Services Australia, Telstra, and National Australia Bank reveal what they did during the height of COVID-19 pandemic.
Unless you worked for a company that endorsed some form of flexible working arrangement — and many increasingly were — remote working would have been a foreign concept at the start of last year. That is, of course, until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It was then that we saw organisations across most sectors scramble to figure out how they were going to continue to operate, while balancing the health and safety of staff. The solution was obvious: Remote working. As staff traded working in open-planned, hot-desking-style office environments for their kitchen tables, in a quiet corner, or the spare room in their home, management was forced to come up with solutions to facilitate the shift and do it in a way that caused as few disruptions as possible. Introducing video conferencing applications, online collaboration tools, and equipping staff with laptops were just a few of those solutions that organisations, such as Services Australia, turned to. “The number of staff working from home at the height of COVID required the rapid mobilisation of resources to support a remote work environment and minimise disruption for our staff and customers,” Services Australia CIO Michael McNamara told ZDNet. He explained that the Australian government department which was responsible for providing welfare support to millions of Australians during the height of the pandemic — including 1.5 million new customers which didn’t go quite as planned — had to deliver around 9,000 “office-in-a-box” kits to staff over five weeks. “This included phones and PCs with the ability to connect to our network and hold virtual meetings from home,” McNamara said. “In this same period, we had around 2,000 additional staff join us from across the APS (Australian Public Service) who, within a matter of weeks, were trained and on-boarded with the tools they needed to assist us to take calls and process claims from both home and office environments. This required the fit out and testing of new workstations across six sites in less than two weeks.” During that same period, McNamara said the department experienced unprecedented demand on myGov, which caused widespread access issues and forced the department to make upgrades so that the system was fit to handle the demand. “We quickly scaled up, simplified policy, and re-designed our digital services so we could help Centrelink customers online from the safety of their homes.
