This is our third week in self-isolation to flatten the COVID-19 curve.  

Thanks for your resilience and willingness to jump into a whole new way of working. Some of us do regular days from home but it is nothing like the new journey we are all embarking on. 

I’ve been impressed by the creative and collaborative ways I’ve seen you solving our shared issue and problems and those of our members. 

I truly believe now is the time to set ourselves up for the new way of working and the new world order, in which certainty is a luxury of yesterday. 

Here are some items from both Communications and HR. They will be placed on the COVID-19 mini-site we’ve compiled to sit on SharePoint. This holds a record of the communications that have gone out. Relevant policies, updates and tips. We’ll be talking to teams about a page each to put our work in progress and let each other know what is happening, especially while we are working remotely. 

Transitioning to a new normal 

Some ideas to keep us going: 

• Clear out the old – clear the meetings in the board room out of your calendar and your mind.  

• This is the time for sifting through what is and is no longer a priority 

If you think the meeting is still needed, and is Zoom-able, re book it. If it’s not, work out another way to fulfill its purpose. 

• Talk about team expectations – are you still doing the same hours at the same time? What are the times everyone needs to be online together? How does anyone know when you are working and when you are not? How are you letting the rest of the organisation know what you are working on? 
• Have regular convos with your team and let each other know when you are starting and ending the day’s work. Consider how long they need to be. Best practice says video meetings be a lot shorter than face2face, as our brains find them really tiring. 
• Join in the all staff zoom at 3.30pm Monday-Thursday. 

• You may now have to ‘listen’ a lot more actively than you are used to. Or you will increase your feelings of isolation or miss important information in a changeable situation.  
• Likewise, you may have to set your do not disturb button to get some thinking work done. Your world suddenly got smaller and you now have 50 NTV housemates so we all have to watch our boundaries and expectations.  
• Give yourself permission to express how hard this situation is, many of us are away from our loved ones, separated by restrictions and border closures and it’s a scary time. We need to acknowledge that. 
• Finally, we should be practising some mindfulness. Notice regularly what you miss and the inevitable unexpected bonuses of the new world order. And join Jean for her sessions when you can! 

Internal Comms arrangements 

We’ve been trialling a few different ways to keep you updated and we’re still keen to hear feedback on how it is working. 

• The main tools for keeping us connected are the all staff zoom at 3.30pm Monday-Thursday and through your team meetings. 

• In general, internal comms should be mostly from Elie and the HR email address. 
• For bigger news, Jacqui’s messages will come when you need to know something. 
• Communications team will update you when publications go out, or we are in the news. 
• We’re compiling these in to the mini-site plus a heap more information.  
• Yammer is for fun stuff and organisation wide sharing,  

• MS teams for smaller scale chatting and shareables,  
• email should be for more formal arrangements and with externals