­­Lockdown is tough. And with no end in sight at the moment to the situation in NSW, the competing pressures of work and home life can sometimes be overwhelming.

We reached out to team leaders around University to hear how they’re supporting their teams in lockdown.

Flexibility is key

CEO of U@MQ, Pete Boyle, says it’s important to recognise that each staff member’s circumstances are different and to resist a ‘one size fits all’ approach. “By listening to each individual’s  circumstances, we can be flexible and understanding of their needs,” he says.

“There is flexibility around work hours, and I encourage staff to ‘turn off’ at the end of the day, as well as remind them to get up and move around during the day. In many ways working from home is more intensive than being in the office with fewer natural breaks.”

Home life and work life together gets even trickier when you throw home schooling into the mix. For Emma Hastings, Department Manager for Physics and Astronomy and Earth and Environmental Sciences it comes down to flexibility around work hours and avoiding micromanaging.

“I let the team establish their own work patterns, which can be affected by home schooling or the limitations of a share house,” says Emma. “Some work slightly earlier or later than they used to, and one makes up some hours on the weekend, which means she can spend every morning focussing on the needs of her young son with home schooling.”

“I also really dislike micromanaging; I thinks it’s entirely counterproductive. In the end we’re all human and there is so much to deal with right now just getting through the day – a restricted work arrangement is not at all helpful.”

Staying connected

Flexibility aside, one problem we’re all facing working from home is just staying connected with our team.  Zoom was already an established part of our working lives before the current lockdown, but most teams have gotten better at using it.

“I insist that everyone have their camera on in Zoom meetings because that visual connection is really vital,” says Emma. “A couple of my team were a little unhappy about that at first, but they see the value now. And it also means we can wave at family members and dogs as they pass the camera. Families are always welcome!”

Focusing on the whole picture

Zoom certainly has its limitations especially when it comes to managers getting a sense of how their team members are really doing. MQBS Student Administration Team Leader Charlene Loh says it’s easy to lose the human side of things when you lack visibility of each other’s day and that checking in shouldn’t just be about work. “We only get to see a snapshot of our teammates’ day and when you are on Zoom – nobody knows what happens before or after the meeting,” says Charlene.

“If you are in the office together, you can physically see if someone is having a good or bad day and you automatically support each other, but when you are apart and only see that snapshot; it is easy to think everyone is doing okay when that might not be the case. So, we make it a point to check in on one another and because our team has a family culture, we do feel comfortable sharing issues; it is not all about work.”

Making time for fun

Charlene and her Student Administration team leader colleagues, Gabby Chan, Roma Shrestha, and Nahia Islam, all agree it’s important for managers to set aside time to be social as a team.

“When Covid first hit in 2020, we started setting aside 30 minutes each week for a department Zoom social session,” say the three. “Each week a team member would organise some sort of online game – treasure hunts, trivia or Pictionary – and the winner would get to pick the next person who would organise the following week’s social session. That 30 minutes really made a huge difference in keeping us connected as a team, and they really brought out the creativity, inventiveness and competitiveness in everybody. Now that we are back to working remotely, the online social sessions are back on – our tip for some great tools we have used are Skribbl and Kahoot.”

On a larger scale, the Faculty of Arts has taken a faculty-wide approach, organising an afternoon ‘Zoom Social’ earlier this month to bring its community together to chat and catch-up with colleagues across all the Faculty’s departments and schools.

“It was wonderful to speak with colleagues in the Faculty to hear how they are coping in lockdown,” says Executive Dean Martina Möllering. “These sorts of interactions and opportunities to reconnect are so important during this challenging time. I’m looking forward to the next one.”

The Faculty’s Senior Learning Designer, Gai Ramesh, organised the attendees into smaller breakout rooms to create a more intimate space to chat. “A lot of people at the end were very happy with the session and said they really enjoyed catching up with their colleagues in an online social gathering,” says Gai.

The right tools for the job

Emma Hastings has found it important to use different forms of communication for different purposes. Much like you would have informal chats with your colleagues in a lunchbreak or on the way to grab a coffee, “I found it really important to have a place where the team can just be social, be themselves with each other and share their experience,” says Emma. “For that reason, Teams has been reserved as a ‘no work zone’.”

It’s a similar story over in Campus Life, says Pete Boyle. “We do the standard things such as regular catch ups on Zoom and on the phone with individuals and teams, and we take the time to make sure that some of the catch ups are non-work related; I think this is very important.”

We’re all human

For many of us, good management comes down to just being human and supporting one another as people through these odd times. Emma Hastings says for her, it’s about being open and honest.

“I try to be honest with my team about how I’m feeling,” she says. “That allows them to do the same and I am certain that the honesty and trust that we share within the teams has been a vital part of how we’ve got through two lockdowns and the many weeks yet to come.”

It seems it’s the little things that count, and Pete Boyle says we shouldn’t underestimate the power of just saying ‘thanks’. “As a leadership team we regularly say thank you to our staff to recognise their efforts– it’s just so important.”