Albury Wodonga Health have two campuses, one in NSW and one in Victoria. During COVID-19, they were faced with the unique challenges of border closures and disseminating information from two state authorities. We spoke to Virginia Boyd, Executive Director of People, Workforce and Support at Albury Wodonga Health to learn about how the leadership team quickly pivoted the workforce to remote working, adapted face to face training to be conducted online, and opened additional communication streams to ensure staff felt supported throughout the pandemic.

How did the emergence of COVID-19 impact on your workforce planning and training strategies?

“Coming into COVID-19 our focus has to shift quite dramatically to how can we surge our workforce? We undertook a lot of rapid scenario planning to understand how each how we could prepare and utilise our workforce to prepare for a surge in cases.

Apart from surge capacity planning, we also had to forecast for the scenario of what if our workforce comes down with illness? That’s where we shifted our focus on a surge workforce or an emergency workforce, rather than a planned workforce or 5-10 year workforce.”

What tools and platforms did you use to keep the workforce engaged during this time?

“Communication was so vital. We have a workforce that was split into two states and as a result, we had directives coming from the NSW Health that was different from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Victoria. As a result, we had to interpret those differing messages and recommunicate them to our workforce in a way that was consistent.

It was a bit of a challenge, but it was critical. We did this through regular email communication as well as a people and culture ticketing system, where staff could log a ticket if they had questions or queries.

The tool we are using now, Blue Jeans, also became very quickly utilised for meeting people. This meant staff didn’t have to travel or put themselves at risk if they didn’t need to. We also designed some redeployment policies, procedures, guidelines and working from home agreements to help our staff navigate change.

Ultimately, I think our communication system – through the phone hotline and the ticketing system – allowed people with questions of uncertainty to be quite quickly answered. We kept the communication channels open so staff didn’t feel isolated if they were working from home.

Those communication channels were also used for training and development as well. The other advantage we had was we got to use the best of both works of the resourcing that as coming from NSW Health and the DHHS, which provided us with the tools, we needed to do our jobs in what was a very challenging period.”

How were you able to facilitate training and development opportunities during this time and what staff feedback did you receive?

“Our approach to training and development was blended. For example, where we had to do actual PPE sessions, we conducted these on-site and were able to get our trainers there for face-to-face training.

We also had training and development for people who were working from home. Particularly when borders closed, we had to switch to virtual training.

The border closures forced us to do some quick scenario planning around how border closures would affect our workforce. For example, it meant that our staff could not travel across the border from Albury to Wodonga and were only able to work at the campus where they were located. It sounds easy enough but it affected a large proportion of our workforce – we have 1600 people who cross the border every day.

Our corporate induction training oved completely online. With other training, we worked with our training providers to adapt – whether that was on zoom or blue jeans. We also adapted our training program and sessions. For example, we took a half day or full day training session and condensed it into smaller learning bites of 90 minutes virtual training sessions over a longer period of time. This also meant people could interact visually and ask questions.”

What lessons have you learned from COVID-19?

“I think the biggest lesson is face-to-face interaction all the time with staff is not essential. We used to have people cross the border to attend training sessions, but through COVID-19 we learned that is not actually necessary and wastes a bit of time. Online and virtual training actually helped us drive efficiency and engagement when it came to training, inductions and development.

That is not to say face-to-face is not important. We will still continue to drive face-to-face interactions and socialisation because it’s important for the workforce. Our learning is that time is critical for everyone. We are thinking about how we can take these learnings inCOVID-19 to adapt to a new business as usual.”