitely not a unique experience to me. For instance, I had been leading a team of comparable size, doing comparable work elsewhere, and had managed the shift originally in that organisation to online relatively easily. There is absolutely challenges in all things but myself and my experience in that was relatively easy because I really knew my team and I knew what they would need from me in that environment. I think coming into a new organisation and trying to establish new relationships in a purely online environment was much harder than I've given credit to. I do not know if you have picked it up but I’m an extrovert and I enjoy talking to other humans so I found that really hard. 

I did all the things that you do when you start anew in a new organisation. You set up the awkward one-on-one meeting, like meet-and-greet with all the different people and you get to meet the people and have an initial kind of conversation. But after that, the way that we work from home and certainly the experience that I had at City of Casey is that if you are joining online meetings remotely, you are there for a purpose. It's not about the little chitty chat beforehand and after, it is about getting on with the work. The personal connections for me personally was very hard and that is probably one of my main reflections. 

The other thing that I would think about in terms of the learnings was we toyed around with setting a minimum mandate for how often people were coming into the offices. I did not know the answer to that question was but I am really proud that we haven't mandated a minimum requirement to return. As I have said, it does make it tricky and we needed to have lots of leadership conversations around the complexity. But I think that if we had gone down that route - for instance, at one stage, we were considering attending our offices like mandating once a fortnight - the employee experience would not have been amazing. 

I really believe to make hybrid activity based working really effective, you need to use the spaces differently based on the work that you are doing. I know that sounds like a kind of tagline but if you need people to come into the office one, two, three days a week and sit in the office to do the exact same thing they would have been doing at home, in terms of teams meetings and the like, people would sit there think why am I here? Like I just spent all that commute time, I have to buy my lunch, rather than getting the true kind of value out of it and really having the opportunity to deeply consider what am I working on, what kind of space do I need to do and then designing our days differently. 

We are not there yet as an organisation. I'm not there yet personally either but it is something I am quite proud of. I have also mentioned it before the other learning would be was if I was to try and do or attempt something like this in an organisation in which we did not have really fabulous executive leadership support, it would be challenging because ultimately, a policy can override any aspirations that you are thinking about. While the voice of our teams and our people is so imperative, it really helps to create the narrative and the need to change what we are doing, if you do not have great executive support, or your CEO and your leaders on board, it would not be possible. That is probably my top three learnings that jumped to mind for me personally. 

Eoin Higgins 
Some pretty big learnings.

Hardeep Matharu 
What a big couple of years huh as we reflect on it, yeah.

Liesl Westberry
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It's not like in most other things that you do in an organisation, someone has done something somewhere that you can kind of get inspiration from. Oh, wouldn't that be great. This is just something that we were all nutting through together and we still are.

Hardeep Matharu 
It's funny because exactly what you just said, I used to work in an audit company doing audit work for a short while early on. The first thing we would do when we looked at a new case was let's get a file from last year, look at what they did then and we'll just do the same thing or we'll adjust it. Here, there was no last year's file, here was a never before situation. As you said, we just had to muddle through. It's great to hear, Liesl, your experience that you had and emerging through it stronger but at the same time having to go through those challenges along the way. I'm sure many people listening would be feeling exactly the same way. It's great to hear as well. It's such an inspiring way of looking at it and essentially, it is good to hear it from another human.

Liesl Westberry 
I started as an auditor too. I feel you, like back in the day.

Hardeep Matharu 
Yeah, there you go. 

Eoin Higgins 
So Liesl, you've taken us on the journey from City of Casey, how they approached the workplace strategy, the pandemic and the journey. Right through, you have given us some of your key learnings and we are starting to get a flavour of how City of Casey is set up on its trajectory for future work. With that in mind, last question that I have here, which we ask all of our guests is, what does a better world of work mean for you? 

Liesl Westberry
Well, that's a big question too. I think that a better world of work is being able to meaningfully connect to the people that we work with, in my case, the community that we serve, the work that we are doing and to be supported by the spaces, the technology and all the kind of elements that help us do our work. I think it is as simple as that. If there's meaning in what you are doing, if you can find value in what you are doing. It is not like you find a job you love and you will never work a day in your life, we will all still work and we work on the hard days as well as the good days. I do think that if you can find that meaning and you can be well supported by your organisation and your teams and all the things, that's a pretty cool future of work as far as I am concerned.

Eoin Higgins 
Very nice. I could not agree more. Liesl Westbury, Head of Service Optimization and Improvement for City of Casey. It has been a real pleasure to talk to you but also to hear the story of City of Casey. Such a progressive approach to thinking about the world of work and how you want to bring that to life which are our ways of working programme. Thanks very much.

Liesl Westberry 
Thank you for having me. It's been a delight.

Hardeep Matharu 
Thanks, Liesl. It is really nice to speak to you.