Transitioning in Times of Great Uncertainty

For most people, 2020 was all about COVID-19, but let’s not forget about the awful bushfires that seriously impacted our communities, our customers and also our staff. EnergyAustralia was in the midst of supporting our impacted customers and employees when COVID was declared a pandemic and so here we were, dealing with both in parallel.

We were guided by 3 key principles during this time:-

·        Keeping our people safe;

·        Keeping the lights on; and

·        Supporting our customers

Keeping our people safe 

We needed to get over 2000 staff working remotely in super-fast time, at a time when we didn’t have the infrastructure to do so – the solution at the time could only scale to support 150 people. The technology team mobilized to build the new remote working platforms with some of our vendor partners to ensure we had a robust, scalable and resilient set of solutions. Something that would normally take 6-9 months to provision, took 6 weeks. 

In parallel, the technology and business teams moved all staff from the office environment to home in a little over a fortnight, including some of our offshore partners, who were impacted once they went into a hard lockdown and were not geared up to deal with WFH. This whole exercise included replacing desktop PCs with laptops for all contact-centre staff, deploying headsets for everyone, desks & chairs etc. 

We asked the team what they wanted in way of support and the answer was ‘get out of the way and let us do our jobs!’ That’s basically what we did – it was magic to watch! 

Keeping the lights on 

Pandemic aside, people expect EnergyAustralia, as an essential service provider, to keep the lights on. To keep our generation sites COVID free, we implemented a range of health and safety measures such as temperature checks, separate control rooms, additional cleaning and making masks mandatory before government directions were in place.

We also undertook our biggest ever plant refurbishment, a large outage, when the teams at Yallourn replaced an entire unit of the power station. Some companies delayed their major maintenance programs, we didn’t because our customers depend on us, and so did many of the local businesses that support such a major project. 

At its height, we doubled our staff at Yallourn during this time and had to build separate everything to ensure if one team got sick it didn’t infect the other teams – it was a massive under-taking and this while other energy providers decided to stop major programs of this nature. The outage cost approximately $65M and contributed tens of millions to the Latrobe Valley region. A huge result and one we are rightly proud of. 

Supporting our customers

It was clear in the early stages of the pandemic that some of our customers would be more impacted than others – suffering perhaps a first in struggling to pay bills at a time when they had just lost their job. In mid-2020, around 100 people were recruited to EnergyAustralia’s contact centre and back offices teams, many of which were part of, or supporting, the EnergyAssist Team, our hardship & vulnerability teams.  

EnergyAustralia also provided over $3.2M of assistance to household customers in the form of debt waivers or payment matching. We also set up approximately 300k payment plans for customers. Participants in the EnergyAssist program grew from approximately 19k at the start of 2020, to a peak of almost 24k in November and there are currently 22k customers in the program. This support is vital to helping our customers to get back on their feet. 

EnergyAustralia played a key role in the ‘We’ve Got You’ campaign as a member of the Energy Charter which was a public campaign to encourage people to contact their energy retailer if they were having trouble paying their bill. We remain the only energy company out of the large-scale providers that remain committed to the charter, with AGL and Origin no longer part of the scheme. 

When dealing with daily change in circumstances of COVID, our priority was focused on our people first and foremost, to ensure they were safe and had as much of the updated information as possible. To do this we called the pandemic early and the Pandemic Response Team were put in place to co-ordinate activities but not control them. 

We also decided that communications in times of uncertainty were key to our staff. They would naturally be worried and so daily calls and communication rhythms were put in place at the company level and we enacted business unit specific communications plans to ensure the teams were able to stay in touch and had something to focus on in relation to their ongoing deliverables. The staff felt connected this way even if it was somewhat strange initially. 

When it appeared that WFH would be an ongoing situation, with no specific end in sight, the teams started to expand their opportunities for keeping staff connected and in touch. I attended a couple of Indian cooking sessions and can now cook awesome pakoras. Who knew that eventually I would learn to expand my limited range of dishes to include pakoras – it was magic, slightly weird at times but an awful lot of fun! Friday Bingo sessions enabled us all to relax and have fun, not something we would normally try as we rush home for the weekend. Who would ever have believed that Friday drinks could also be such fun and great to share drinks with the whole team, despite being locked down? The pleasure of sharing such fun times and enjoying each other’s company was something that emerged during those times and remains to this day, as we revealed our more personable sides. 

Despite the unchartered waters we were navigating, the focus on our staff seemed to work – our company staff engagement scores increased 17 percentage points to 71 per cent this year, which is above the Energy and Utilities average of 68%. As a Technology team it’s even more dramatic, going from 50 percentage points 18 months ago, to 77%, and this is a credit to my leadership team who’ve worked really hard to ensure our people take priority and still do. 

As well as my leadership team, I want to recognize the wider technology team, who were and still are spectacular in their adaptive approaches to the new normal. The technology staff really took things in their stride and delivered without missing a beat – the aspect that made me feel most proud though was how they supported each other through the peaks and troughs. This brought the organization together quickly, with people focusing on health and well-being and delivering to their commitments. That connectedness has continued, as too the trust in each other. And finally, staff have continued to own their own destinies – making decisions and removing blockers, whereas before there would be a tendency to escalate.

My CEO, Catherine Tanna said to me recently that in her 40 years of working she has never seen a Technology team held in such high regard and I agree, it’s a wonderful privilege to be part of this team and they’ve worked so hard for it. 

Using these dramatic times to turbo charge change has enabled us to achieve four key changes. We have redefined the function of technology – the business has been able to see the value that Technology brings to the table rather than what issues have been created, and this strength of relationship continues. 

Secondly, flexibility is where we’ve been strongest. So much so we’ve implemented a new initiative called ENERGISE, which gives staff 2 additional days leave, in addition to taking public holidays when they want to rather than when they occur. 

Thirdly, measuring outcomes rather than attendance is the biggest change which has enabled is to implement workplace flexibility in a non-prescriptive manner – the staff love it, we all do! 

And finally, staff now own their decision-making – people are traditionally wired to the perceived safety net of hierarchical decision-making. This disappeared during COVID and it can’t and won’t come back – teams make much better decisions on the ground than floating them up to senior leaders, including executives. 

What changes have you and your teams managed to achieve during these extraordinary times of uncertainty?