Capturing the lessons of COVID to plan our 'new normal'.

As COVID spread across the globe, and as we saw our colleagues in Asia going into lockdown before experiencing it ourselves here in Australia, one thing became clear.

The crisis has proved without doubt that we are only as good as our people. During COVID, our people have been under pressure like never before.

At ANZ, we’ve been able to pivot and instigate a series of health and wellbeing offerings to support our people, but it was really important to hear firsthand about their experiences.

To listen to our teams, we have been running monthly ‘COVID-edition’ engagement surveys which have found record high engagement, and we are encouraged to hear our people tell us they are feeling supported at this time. 

We have achieved some extraordinary things and learned a lot along the way and so we also wanted to make sure all of our people took a moment to reflect and make conscious decisions about positive changes to intentionally build them into our ways of working as well as identify areas that aren’t working so well today. 

With speaking up and always learning being important aspects of our culture, it’s common practice at ANZ to conduct a retro at the end of a sprint or project. So we launched an ANZ-wide “Big Retro” to understand what our teams want to continue doing as part of our ‘new normal’ as we plan for the future.

We launched the Big Retro in early June, encouraging our teams to get together virtually to discuss two questions.

1)  What did we do well as a team?

2)  What should we do differently as a team?

In the spirit of learning, we then asked teams to share their commitments on Yammer.

Our people’s response to the Big Retro has surpassed my expectations – we tapped into a river of experiences where people wanted to share feelings about how they’re working together. The Big Retro helped us to bottle it.

So far, Big Retros have been held in 24 of our global markets, more than half our employees have participated, and 2,700 team ‘scribes’ used #BigRetro to share their commitments on Yammer, which in turn saw 5,600+ conversations.

Themes are emerging. In terms of what is working well with people during COVID, it is embracing technology, increased collaboration with a strong focus on delivery, appreciation (including celebrating wins) plus, my favourite, a sense of comradery.

And, some themes I’m sure you can relate to in terms of what we need to continue focusing on include social connection and managing the blur between work and home and ensuring everyone has an equal voice in the virtual room.

We’ll continue our focused and careful listening for some time yet. Just as you can’t over communicate in a crisis, for me there’s no such thing as too much listening to people.