Transformation within Gov

Andrew Barrie, Ruth Ellison, Catherine Madden at UXDX Community: Australia. Video: https://youtu.be/M8b6bfrIGAI

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introductions: Andrew at WorkSafe Victoria and Ruth at the DTA

[00:00:00] Catherine: My name is Catherine, and I'll be hosting both Ruth and Andrew on the panel today, for those of you out there who want to look into transformation or are struggling in the area. That's what the topic is going to be today. Whether you're in banking, finance or more traditional organizations, digital transformation is one of the most complex issues out there. In fact, the bigger issue is that over 70 percent of those people fail to deliver on their transformation globally. People often perceive government to be one of the most difficult sectors and the most challenging to take on, and both Ruth and Andrew have taken on that challenge, and talk about the positivity of working within government as well. I'm really excited for them to share their thoughts with you today. Andrew, I'll hand it over to you. You're innovation lead at WorkSafe Victoria. If you could explain a little bit about what you do and your role, that'd be great.

[00:01:10] Andrew: No probs, thanks, Catherine, for the intro, and hi everyone. I hope you've had a really great day wherever you are right now. My name is Andrew Barrie. I'm currently an innovation lead at WorkSafe Victoria, where I've now been for a couple of years; I've been in the role for a little while. I think the easiest way to describe the role that I currently have at WorkSafe Victoria is that our innovation team is broken into four portfolio areas, and one of those portfolio areas is what we call recovery. That's the area that I'm currently leading within our team. The core purpose of the recovery team is to look for opportunities to improve the recovery experience itself and the recovery outcomes that might be required if someone is unfortunately injured in the workplace. So a lot of my time is spent figuring out how we fundamentally improve experiences for injured workers in the Victorian community.

[00:02:12] It's important to point out, though, that as part of that work we're not only interested in how to improve things for injured workers. We equally have to think about quite a complex ecosystem in which we're improving experiences as well for the employers who are perhaps supporting those people, their friends, their families, everybody around them. So that's the elevator pitch, guys, for what I currently do as part of my role within WorkSafe.

[00:02:38] Prior to WorkSafe I came from a very different space. I was a design lead at Fjord. Some of you might know about Fjord and their work, but if not, they're quite a large service design, design and innovation agency that is now part of Accenture. I was there for about four years or so as a lead, and I was lucky enough in that time to work across a pretty diverse range of projects, in the public sector and the private sector and across APAC. So I was lucky enough to be involved in a lot of different styles of projects. Before that, like most senior-ish designers these days, everything before that is a bit of a patchwork quilt of various design roles across about 10 or 15 years, but mainly for me within the area of interaction design or user experience design.

[00:03:30] Catherine: Great. And Ruth, hi, welcome. You work at the Digital Transformation Agency in an interesting design role. Can you explain more on that to the audience?

[00:03:39] Ruth: Hi everyone, nice to meet you, and thank you for being part of this. My name is Ruth Ellison. I work at the Digital Transformation Agency, the DTA. We are a federal government agency, and we're responsible for helping government improve digital services to make them simple, clear and fast. What that means is that we lead whole-of-government digital strategies, policies and advice, to look at how we create joined-up and efficient user experiences. We also look at coordinating platforms, technologies and services to enhance the user experience. And finally, the bit that I work in is building digital capability across federal government. What that means is I'm a bit of a connector and a coach in government. My team and I work with teams to coach people through how to take a human-centered design approach to designing policy, products and services. It's really exciting; I really like what I do. And it's a really interesting challenge as well, because working at federal level we have a lot of agencies working on very complex things that impact Australians across the board, and it's always interesting to see what's changing in this space.

What the DTA does and the innovation team model

[00:04:49] Catherine: That's for sure. I will start with you, Ruth, because digital transformation in government is a very broad area. Can you clarify what the DTA does?

[00:05:06] Ruth: At the moment our scope is federal government. We focus on improving the user experience of services and working with agencies to help do that. Although we have "digital" in our name, it's a little bit misleading. A lot of the work we do is really transforming cultures and mindsets. Although people talk about transforming digitally, we go in there, we talk with executives and with teams, we try to understand what outcomes people are trying to achieve, and how we help them take a human-centered approach to what they're working on. Often we're dealing with teams who have a range of experience: some are very experienced doing human-centered design, others less so. How do we help connect those capabilities and experiences across government to help make a more efficient and joined-up user experience? It's a bit tricky when you're dealing with large government agencies, but we're up for the challenge.

[00:06:03] Catherine: It is really interesting. And I guess your role in the mission is to drive that change, or what specifically is your role?

[00:06:15] Ruth: My role is more of a coordinating, facilitating and coaching role. There are elements of the DTA that would actually help drive some of what we call life events, working with federal and state level government to look at how we take a life event approach to improving the experience of our citizens, businesses and communities as they engage with government. But my particular role within that is how we enable the uplift of digital capability in both product design and product delivery, user research, service design, all these different elements, so that as government we are capable of actually implementing and delivering these changes. Often we're working with people who are doing a bit of a shift of career. We're also working with people who have been doing design for a while but may not necessarily have designed in the digital space.

[00:07:05] Catherine: Great. And Andrew, talking about roles, is your role in innovation a centralized function, or how does that work?

[00:07:13] Andrew: At the moment it is a centralized function. We're a team of 25 people or so who are essentially a centralized capability within the organization. We sit within a broader function which in WorkSafe is called Innovation and Insights, which includes not only innovation and the design practices within innovation, but more traditional research capabilities as well. As Ruth was describing, we work in a highly complex space with a lot of interfacing with the health system and the health community, so we tend to do a lot of research in those areas. We also have things like data and analytics teams, and some of these new digital capabilities that have only really come on board within WorkSafe in the last couple of years.

[00:08:06] In terms of the way that we function at the moment, we tend to be a bit more of a service to the organization, as in we're effectively taking briefs and problem spaces or wicked problems from different areas of the organization, and then embarking on certain kinds of projects to help attack those things or focus on those things for the business. That's the way that we operate at the moment. I dare say, though, as we progress as a capability, we'll actually start to see more hybrid models occurring. We're starting to see that a little bit more, where we act in a more decentralized way. We perhaps work in a kind of embedded way with other teams within the organization, to perhaps even establish new value propositions, or even go to the opposite end of the value chain and work more with delivery teams, and embed some of our design capabilities in there to make sure that the work that we've done actually gets out into the real world as well.

Human-centered design as the vehicle for innovation

[00:09:04] Catherine: That is an interesting one, trying to instill the design practices into the dev and the other parts of the team. If you're trying to transform a place, is there a challenge there to make everyone innovative?

[00:09:22] Andrew: I think so. It's definitely a pretty big challenge. Picking up on something that Ruth was saying about human-centered design, for us we don't necessarily see it as a challenge of trying to make people more innovative. We tend to see it more as a challenge of how to infiltrate human-centered design practice more prevalently throughout our organization. It's not necessarily just about innovation, because I find innovation can be quite a loaded term depending on who you talk to in really large organizations. In our team we take the approach that we're essentially using human-centered design as the potential vehicle for the innovation. The more that we can get people in the organization involved in human-centered practice and human-centered projects, the more we build up the muscle memory within our organization around innovation, and hopefully start to see some positive cultural change in that respect.

[00:10:25] Catherine: Just before we move on, is there a problem with everyone thinking outside the square? What are your thoughts there?

[00:10:31] Andrew: I haven't yet seen that problem, and I'd love to see it at some point in time: the problem of having too much innovation and everyone thinking outside the square. But one of the things that I have realized about our work in the last couple of years is that the best examples I've seen in innovation, especially in the public sector, have been in that tension almost between existing ways of working and new ways of working. For anyone who's working in design or innovation, it's a tension that we deal with every day, and I actually see that as being quite a positive thing in some respects. So perhaps one of the problems of everybody thinking outside of the square is that you perhaps lose some of that tension. Philosophically, though, I don't necessarily think that thinking outside of the square needs to be just the domain of innovation practitioners or design practitioners. It's something that hopefully you start to see happen right across your organization. But I do sometimes think that innovation tends to happen at that tension point between those who are not yet thinking outside the square and those who are perhaps a little bit more comfortable with thinking outside of it.

Where to start: champions and small wins

[00:11:57] Catherine: It is interesting; I guess it's the best of both. Ruth, I'll go on to you, on the area of where to start. How do you transform and change? Do you start top down, bottom up, or is there a standard approach that people can take?

[00:12:15] Ruth: I enjoy what you're saying about threading through the different levels of the organization. My experience with doing this, both as a consultant to government and now as a permanent public servant, is that it's a very standard approach. It's really about trying to come to an understanding of what the organization is trying to achieve and what the people you're working with are trying to achieve. As designers and developers we often get so caught up in the jargon and the processes and tools that we have, and it's exciting, but executives often don't really care that we're using this particular canvas over this particular tool. They just want to achieve a particular outcome.

[00:12:55] Where do we start? I think top down, sideways, up and down, through all directions is really useful. Often the best success we've had is finding a champion at the executive level and working with them, while in the meantime starting small, finding little projects and products that we can actually start converting, and working with those teams. Once you get those successes, they can be used to talk to other people and say, wow, we've done this, this is really valuable for us, and we want to keep doing this more. They become the advocates and start rippling that change onwards. Right at the start of my career managing transformation, we were trying to do too much and went too wide too quickly, and it was really hard to do that, because it's hard to support the mindset shift on such a large scale without finding the right levers and champions.

[00:13:49] Catherine: It's a really good point, to tackle it from all angles. Culture and personality is probably the biggest challenge for people. Ruth, I'll ask Andrew this, and you can butt in afterwards, because I'm assuming executive buy-in is a little bit easier at the DTA on digital transformation. But Andrew, how is it for you?

[00:14:16] Andrew: It's probably different, but I don't think that we've had too many difficulties with the fundamental buy-in around digital transformation within our organization, mainly because in the last few years at least it has been fundamentally aligned to a broader strategic objective that WorkSafe Victoria has embarked on. My personal experience of the digital transformation projects that I've been involved in is that they usually come as part of a broader strategic intent within the department or organization that you're working in. That intent might be something like, we fundamentally know that we have to improve customer experience, or aging systems, or legacy tech that we've had since 1978, or whatever it is. So I think our executive and our board are pretty fundamentally aware of why we need to do it and the fact that we're embarking on this. That's almost the basics of it.

[00:15:18] For me, though, I do totally hear what Ruth is saying around that approach of needing to find champions on an ongoing basis. It's one thing to say that you're transforming, but transformation is an ongoing process, and I think you need to find champions at a higher level to talk about how it's going, where we need to go next, where the strategic direction of the business is going, and whether we're still even aligned on what we need from our transformation. That's equally important. So far so good is what I can say in terms of what I've found within WorkSafe about finding those champions. Obviously it's always an ongoing process, but we've had some success so far.

[00:16:10] Ruth: Sustained change is challenging, because you get an executive on board, they bring along a bunch of people, then they leave for another organization, and sometimes you have to start the journey again.

[00:16:17] Andrew: Absolutely, absolutely.

Autonomy and the gap between intent and implementation

[00:16:23] Catherine: And Ruth, from an autonomy point of view, does your leadership team provide it to you, and you to other people, in terms of those implementing the change? I'm taking you as the person implementing. Is there autonomy there?

[00:16:43] Ruth: I'm very lucky to work with executives who just get it in my particular section of the DTA. But the people we work with most are actually executives outside of the DTA. We do a lot of work with executives and teams from across different government agencies at federal level, and what we found is that autonomy is actually very varied. There are parts of government that are quite hardcore, and it's just the way things have always been. Traditionally in government you've got very hierarchical [?] ways of working in federal government. I think state government is a lot more flexible, at least, correct me if I'm wrong, Andrew, but sometimes it feels like so much more happens at a much quicker pace at state level compared to federal, because we're dealing with these massive, big policy changes, and it can take a while to shift a lot of people along those lines.

[00:17:35] So autonomy is varied. It really depends on the maturity of the organization and the teams that we're dealing with. Andrew touched upon the intent. From the executive level there's lots of intent; people have bought into the intent of it. But when you have to implement it, when the rubber is hitting the road, that's where you get some of those challenges, some of the resistance, and people just not sure how to actually do it at that level of detail. That's where it gets really interesting.

Barriers: framing transformation as technology, and its scale

[00:18:05] Catherine: It is, and it is where to start. Andrew, jumping on to you: you've worked at both internal and external organizations, in places like Fjord, as you mentioned. What have you seen as some of the biggest barriers that block the path to transformation?

[00:18:29] Andrew: A couple of the main barriers that I've seen around blockers to transformation are probably much the same whether I was sitting on one side of the table or the other, to be perfectly honest. It's not like those things necessarily gave me different perspectives. Being a consultant or a designer from the outside, I didn't have such a clear picture of some of the complexities from a business perspective or an organizational perspective. But a couple of the barriers that I see within digital transformation: one of them, which Ruth has already touched on, is how we frame transformation. A lot of the time it's very predicated on technology. There's this assumption when you start talking about transformation that it's about tech and it's about digital. What I've learned over the last few years of doing this type of work is that that's probably only one small part of the problem. It's a tricky thing to negotiate, but the more interesting, more difficult part of transformation to design for is actually the human factors at play: the capabilities and the skills and all of these other human elements that effectively need to be built out within the organization in order to actually transform. That's not just about tech. So that's probably one of the biggest barriers that I've seen: when that's not done well, to be honest, it's a really big blocker.

[00:20:06] The other one that I'd call out, which is something I've been thinking a little bit about, is sometimes the actual scale of transformation, and even the kind of commerce [?] of transformation itself. I've definitely noticed in the different government departments that I've worked with who have been moving through transformation that the transformation is generally this thing where, like I was saying, there's a strategic intent to do it, the organization gets some buy-in, there's a budget, and then everyone goes, awesome, we're transforming, here's a huge amount of money, and in a couple of years we're all going to be transformed. What I've found is that that's just not necessarily true. As we started with tonight, not many transformations come in on time and on budget, for a start. They tend to take longer than we think they're going to. And I actually think that there's something inherently wrong with the way that we think about the scale of that transformation, and sometimes it runs counter to the fact that in order to transform you actually have to do smaller, more incremental and sustainable work. Sometimes that's almost counter to the way that we talk about transformation itself.

[00:21:20] Ruth: Can I just add to that? It's not just counter to that. At the federal level, the way products, services and projects are funded is almost constituted against that, because we fund massive big chunks of projects, millions of dollars at a time. Yet the way transformation appears to happen best is in these small incremental changes, small experiments, and keep building upon that, but our funding models don't necessarily support that right now. So we have this clash [?] between the way big funding occurs and the way people on the ground actually have to do this, and it's very hard because it's a big clash. I'd love to see a massive transformation of the whole money side of government, but that could be years and years down the track. Think big.

[00:22:08] Catherine: Sorry, Andrew. Is there an argument that there's no finite end to digital transformation, that it's an ever-evolving piece, and putting it as definitive, I need to have it at this time and at this budget, is set up to fail, because that's almost anti what you're trying to do?

[00:22:27] Andrew: It's an interesting question, Catherine. I do think that at the moment we don't yet have the models, and perhaps sometimes the vocabulary around those models. Yes, I totally think that there's a tension between incremental design and incremental development and the way that we fund these things. Looking into the future, as we start to see that dialogue play out a little bit more, I'm hopeful that perhaps we start exploring the funding models around that within government. But traditionally the way that government tends to fund things is almost at a program management level. We're used to funding these big programs of work, and the predominant program management model doesn't sit so neatly sometimes with the world of iterative design, lean, agile product development, or whatever methodology we're using.

Culture, mindset and hiring

[00:23:31] Catherine: Great. I'll just pause to ask the audience: if you've got any questions, join the Slack channel and ask the speakers. We usually have plenty of discussion on there, both during the talks and afterwards, so please do use that channel for anything that you'd prefer me to ask, because my goal is to make the questions interesting for you. I'm going to move on to something that I think the audience will really resonate with, and that's culture and mindset. We touched on it in the beginning in terms of innovation, but Ruth, is there a change of mindset needed for employees to embrace digital transformation?

[00:24:16] Ruth: That's a definite yes, and Andrew touched upon this. Part of the shift is this understanding that transformation is not just technology, but actually about people and cultural mindsets. That's a very big mindset shift, because often, where things are funded, we've got projects that get set up. It's always projects and programs rather than products, set up to do this big system changeover. But at the end of the day, how do we do development and design? How do we help bring people on that journey and get people to think more holistically about the human that has to use this thing at the end of the day?

[00:24:53] Catherine: Great. And Andrew, have you started to hire differently? What are the indications of an innovative thinker?

[00:25:02] Andrew: No, we haven't really started to hire differently, but I say that being more specific to the way that we've built out innovation. Once again, we've only been around for a couple of years, so we've really just needed to build core capabilities. For us that has meant trying to create enough of a multidisciplinary team that covers off enough of the craft and some of the fundamentals of what we need to build out as a team, just to be able to get going. So in short, no, we haven't necessarily hired differently.

[00:25:39] But what I have found is we've had some really great success stories recently where we've collaborated with different areas of the organization and seconded people from quite different backgrounds. For example, a lot of our team are designers and technologists and come from a range of different backgrounds, but we might work on a project with someone who's a health expert in a certain domain, or maybe even an insurance expert in an area that we don't know a lot about. What we tend to find is that some of those people that we've collaborated with will end up going for positions within our innovation team, which is a really positive cultural thing that we've seen.

[00:26:22] What I've definitely found, and this is not just about internal hires, is that you can pick up on things quite quickly with some of those internal collaborators. Some of those things are the basics: people who seem to be more comfortable with ambiguity, or tend to be the people who are always asking why, or the people who are prepared to dive into challenging an assumption or developing a hypothesis to test, or whatever it might be. You start to see the inklings of these things in people. And we've started in our own team to think about being more inclusive, but a little bit more expansive as well, in terms of our own thinking about what makes up a really great multidisciplinary innovation team within the organization in which we work.

From consultant to in-house: changing mindsets

[00:27:15] Catherine: And have you yourself changed your mindset during your career?

[00:27:20] Andrew: I change my mindset every couple of weeks, Catherine. Yes, I have. I definitely think the biggest shift for me in mindset, if I had to pick one, was probably going from working on the outside of organizations to going in-house. That was probably the biggest fundamental mindset shift for me. When you're working as an external design consultant or within design agencies, there's a lot of emphasis on craft and methodology, and almost proving yourself as a design practitioner, because a lot of the time you're being hired by organizations to helicopter in and help solve the problem.

[00:28:11] The fundamental shift for me when I joined WorkSafe and started to work from the inside is that I definitely had a shift towards trying to understand the human and organizational side of things a lot more, and having to really contemplate things like: what's driving this business? What are some of the pressures or the tensions organizationally, and what impact does that have on my ability as a design leader to actually push for the impact that I'm looking for? So that's probably the biggest mindset shift for me, if I track back: going from being on the outside of the walls to being on the inside of the walls.

[00:28:58] Catherine: Ruth, do you have anything to add to that?

[00:28:58] Ruth: It's a very similar journey for me, because I've been consulting for most of my career. Coming internally was a really big shift. I always thought I knew how complex government was; I'd been consulting to government for a long time. But you're right. Going in, you actually get that appreciation for the interconnectedness of everything. You think you're working on a simple interface or product, and you go, wow, this actually connects to this, and then this has this implication that causes this other process to get kicked off, and if you change it over here, there are actually ten different organizations involved in that particular process. So the level of complexity was just significant.

[00:29:41] But also, you're right about the shift from craft to the strong focus on soft skills, the stakeholder negotiation and management, and leadership. That became very, very crucial, because now you're in it for the long haul. It's about how you do that sustained change, building the relationships with people who have been here for a long time and have this deep knowledge of their particular domain. How do you connect all those pieces and work towards a common shared goal, when funding is separated across different organizations, there are different agendas, and there are different ministers that we report up to? These are all competing, so how do we work together? That mindset shift was less about research and user experience design, and more about the big-picture [?] design and experience of the stakeholders and the decision makers in this journey.

[00:30:32] Catherine: What I got from both of you is that a lot of people think working within government is very process-driven and you can't be open to change, whereas people often go into tech because they want to be innovators, they want to change. Both of you are so passionate about the work and the opportunity that government actually allows you, and the capabilities that it gives you. More than anything, it's change on a national [?] level, not just within your department. I really felt that from chatting with you both. For me it was that, and I saw the opportunities for the first time working within government that I wouldn't have seen before.

Getting people on board: exemplar programs and working in the open

[00:31:19] Catherine: We'll move on to a little bit on the challenges. Ruth, people love change but hate being changed. What approaches do you use for getting people on board?

[00:31:35] Ruth: One of the ones we use a lot: we always talk about taking people on the journey, and what that means for us is actually getting people involved in designing and developing the product, at all levels of leadership. For example, we used to run this program called the exemplar program. People had 20 weeks to go out and actually experiment, where they had to do a discovery and then take it all the way through to a product and release it out into the world. That was interesting because we helped out people who were very keen for the change, but they didn't know how to approach it and how to actually do it. So part of this 20-week journey was a bit of an accelerator program where we took people through this human-centered design process. They went through discovery.

[00:32:18] What was interesting about that was people started changing the way they were thinking about the work they were working on. Instead of it just being, we're going to release an app, it was more about, well, should we be doing that? What are the experiences like, and could we connect this to other aspects of government? Those kinds of projects were getting people out there doing research all together, which was a massive shift for people, because as government we often outsource the research process and get lots of experts to come in. I was one of those when I was a consultant; I would come in and do the research. This shift was about how we do it as a team, so we're all building that deep understanding of the problem space and the people who have to live through those particular challenges, and what it's like for them.

[00:33:04] Part of this is getting people out in research, doing lots of research constantly and iteratively, not just one-off sessions, and actually seeing the change through over a certain period of time. Part of that journey is making sure the stakeholders were also coming along on the journey, so they could see why we're doing things. We do a lot of what we call working out in the open, where we show a lot of our work very early on, which was a massive mindset shift for a lot of parts of government, because often you have to wait for it to be signed off all the way throughout your hierarchy before you can show it to anyone else. This was about how we show people the work we're doing so they can input early, they can help change direction if we need to, and we keep learning and building as we go. That's one of the few approaches we were using.

[00:33:53] Catherine: It's interesting. Andrew, did you have anything on that?

[00:33:58] Andrew: What Ruth was just saying about taking people along for the journey is definitely a tactic that we try to use as much as possible within the group, to alleviate nervousness, perhaps, about our processes. You tend to find that one of the blockers culturally tends to be that people are hearing about processes that they're not sure about, that they've never been involved in before. We definitely find that one of the best ways to alleviate that is to try to bring people along the process, but also to have them directly involved as collaborators as well. That whole mantra of learning by doing, and de-risking things for people by having them actively involved in the process, for us has definitely helped to get people to give our teams space, but also to learn from those processes as well.

Measuring success and team happiness

[00:35:07] Catherine: It's interesting. All right, Ruth, going on to success: what does that look like, and more importantly, how do you measure it?

[00:35:19] Ruth: That's a good question. As a researcher, measurement is a very important thing for us. In my particular area, because we're concerned about the digital capability of the public service, the measurement is about whether we see a shift in the mindset and the culture, and also the uplift in capabilities. Where are people now, with their capability as digital specialists, versus where will they be once they go through an uplift program, either with us or with partners in the private sector? For me, it's just seeing a shift in somebody who might be really skeptical and usually anxious about this human-centered way of working, and it took a good few months to get there, but then being the champion and advocate for it. For me that's a huge measure of success when you see that.

[00:36:14] An example: I was working with a few people who were very skeptical of user research and how it impacts product decision making. I just kept getting this resistance: no, we don't do that. Should we even be going out to people's homes? This was pre-COVID. Should we go to people's homes? It's kind of weird, why would we do that? It's very risky. Then at the end of this process, they were actually going and telling the organization, why aren't we doing more of this? And they actually went back and implemented a lot of these changes themselves. That is a fantastic measure of success.

[00:36:47] Catherine: And Andrew?

[00:36:47] Andrew: I guess the key indicator of success for our team is impact. What I mean by that is that the sole reason innovation exists at WorkSafe Victoria is to help WorkSafe itself hit some pretty important key aspirations and targets, and that is to help prevent injuries in the Victorian workplace and to support people who have unfortunately been injured. So our main KPIs really are around whether we are actually having an impact. From the products and services that we're developing, or the initiatives that we're working on, are we seeing them push out into the real world, and are we starting to see any measurable impact from that, positive or negative? Hopefully positive is what we're aiming for. So that's really our main measure of success.

[00:37:49] As Ruth was describing, the other measure of an internal innovation or design capability, slightly more difficult to quantify but equally important, is the cultural, slightly intangible aspect of wanting to infiltrate some of those ways of working or more human-centric practices within the organization. We equally measure ourselves by how many people are bugging us to run workshops, or product teams wanting input into perhaps different ways of working, those types of things as well. That's definitely a way that we like to measure our own impact from more of an internal perspective.

[00:38:37] Catherine: And then teams as well. Success in terms of happiness would be a big one. Is there anything that either of you are doing on that side to measure team success, i.e. happiness? Because it can be very challenging. It's a very disruptive and very challenging piece that you're doing.

[00:39:03] Ruth: Yes. One thing that I think the federal government is going to look at is also the retention of people in the federal public service, because there can often be a bit of a skills drain back into the private sector. I personally started in government 19 years ago, then left and went to the private sector for a very long time, and only came back about five years ago. So one of the measures for us is: do people feel satisfied working in government? Do they want to stay a bit longer as well, and actually use their skills broadly? I'm currently working on a pilot at the moment for government which is looking at mobility of digital talent, and one of the things that we're interested in is that happiness factor. If people take part in this program, this pilot, over the next few months, do they have higher job satisfaction? Do they want to stay? Do they feel like they're having an impact on the actual outcome of what they're doing? Because I think a lot of us join the public service because we want to work on meaningful, impactful things. You want to feel like you have made a difference to society, and that's one thing we're trying to measure.

What excites them

[00:40:12] Catherine: That's a really nice point, the impact on society. Very quickly, as a last quick question: what are you excited about? I'll ask it to both of you. Andrew first, what's the exciting thing for you?

[00:40:31] Andrew: The exciting thing for me at the moment is actually related to skills and capabilities. One of the exciting things that I'm seeing at the moment, probably more than ever, is that we're actually seeing more design talent, and more people than I perhaps naively thought a couple of years ago, when I thought about the types of people who would be wanting to join WorkSafe Victoria in an innovation team and deal with the complexities of government and public sector work. We're starting to see some really promising signs that we do have some really fantastic talent who are interested in joining those teams. For the sustainability of the work that we do, and the sustainability of innovation and design in government, I think that this is an incredibly exciting trend that we're seeing at the moment, and that keeps me super positive about the future.

[00:41:28] Catherine: Great. And Ruth?

[00:41:28] Ruth: For me it's the speed at which all of us have had to change. That's been really exciting, because it's actually accelerated the uplift of a range of the services that we've been doing as government. COVID has forced us to get things out there much quicker. So I'm excited to see how we sustain that change, because that momentum has been built, but we can't work at that kind of pace all the time. How do we keep building the skills, attracting the talent, but also upskilling the current talent that we have in the whole range of digital skill sets? Not just research and design, but also data, big data, analytics, AI, all these kinds of elements. How do we bring them together in the products and services we're designing, and still keep that human-focused lens?

[00:42:14] Catherine: That's really nice. Thank you so much, both of you, for an amazing panel. I'm going to end it at that. Please do add both Ruth and Andrew on LinkedIn, and ask them any final questions on the Slack channel. I'm going to hand back over now to Jovi [?]. Thanks, bye.