Remote Control

Transcript

KATE MORRIS:  Good evening, everybody. Kate Morris here from Bastow. Delighted to have you in the room and with us tonight. Tonight you'll be joined by Losh Pillay, from Box Hill High School, and Brett Bell, from Mt Eliza Primary School. We also have David Howes with us, the Deputy Secretary of Schools and Regional Services, which is fantastic, to launch us into the work tonight; Ian Hamilton, from Genos; Lova and Peter, Irene and Maria Oddo, from Bastow.

So what we'd love you to do now is tell us that you're here, tell us your school and where you're coming to us from today. I'm with you today from St Kilda, on the land of the Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation and looking forward to seeing where you're from.

IAN HAMILTON:  Fantastic. Thank you, Kate. So this is Ian Hamilton. We just have another minute to go before we're going to start the webinar, so please make yourself comfortable. If you've got a pen and paper close by, that will be useful, but you don't need any resources. It's just your presence we need for the webinar tonight. Great to see that we're almost over 100 people already.

KATE MORRIS:  So tell us where you're from. We've got Broadford Secondary. We've got a school nurse here from the north east, which is brilliant, Princes Hill Primary, a range of schools ‑ Swan Hill Primary, which today we heard there was a lot of rain in Swan Hill and we needed to turn the volume up a little, so it was pouring. Armidale Primary, Glen Eira, Birralee Primary School. Our special schools are well represented, which is fantastic, community schools ‑ really represents the diversity of our system and people from all across the state, our system leadership and learning at work, people investing in themselves.

We've also got some of our colleagues from interstate, Riverside High School, welcome. 

 

IAN HAMILTON:  Fantastic. Thank you, Kate. Well, it's exactly 8 o'clock, so I'll formally open the webinar. My name is Ian Hamilton, from Genos International. I'm absolutely delighted to be spending an hour with you this evening and I understand how precious an hour is after a busy working day, so we really are grateful for you prioritising spending an hour with us this evening to talk about remote control, tips and techniques to be as productive as possible whilst working from home.

Let me just do a small bit of housekeeping before I hand over to Kate to finish the introductions. You are on mute deliberately and it's not because we don't want to hear from you, in fact, quite the opposite, we would love to hear from you this evening. It's just that when your microphones are live, there is a lot of noise, background noise, that's created and that can negatively impact the learning experience. So you're on mute deliberately, but use the chat function, please, to communicate with us throughout tonight's webinar. That's a great place to introduce yourself and just to make general comment or offer up some suggestions as we go through the content tonight.

On your tool bar you'll also see a Q&A box. Now, that's a great place to pose a specific question and we've got a team with me tonight who will look at those questions as we go throughout the webinar and they will endeavour to try to answer those directly and will also be able to get back to you after tonight's content if there's something they need to follow up on.

Now, a recording of this webinar will be made available to everybody who attended tonight and more broadly, but it will not include the chat. So feel free to type in whatever you like. That will not be included within the recording. It will simply be my facilitation plus the slides that I'll be using this evening.

Well, Kate, can I hand over to you to finish the introductions, please. 

KATE MORRIS:  Great. Thank you, Ian. As I said before, I'm joining you from St Kilda and I'd like to acknowledge the Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation, whose land I'm meeting with you from today. I'd also like to pay our respects to Elders past, present and future and extend that respect to any Aboriginal members of the Department of Education who are joining with us today.

So a great opportunity for us to be in a really fabulous learning experience together as we traverse new territory and finding new ways of working and learning and connecting and Remote Control, what a great title and what a great opportunity to work with experts and Ian has introduced himself and thank you, Ian, for your leadership of this work. Losh Pillay, from Box Hill High School, part of our principal panel, and Brett Bell, from Mt Eliza Primary School. We're also joined with our colleagues from Bastow, Maria Oddo and Irene Iliadis and Peter Hough, who are also principals, and Lova Jansson and Jyldyz, who are also staff at Bastow, who will be supporting our chat line.

So enjoy tonight, a great opportunity to check where you're at and see what skills you've got to share with our fellow staff who are with us tonight.

I'd now like to introduce David, David Howes, Deputy Secretary of Schools and Regional Services. Over to you, David, and thank you for being with us tonight.

DAVID HOWES:  Great. Thanks, Kate. Thanks, Ian. Welcome, everyone. Just looking at the places that are flashing across the screen, it's clear that we're meeting on lands of traditional owners right across Victoria. So on behalf of all of us who are participating tonight wherever we're meeting, we acknowledge the owners of all the traditional lands and pay our respects to their Elders, past present and emerging and, as Kate said, acknowledge the presence of Aboriginal colleagues and pay our respects to you who are joining this chat tonight.

Well, gosh, there are a couple of things to say by way of introduction. One is the irony of a session on remote control being run at 8 o'clock is probably lost on no‑one that one of the challenges that I'm sure we're all experiencing is how even more than usual work and home get blurred. I don't know about you, but my experience has been that every day feels a bit like a week used to and certainly at the moment it seems as much is happening in a day as used to happen in a week. It's incredible to think that we're just into the second week of remote and flexible learning. It feels like two months and I'm sure it's going to be coming ‑ well, not routine, but it's getting closer to being less than unusual.

So can I just say right at the start what an extraordinary achievement this has been to have a million students across Victoria who just a couple of weeks ago were sitting in classrooms now engaged in, you know, an incredible experience of remote and flexible learning. The stories that are coming through every day about the kinds of things that are happening, the level of engagement, the struggle that lots of schools are having in keeping up with the students who are just wanting to race ahead with their work ‑ something extraordinary has happened and it's only because of the really phenomenal efforts of the people who are in this room tonight. And while it continues to be an amazing achievement, it hasn't come without cost. The effort that people have put in has been truly extraordinary and the challenges remain, and you'll know this better than anyone, that there are still students that you're concerned about that aren't as connected as they might be and the challenge to reach and in connecting with them is harder than it was, but again balanced by the excitement of seeing others who are just thriving in ways that we've never kind of experienced before.

So first up, I just ‑ I want to say thank you for your efforts. What you've done to make the whole Victorian community grateful for the work of teachers and school leaders is extraordinary. I think this is marking a sea change in the attitude of community, our community, towards educators, so all people are seeing really is a more visible manifestation of the work that's gone on previously, but that visible manifestation is important.

So the purpose of tonight ‑ when I had the chance to talk with some of the principal forums at the principal forums last term, we reflected on a couple of things. One was that we were thinking about how wellbeing was going to need to be an important part of our work this year and we were thinking largely about student wellbeing then and that obviously continues to be the case, but at the same time, we were also reflecting on the importance of the wellbeing of staff and school leaders and that's even more the case now because the pressures that have come on and the challenges through the shift to remote and flexible learning have presented their own challenges for each of us and for our own wellbeing. So it's great to have the opportunity to focus on that tonight.

The second is that the theme for the year was going to be learning from within. I feel there is so much expertise in our system and we've drawn a lot from international expertise and experience, but we're well able now to learn from each other. But I did put the caveat on it that at times it will still be useful to look outside for external expertise and this is absolutely one of those areas that none of us have expertise in managing this kind of flexible and remote learning, certainly not at the intensity that we've been experiencing it over the last couple of weeks, so it was important that we did turn to the people who are the experts in that and that's Genos International. So thanks to Bastow for facilitating work with Genos. Ian, thank you for making yourselves available at such short notice. I know the seminars that have been happening up until now have resonated extraordinarily strongly with people. Your expertise has been really valued.

So that's probably plenty from me. I want to thank Bastow again, Kate, for your team and I'm leaving you in the hands of Ian. I won't be staying with you tonight because I've got to do a bit more blurring of home and work and have a few more things to get through before the night is done, but Ian, I will, as always, get a fulsome report from you and look forward to having a look at the questions that come through and the responses and the kind of discussion that happened.

So again, thank you so much, everybody, for the efforts. I hope the next hour it's your turn to be given a bit rather than giving out all the time. I hope you enjoy it. I'm sure you will and I hope you get a lot out of it. So Ian ‑ Kate, am I throwing back to Ian or to you.

KATE MORRIS:  Back to Ian.

DAVID HOWES:  Back to Ian. Ian, all yours.

IAN HAMILTON:  Thanks, David. Wonderful. Thank you very much, David. Yeah, great, thank you very much. Okay. So let's move into the content of the webinar, and I think David has just provided for us there a fantastic internal perspective on why it's so important for us all to spend an hour just reflecting on the challenge that we've been presented in terms of working from home and how we can grasp this challenge and make ourselves as productive as we can.

What I would like to do is overlay on top of David's internal positioning some external positioning, you know, what does the research tell us about working from home and what can we learn from that and then, importantly, I want to ask you what are your challenges, you know, what's the lived experience that you've been through over the last few weeks? Let's share the challenges amongst each other because that will then perfectly place us to explore a range of tips, tools and techniques to overcome these challenges.

Now, clearly in the confines of the time we've got available this evening we can't give you all the answers and I think it would be fair to say that what works for me probably won't necessarily work for everybody on the webinar and it may not work for Losh and it may not work for Brett or Kate, but what we are going to try to do tonight is create some thinking, stimulate some ideas that you can take away and experiment because working from home is different for everybody and if we can leave you with what I like to call a couple of golden nuggets, things to think about, it could well make that 2, 3, 4% difference that Ben talked about in his webinar that could very much change how you feel about working from home and how productive you are.

We'll also look at a technique that you can use very easily to actually evaluate whether these things that you're going to implement hopefully after the webinar are working, how we can assess their effectiveness, and I'll introduce that at the end of the webinar.

Now, one of the great things about having so many of you join us is that we can learn from each other and I would actively encourage everybody to type in comments as we go. That's why we've got a big team who are supporting me checking the comments that you're posting and we will share those because there are so many great ideas that are coming from the group, things that we probably haven't even thought of, and I'll share a few of the best ones that I've heard so far during the course of the evening. So please type away and we will stop fairly frequently during the webinar and actually present those back to you.

Finally, because of the large number of people joining us tonight, it won't be possible to address everybody's question, but we'll endeavour to do our best. But if there are specific questions we can't get to, we will try our best to follow up after the webinar has concluded.

So let's move into the content. So Genos International specialise in emotional intelligence and whilst tonight's webinar isn't about emotional intelligence, there is a large element of self‑awareness when it comes to thinking about being productive at home.

Well, what do I mean by that?  Well, when you work from home, you may well have discovered that there are a myriad of challenges, challenges that are distractions in many cases or things that we didn't anticipate that can erode our energy, that can make it difficult for us to focus and are essentially distractions, and one of the most powerful skills of being emotionally intelligent is to be aware of the influence those factors are having on us and at Genos we call this being present.

So I thought I'd just show you the model because as we go throughout the webinar tonight, a lot of what I'm going to be talking about is being able to cultivate or develop a greater sense of awareness hour to hour, minute to minute about how I am feeling and what are the influences that are causing those feelings. So when I'm really feeling productive, when I'm really working well, when I'm really engaged, what's causing that, and when from time to time I'm feeling slightly disconnected, I've lost focus, what might be the things that are causing that, and so in a sense what we're able to do is start to build this really good sense of what do I need to do, what do I need to create around me that's going to help me be as productive as possible in my home working environment.

Now, in building this webinar, I drew from research that was conducted in late 2019 and in a way it was very timely, but it was absolutely pre COVID‑19, pre pandemic and it was a survey conducted by surveying 2,500 people to understand the experience of working from home, and I myself have worked from home for eight years and I could relate very strongly to many of the things that came out in the research.

So through this study, what did we identify?  Well, we identified that an overwhelming majority of people who were surveyed, 2,500 in fact, in late 2019 indicated that, given the opportunity, they would like to spend some of their working time at home, and I think if you take yourself back six months you probably would have been one of those people. The opportunity to stop commuting for at least one or two days a week, to have the opportunity to do other things around the house during your breaks are very attractive propositions.

But what else was really interesting about this study, and it was conducted by a brand agency called Buffer, by the way, was that even though the overwhelming majority of people surveyed thought that they would like to try working from home, less than 5% of that survey group had actually had that experience and so where did we find ourselves in late April/May 2020? Well, thousands if not millions and billions of people are now having that very experience, but they've had to do it with almost no preparation. The planning that would normally have gone into setting up a home working environment we haven't had and we've been thrust into this at very, very short notice.

So what I'd like to talk about now is the fact that when you work from home, much like working in a school environment or in an office, there are a range of things that create emotions. In the office we generally know what they are. When you go into a meeting, when you go into a classroom, these are experiences that we've had frequently and these influences will be things that we've been able to manage quite effectively. So they influence, for example, the way that we behave around people, the way that we make decisions.

But suddenly, when you're working in a home working environment, these factors that cause certain emotions are very new to us. So for example, if you're home schooling your kids and you're also trying to maintain a teaching load or run meetings, there's a lot of distractions and we know fundamentally that these distractions create emotions, both productive and unproductive, pleasant and unpleasant, and they fundamentally influence three aspects of ourself. They influence the way we behave, they influence the quality of our decision making, and they influence our productivity. So a large part of what I'm going to be talking about tonight is being really able to understand what those influences are and manage them as best we can so that we are able to try and maximise our productivity and what, let's face it, is a particularly challenging environment that we find ourselves in.

So what I'd like to do is bring you into this webinar as soon as I can by inviting you to type into the chat box what are the specific challenges that you're facing currently when working from home and I'm using that three‑letter abbreviation which is now very common place, WFH. What are your working from home challenges? And I'm going to give Brett and Losh in a moment the opportunity to come into the webinar and I'll call out some of the challenges that you're facing. So what was expected, what's unexpected, what are the things that you're currently grappling with in your working from home environment ‑ please post those comments in the chat box and let's see what issues are being raised.

I'm looking across now to both Brett and Losh, who I can see are frantically looking at the chat panel. Brett, would you like to start there and give us a bit of a feel for what's coming through.

BRETT BELL:  Yeah, look, there's lots of variety tonight, which is absolutely fantastic. I think the big one, like Victoria said, she's got her own prep student at home and then having to balance her own class with her own children, and there's lots of examples of that, and obviously having different children at different age groups can be a big difference in the home. I know I've got a staff member in my school that's got four children, she's teaching a grade that she's only just picked up at the end of last term, and there's a couple of people here who've also indicated that they're brand‑new to teaching and it being nothing like they thought it was going to be, so lots of things that are balanced in there.

IAN HAMILTON:  Yeah, great insight. If I could overlay on top of that my own experience, I've got an 18‑year‑old daughter in year 12 who is largely self‑sufficient who when I check on her seems to be working very diligently and I've got a colleague with three kids under 10 who require a large degree of input from him and these are very, very different experiences that we're both having, but we're both sharing our homes with our kids when we wouldn't normally. Losh, what are you noticing coming through?

LOSH PILLAY:  Oh, plenty of challenges coming through there, Ian. One of the ones that stood out for me is just creating those boundaries with parents and I think my staff have said exactly the same thing, they seem to be much more accessible now that they're working online and lots of parents, you know, emailing at all hours of the night and expecting a reply and what we've done at our school is made it really clear to parents that staff are contactable during work hours only and we've actually given permission to our staff to switch off at the end of the day and respond the next day. So we're not expecting our staff to respond to emails at all hours of the night.

Sarah mentioned that she's missing the drive to and from work, important time for her to reflect and switch off. So I think it's important, you know, unplugging at the end of the day and finding a routine for yourself.

Another comment that I found interesting was Han. She seems to be all things to all people, not just a teacher, but also providing IT support and translator as well. So those are some of the challenges that teachers are having to cope with nowadays, not just tending some of the class. 

IAN HAMILTON: Thank you, Losh. And so what's so interesting is that from both Brett and Losh we're hearing things which we know are themes ‑ distractions, unplugging, the commute that was the sense of leaving work and re‑engaging with life outside of work.

Well, what I would like to do next is reveal for you what were the big five challenges that were identified in late 2019 at the time when the world was how we remember it. So let's have a look at those challenges and let's bring that back to some of the comments you've made already this evening.

So as I've said already, a survey conducted in late 2019, nearly 2,500 people identified number one challenge unplugging, this sense that when you work from home, the separation that you would normally get, and I pick up on Losh's comment a moment ago when you jump in the car and drive home, symbolically that used to represent a transition. For many of us now the transition has disappeared because our work never really goes away because it's always in our eyeline. Your laptop may well be in a place where it's very visible, your office may be somewhere that people walk past or you walk past all the time and it's very, very easy to start working at unusual hours, and so we'll talk more about that later.

Loneliness ‑ that's interesting. This was something that was identified through the survey that many people discover that working from home and losing that sense of collaboration and the relationships that we've built over many years creates a sense of loneliness and I was really interested to see yesterday that the Australian Government's own survey has highlighted the challenge associated with loneliness.

Now, once again, this will vary depending on whether you're sharing a house with lots of people or whether you're actually on your own and so we've got to be careful we don't make too many assumptions here. But undoubtedly, working from home, being physically detached from our colleagues who we have very deep relationships with will create challenges for many of us.

Number 3, and I think you can all relate to this one and I think we should all take our hats off to every person who works in IT in this country, communication. Even something as simple as working on a Zoom platform has been a voyage of discovery for many of us and communicating, whether it be through mobile phones, through email, through virtual platforms, has presented challenges. There are big challenges with internet speeds across the country, there are challenges with actually grappling IT systems, and I do take my hat off to the great work that's been done across all organisations getting people connected to their workplaces from home.

 

Number 4, and this is something Brett talked about earlier, distractions. Working from home presents many, many distractions, and I'll talk about these in a moment, but probably there are some things we didn't anticipate ‑ the noise from the road outsize that distracts us, the noise internally that we weren't anticipating. Just things that are more distracting when you work from home because maybe the rules have changed slightly ‑ maybe how often you check social media, for example, has increased mainly because of the focus we're placing on the current global challenges that we're all acutely aware of.

And number 5, and I think this is a really interesting one too and one that may play out more over the next few weeks and months, is this sense that to stay motivated across a working day is more challenging at home than it is when I was in the office. I think in the office you've got structures around you that keep you focused, but when you're at home you've got to be very disciplined and I'll talk a little bit more about this later as well. So these were the big five.

So what I'd like to do now is bring you into the webinar again and conduct a quick poll. What I'd like you to do is identify which of those five are a challenge for you. So here's my poll and I'm going to launch that now. So this is multiple choice. You're allowed to tick as many as you like. Which of the top five are you currently working on?  Let me must ‑ sorry, my poll has just disappeared on me.  I'll just pull that back up. Which of these challenges are you currently working on? 

So you can see there that we've got already 15% of you have voted, that's fantastic. So you can tick as many as you like ‑ which are the challenges that you're currently experiencing, what's your lived experience is another way of putting it. And the beauty of this data is this isn't a survey that was conducted in 2019. This is very much what's happening in Victoria right at this moment, data that's very fresh, very real, something that we just couldn't pull from research.

We're up to over 80%. So I'll just give you another 30 seconds if you haven't voted yet. Fantastic, up to 90%. Thank you very much for the speed at which you're doing this. It's extremely helpful and very useful to see this data.

Okay, I'm just going to end that poll now. Apologies if you didn't quite get to vote. Let me share these results. Brett or Losh, if you could let me know when you can see that with a thumbs up. Wonderful, that's great. With bandwidth, sometimes they take a while to come up.

So what are we seeing here?  Well, rather than me call out the results, I'd love to hand that over to Losh and Brett with their experience as principals and the context that you can overlay on top of this. What are you noticing, Brett?

BRETT BELL:  Yeah, unplugging is the big one. I think, just reflecting on my own ‑ that's been anyway just the technology and living with phones and things is difficult, but this has just heightened that (inaudible) as a problem. I think Sharon said an idea a little bit earlier that she set up her home office in the caravan at the back so that when the work day is over, she can lock the door and she's gone.

IAN HAMILTON:  Wonderful.

BRETT BELL:  Which wasn't a bad thing, I thought that was pretty clever. But unplugging is the big one there, almost 60%. It's a big problem.

IAN HAMILTON:  Yeah, and I think for many of us we haven't had an opportunity to practise what unplugging feels like. We've been thrust into this so quickly. It's really on the run trying to work out how do I separate work and life outside, something that Losh spoke about earlier with just trying to put some boundaries around when we can and can't be contacted by parents, for example. Losh, what would you like to add to that list? 

LOSH PILLAY:  I think distractions has come up quite a bit through the chat as well. I wouldn't call, you know, having your own children demand attention a distraction, but that's something I think that people have to juggle, staff have to juggle whilst working from home.

The one thing that's come up for us in our school and something that we've paid particular attention to is this whole idea of loneliness. You know, I think working in a school can bring so much joy, so much interaction happening constantly that it's a huge change to suddenly leave all that behind and then be in the quiet of your own home, and some of the chat around that has been about that loneliness, about the social interactions with colleagues, but also the actual joy of interacting with students and hearing their classroom noise.

So those are some of the things that I think are huge changes going into the working from home environment.

 

IAN HAMILTON:  Yeah, wonderful. Thank you, Losh, for adding that. And I think when I talked earlier in the webinar about self‑awareness, this is a great example of being aware of which of these five are the biggest challenge for you at the moment and it will vary person to person and it will vary over time as well. You know, as we move through this current environment week in, week out, things are likely to change and, as Losh said, the sense of loneliness could well be something that gets bigger or gets smaller over time, so really being aware of which of these are a challenge for me is a very, very important thing to do because once you've identified that, then we're able then to start addressing that with some of the tools and techniques that we're going to look at later in the webinar.

So I'm going to stop sharing that poll and I'm going to move now into some strategies. So let's look at ways in which the top five challenges when we're working from home can be addressed and when we talk about unplugging, one of the most useful concepts that we can consider is this idea of boundaries and even without revealing what some of the boundaries might look like, I think the concept in itself is a very useful one just to sit with for a few minutes.

So what do I mean about boundaries?  Well, I could draw from the example that Brett just gave, and I can't remember the person's name, but if you have identified that being in your house is creating a challenge with regard to unplugging, then a boundary might be physically separating yourself from that challenge by moving into a caravan. Now, I know that's not something many of us can do, but the concept is very sound. The boundary in a sense is the distance between where I'm working and where other things happen, and so a boundary can be a very small thing or it can be a very big thing.

The key to boundaries in a sense is to delineate your work space. One of the most powerful things we can all do at this time is to actually communicate to others how important it is that the space where I work is treated like an office or treated like a classroom. I've heard people talk about putting tape around the very important part of the desk where they store IT equipment, where they might store a mouse, where they've got paperwork so that other people don't pick that up and move it ‑ very, very important. You wouldn't expect that to happen in a classroom or your office and certainly, therefore, you probably wouldn't want it to happen in your home. So therefore thinking about where you need to work, thinking about the suitability of your work space is a very important boundary that you can communicate to the people that you're sharing your working from home environment with.

Another great thing to do is to communicate to people around you and your colleagues and to parents and perhaps to your manager, principal, the hours of time, hours during the day when you should and shouldn't be contacted. So if you're home schooling your children, maybe there's a certain time during the day where you would prefer not to be contacted. That's a boundary. Maybe there are times when you are completely open to people calling you, connecting with you and therefore communicating that could be a very, very powerful thing to do to start to put some routine to your day and to delineate when you are and you aren't working.

Another technique about creating boundaries is to consider what distractions there might be from social media. Now, if you're anything like me and I'm very interested in the news, it can become very habit forming to regularly check on what might be happening within Australia and globally and of course social media is at arm's length for many of us. You know, you can pick up your phone and very quickly open up your most popular social media app. Maybe that's Twitter or Instagram or Facebook.

A boundary to prevent you doing that so often and to therefore mean that you're less distracted might be something as simple as logging out of that platform so therefore it becomes just a little bit harder to reach and check the news, so another simple way that you can, if a distraction for you is mobile devices and other things around you, think about simply logging out of those popular social media apps.

Another very similar strategy might be to simply turn your phone to flight mode to protect your private time. Ben Palmer, who I work with, has identified that when he leaves work he likes to spend his first couple of hours in the evening with his family and not be distracted. So he has turned his phone to flight mode, much like you do when you get on a flight and you're about to take off, it's a single swipe, and therefore he knows he can't be contacted for a couple of hours. This might be a technique that could help you unplug and create a boundary between work and life outside of work.

So they're just a few ideas. I'll hand over to Brett and Losh again now just to see if there's anything coming through on the chat that you'd like to share. This is where the richness of these webinars takes hold. I might start with you this time, Losh. Are you noticing any great suggestions around boundaries coming through? 

LOSH PILLAY:  Yes, sure, Ian. A couple of really good suggestions. One of them was turning the phone on night mode so, you know, you don't get emails coming through. Another suggestion that came through from Robyn was to designate a work space. She has turned her spare room into her work space.

IAN HAMILTON:  Excellent.

LOSH PILLAY:  That's really great. That's really limiting your work to that one area. And Victoria says that the advice from her school was to stop looking at emails at 4.30 and that's the advice we've given our staff as well, you know, you need to stop work and take some time for yourself. So those are some really good suggestions that are coming through there.

IAN HAMILTON:  Yeah, and be disciplined as well around it. If you do start answering emails late at night, it might send a signal to other people that you are open for business, you are still working. Brett, are you seeing anything else come through you'd like to share?

BRETT BELL:  Yeah, I'll just probably pick up on Losh's last point there, which was Victoria's point, around the school setting the boundaries and I think that's a really healthy ‑ you know, a lot of schools have already established that or are picking up on that. If your school hasn't, then it's not ‑ people there have said "our team have said this, we've communicated as a team this is how we're going to operate" and it's okay to say our emails will be responded in 24 hours. It's not going to be responded straightaway, it's not an instant access, it's okay to set those boundaries and walk away.

I know the other one is using alarms ‑ you sort of touched on it, is having an alarm set so that you don't get stuck into just working consistently so those breaks are in there. I know one of my teachers does it for her children, but she's also doing it for her, so she can have her break ‑ now, this is time for me to go for a walk, I need to do it.

IAN HAMILTON:  Yeah, wonderful, yeah. And I'll share one that I heard last week was somebody using red and green stickers on their office door to indicate to the people they're sharing a home with when they can and can't be distracted. So, for example, when I'm running a webinar this evening, my family have been told for the next hour I need no interruptions. It sounds obvious, but if we get into a habit of doing it, it can make a big difference to how many times we might be distracted during the day.

Okay, let's move to the second one. Now, loneliness was identified as a major challenge when you're working from home and so when we think about loneliness, what we're really talking about is the breakdown or the separation that we're experiencing from our work colleagues or from the pupils that we teach or the broader school community and so I think it's important to consider that connecting with others is absolutely fundamental to our physical and mental health and wellbeing. And if you have had the opportunity to listen to Ben Palmer from Genos talk about boosting your wellbeing, he talks at great length about how important it is that we don't neglect this, that we do think about making a lot of effort to stay connected more broadly with the people who are important around us. And research on this is so strong. It indicates that people with strong relationship networks actually have greater longevity, the research is that powerful on it. So whether you're someone who's a little bit more extroverted or introverted, it makes no difference. It just might look slightly different to the way that we do this.

So what I would suggest that we can all do ‑ and this is again about being self‑aware ‑ is build an understanding of our specific personal needs for building relationships. Now, if I give myself as an example, I know that I'm slightly introverted. My need to connect with others might be less than a colleague who's more extroverted. It may well be that I'll get more benefit from meeting individually with people than joining one of these big meeting platform events that many people are establishing within their work groups. But this is very individual and so I think every one of us should reflect on what is my specific need to build connections and build relationships with others.

I also think that there is a great opportunity for all of us to think about who perhaps we should be connecting with ‑ it could be work related or non‑work related ‑ and make this habit forming and build it as part of our day so that we're connecting and reaching out to important people.

And finally, as I've said already, I think there's a great opportunity here to build routine. David has spoken about ‑ David Howes spoke about how exhausting working virtually can be. Let's not compound that by being unstructured in how we connect with others. I think regular meeting times, building routine, can be a great way to help people manage virtual relationship building effectively.

So once again, this time I might hand over to Brett first ‑ what are you noticing coming through, Brett, here on the importance of us connecting to try and break down barriers around loneliness? 

BRETT BELL:  Yeah, and I think it was interesting, even going back to the survey, that even though the lowest was around the connections around the loneliness part of it, for some people it's a really big thing and I think that's a really fair thing and I think it comes down to whether you're video conferencing with your kids regularly or not and with your staff regularly or not and that's a big issue there. I think keeping it regular is really important.

As I said the last time I did one of these, we made sure that was with our staff ‑ we have Friday ‑ it's termed choir practice, but that's code for other drinks, not coffee drinks, but one of my staff members made sure that was established on week 1 on Friday, invited to all staff and staff come along and even if it's only for 15 minutes just to check in and just to see each other's face and just have a laugh and it's been really powerful in our school. 

And the second part of that, we actually on a Friday usually have a briefing, a staff briefing, and we've maintained that. We've moved it because staff felt it was better at a different time, so we were flexible, but a big part of that briefing is sharing positive feedback and we had staff email them to me and I had ‑ when normally I might get six or eight a week, I had over 100 last week and staff were craving the chance to just connect and be positive about it. So it was really powerful.

IAN HAMILTON:  Fantastic. Losh, would you like to add to that list? 

LOSH PILLAY:  Yes, I think, just picking up where Brett left off, we also have staff that enjoy their Friday night drinks and we've continued to do that virtually through Teams. One of our staff members is a bit of a trivia guru and he sets up trivia for the staff every Friday, so that's something that everyone looks forward to. And some similar comments have come through on the chat where staff ‑ Prema has said that they use Teams a lot to connect with each other. Victoria said that as well, and Debbie also said something about using Zoom. Instead of meeting in the pub, they have Friday night drinks on Zoom ‑ so all great ways to stay in touch and maintain that connection with your colleagues.

IAN HAMILTON:  Wonderful, fantastic. And something I'd like to add that I thought was very powerful is who haven't you heard from recently? Who's somebody that you may connect with, but you just haven't had the time or the opportunity?  Maybe write that name down and think about trying to connect with that person before the end of the week. That could be very useful too because we also don't know who might be craving this, who might be really wanting a check‑in opportunity. Now, this is just a snapshot of things that we can consider, but I think loneliness is an issue that we need to be conscious of and certainly has come through in that national survey only this week.

The third one, communication ‑ well, if you're anything like me, you've probably had to have a crash course over the last few weeks in virtual platforms. We've heard Microsoft Teams mentioned, obviously Zoom is one of many platforms that people are using, but communication has changed rapidly for many of us and I imagine that if you're teaching ‑ not just running a webinar for six minutes, but teaching virtually ‑ that can be very, very draining and is going to certainly require us to be really focused around how we do that effectively.

So number one suggestion when you're communicating virtually is bringing focus to these conversations. It can be very, very easy to lose focus in a virtual meeting, for example. What do I mean by lose focus?  Well, it could be checking your phone, it could be checking your email at the same time that you are communicating with others, and of course if many people do that, the meetings can get longer, we can lose our sense of where we're heading and these meetings actually can become quite mentally draining. So I think if we all apply focus to our conversations, whether they be on the phone or on a virtual platform, that can be really beneficial.

One of the great ways to do this, of course, is to remove or manage distractions. Turning your email off before the meeting starts, switching your phone off before you go into a virtual meeting could be very, very simple but effective ways to try and help us bring focus to the meeting that we're joining.

Another very important thing is for us to think very clearly about how we want to communicate to others. When you're communicating virtually, it's much harder than when you're looking somebody in the eye and you're reading their body language and picking up those subtle cues they may give you, we've all got to work a lot harder, and therefore I think being prepared and talking very clearly to be understood is a great way to maximise productivity in a virtual setting.

And of course the flip side of that is to listen with an intent to understand, and of course we all know these are important skills, but I think at the moment they're very, very important. The ability to really tune in, remove distractions and get focused in on what other people are saying and checking understanding is a skill I hope we'll all come out of this current challenge with having perfected and got much more proficient at.

It might also be as simple as talking to your manager, your principal, your assistant principal about the sort of direction you might require. Some people may feel they need more, some people might feel they need a little bit of space, but talking to those around us about what works best for us is another great way to maintain really good healthy lines of communication.

And finally, it may well be something as simple as setting up a buddy call with a colleague. I find great benefit in checking in with a colleague once a week who is a good person just to bounce ideas off. A good download is also really helpful too. Identifying that buddy and doing that regularly can be really powerful.

So back over to the team. Losh, what are you noticing coming through around communication because this is a very, very big subject. 

LOSH PILLAY:  We've had a lot of social connections, you know, ideas for social connections, but one of the things that's come up from Amanda was when having a meeting, having a really clear agenda so that the meeting can be very productive, and I think that's something that we've been very conscious of at my school as well, having regular check‑ins with our leadership team, our staff, but also being very clear about what the purpose of the meeting is going to be and why we are having this check‑in and I think that's made it much more effective.

IAN HAMILTON:  Yes. Something as simple as an agenda could be really important at the moment just to keep people focused and on track. I've even heard of meetings starting with 30 seconds of just quiet, getting everybody focused in on what it is we need to talk about. So getting everybody's focus through just spending 30 seconds sitting quietly and thinking about how we want to bring ourselves to the meeting could be another great tool as well. Brett, over to you, what are you seeing coming through?

BRETT BELL:  Yeah, lots of the same. I think the only thing I really wanted to add there was, similar to what you're saying about communication, that relationship, my leadership or my assistant principal and I are still working from school, so we just got a list of our staff and put it in a central place and just highlight when we've made contact, so we can see the ones we're missing just by chance. We've got 45 staff to look after, so you want to make sure that you're not missing people. So there were some people we knew were going to find it a bit more challenging because they've got young children, or whatever, so we checked in first and then have been working around from there.

So, you know, just those check‑ins.  People just want to know they're connected. One of our teachers birthday was today, so you just jump in, say happy birthday with a voice call and then nick off again, so just remembering those little things, we're still living life as we are.

IAN HAMILTON:  Yes. What I really like about that simple but so powerful, you know, actually going through a list and making sure we've heard from people. It could be the quieter people are actually the ones who are craving a little bit of one‑to‑one time, you know. So thanks, Brett, that's great suggestions there.

So let's move into the other category that came from the survey, and I think many of you also identified this in the poll that I ran, distractions, managing the myriad of distractions from your working from home environment. Well, one of the most effective ways to manage distractions is using the tip for creating boundaries. So if you think about a distraction, the best way to manage it is put a boundary around it, and that could be anything. It could be the people you share a house with, it could be the noise that's coming from other parts of the house, it could be your email, it could be your mobile phone. It doesn't really matter what it is, but the ability to be able to put a boundary around the distraction is a really powerful tool.

But of course there are some distractions we can control and some that we can't and I think we've got to be a little bit kind to ourselves here and recognise that our homes have not been set up for perfect working environments and so there will be some distractions that we can control and there will be some that we can't manage so effectively. And I think it's about stepping back and being self‑aware and saying to yourself, "I can't not have my kids around me, perhaps, so therefore how do I manage best with the situation that I'm in" and being a little bit kind to ourselves ‑ if we're really thinking that we've got to have this exactly as an office, what it would look like.

The other thing around distractions is it's a great opportunity to start practising the skill of being focused and mindful. Now, many people during the course of these webinars have spoken about how useful mindfulness has been over this period, but of course what mindfulness is in effect is focus, intentional focus, and therefore one of the great ways to manage distractions is to start building the skill about bringing focus to the work that we're doing. So it could be, for example, when we're writing an email trying to be really focused on getting to the end of the email without the temptation of moving to something else. It sounds simple, but of course it's actually not, it's actually very difficult, and so being intentional in meetings, being intentional in phone calls, being intentional in webinars is a great way to start practising mindfulness as part of our work. So I'd like ‑ I'll come back to that in a moment, but being intentional in everything we do.

Another great way of managing distractions is to actually write down what it is we want to achieve. Now, I know there are some people who do this routinely. If you're not one of those people, here's a great opportunity to start capturing what are the top things I need to achieve in the morning or in the afternoon and then managing that list, trying to get really focused in and pushing those distractions to one side so we've got a sense of doing the right things.

Another distraction, managing a distraction, could be a social media. As I said already, it's very, very tempting to open social media multiple times during a day. Putting a boundary around that could be highly effective for all of us.

And finally, recognising that if we don't manage distractions and we are task switching or we are moving from work to something that's happening around us, it will be ‑ and research backs this up very strongly ‑ what we call cognitively draining. If you are constantly switching between tasks ‑ as much as we used to think that was a great skill that we called multitasking, the research now says quite clearly that it's draining and it's probably why so many of us are finding virtual work more of a drain than being face to face.

 

So I can see, Brett, you're looking intently at the chat that's coming through. Is there anything you'd like ‑  great tips or ideas you'd like to share around managing distractions that's coming from the group?

BRETT BELL:  I'd just like to start ‑ I've actually taught with Melissa, so thank you, Melissa, for putting on ‑ starting the food conversation that got run away there from cooking tips from Kate and putting a lock on the fridge because Melissa visits it too often. But there's lots of ‑ I think the main tip around there is actually going to those lists and being really organised and having those sort of little mini goals that feel achievable. Lots of people talking about, you know, setting that list up the night before. For me I find just even rewriting my list ‑ you know, if I've crossed it off, rewrite it so it's a nice fresh one gives me that five minutes just to refocus what's important so I can hone in and draw a circle around what I'm going to target first. But yeah, no, there's been a little bit of diversion there in the middle there, Ian, but they're back on track now.

IAN HAMILTON:  Okay, great. And I also think if you have started to build physical activity into your day ‑ maybe you've replaced your commute with a walk, even if it's a 10‑minute walk ‑ what a great way to set your day up for success by identifying what are the core things I need to achieve and holding those front of mind for as long as you can on a post‑it note or on a pad and every time you get distracted, bringing yourself back to those top three things that you've identified that need to be achieved is a great skill anyway, but a really great skill we can hone over these next few weeks and months when we're working from home.

Losh, I'd like to bring you in at this point. Are you seeing any other threads coming through that you'd like to share? 

LOSH PILLAY:  Well, one of my personal favourites, Ian, is just making a list, as Brett mentioned before, and a number of people have mentioned that ‑ Claire, Elizabeth as well as Susan have all set themselves clear goals for the day. Elizabeth talked about being really disciplined about how often she checks Teams and she allows herself to do that every 30 minutes and Susan talked about a to‑do list as well. So I think that really helps to manage the work for the day.

IAN HAMILTON:  Wonderful. What I like about that is we're not suggesting for one minute that you don't look at social media, but it's about managing it in a way that keeps you productive and so if every 30 minutes you get a reminder that it is okay to reward yourself with a look at what's happening in the world outside, fantastic. So this will be different for every one of us, but certainly managing distractions is critical when you're working from home because, let's face it, there are many, many, many distractions, many more distractions than perhaps you would find in a school‑based or office‑based environment.

Let's move then to a large category and that's ways to stay motivated. Now, I think at the moment most of us are very, very motivated because we're having to set up new ways of working very rapidly, it's all relatively new to us at this stage, but there could well be some fatigue that will set in as we end up working from home over the next few weeks and months and so one of the ways which we know from research can be very, very powerful is to actually build new routines. We are all creatures of habit. You will have had routines I'm sure that you've been following for years and of course they've all been disrupted and you're suddenly having to build new ones.

So really the best routine is the one that you can stick to. So there's no formula for this, what might work for me or Brett or Losh or Kate could be different for somebody else, but establishing a routine could be a very, very powerful way of keeping yourself energised and motivated throughout the day.

So what do I mean by routine?  Well, your routine might look like a walk instead of a commute; it might look like rewarding yourself with breaks, small breaks and large breaks; it might look like establishing a new way of having lunch. There are a multitude of things that you can do to build structure into your day so that it starts to become more the normal.

Another thing, as I've mentioned already, is taking breaks. Now, many people have commented that when working from home, strangely, they've been sitting at their desk for hours because there aren't people around them to encourage them to get up and move and go for a coffee, et cetera. So you might want to think about rewarding yourself with micro breaks, perhaps when you've finished a piece of work like an email or you've written a report or recorded a webinar, or the larger breaks that you would typically have over lunch. But certainly for psychological wellbeing it's not healthy to be sitting for a long time in your new working from home environment, breaks are really important.  Thinking about when they should be most appropriately taken could be something you leave this webinar reflecting on.

Another one is your workspace. Ben Palmer in his webinar talked about the environment in which you're working. Your work space has been put together hastily and you may well be like me and find that where you first thought you'll be productive isn't necessarily the case and you may well have to make some adaptations to where you're working.

Certainly seeking advice on ergonomic set‑up, finding an area that perhaps will allow you to stand for certain periods during the day, and we've heard some great suggestions about putting the laptop on a breakfast bar or on a table to allow standing, could be ways in which you could be more productive in your immediate working environment. But certainly seeking advice on the right sort of chair, thinking about your posture could be great ways to keep yourself motivated during this period.

Very closely aligned to that is this sense of activity. We know that activity is one of the most fundamental ways to maintain our physical and psychological welfare. That activity could be as simple as rewarding ourselves with a short walk, building some stretching or yoga or mindfulness or anything that gets us up from our desk during the day could be very, very powerful, and there are a multitude of home fitness programs that I know are available for people as well. Now, I'm not suggesting you go to from 0 to 100 here, but some simple exercise during the day to replace the exercise you would normally have done by walking around the school or the office could be very, very powerful too.

And finally, and I think really significantly, there is a fantastic opportunity for all of us, and we've heard so many great stories about this, to be a positive influence to others. Not only is it very beneficial for the person that we're positively influencing, but there's great research to say that the process of giving, the process of helping, certainly creates great psychological uplift for us as well, so maybe thinking too about on a weekly/daily basis giving back to others and making a positive difference to other people's lives.

Now, they're just a few examples to get you thinking. Losh, I might start with you this time. What are you noticing coming through on the chat about ways to stay motivated? 

 

LOSH PILLAY:  I think people have picked up on your point around having a routine, Ian, and Leanne talks about building in some activity and going for a walk and Victoria says that she's setting her routine for herself by being dressed and has her shoes on by 8 o'clock in the morning and uses her commute time to have a really good breakfast.

And on a personal level, I find on the one or two days that I work from home, equally, I like the idea of having those micro breaks. So I tend to go and, you know, unload the dishwasher or check the mail box and that tends to break up the day and gets me on my feet as well.

IAN HAMILTON:  Yeah, great suggestions, yes. Certainly there's no shortage of tasks around the house that we can reward ourselves with through a micro break and of course there's great benefit in getting up, moving and doing something and just refocusing on another task.

Brett, are there any other suggestions you'd like to share coming through?

BRETT BELL:  Yeah, I mean, Elizabeth said it right at the start of the session tonight, but Robyn picked up on it as well. Some people are using their normal commute time for their walk, so they're sort of building those things into their normal routine. So their routine would be still to get up at this time, but rather than wasting this time, getting into it and putting something different in, which is really powerful and doing that, which I think is really good. 

But I think ‑ today is not a good example of it but, you know, going outside for those breaks and, you know, getting out in the garden or having your lunch outside or your coffee break outside has been really good up until the last two days, but, you know, it can be really ‑ just gives that mental break of change of environment.

IAN HAMILTON:  Absolutely. Even writing down what that routine looks like, adapting it ‑ you might try something, it doesn't work, you try something else. But the walk in the morning is a great way to combine setting up your day as well as physical exercise. You almost get a win/win from that. And it could be a 10‑minute walk, it could be a half‑hour walk, it's different for everyone, but certainly establishing a routine from research we know is immensely important when we have a rapid shift in our working environment.

So hopefully some thought‑provoking ideas. Again, this webinar is about trying to stimulate thinking, giving you things to think about that you might try that are different to what you're doing at the moment.

Now, finally I said to you at the start of the webinar that it's to a large degree about being aware of how these different things are influencing me and what I'm going to leave you with is a technique that you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of these different strategies that we're hoping that you might put into place after tonight's webinar.

So the first step to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy is building into your working day the opportunity to just pause temporarily and check in with yourself and identify the way in which you're feeling. Now, we know this is good for ourselves, but when you're really busy and you're working hard, very few of us actually are disciplined enough to actually pause and stop and actually reflect on what has made this morning or this afternoon as productive as it has been?  If you feel like you've had a really productive day, have you actually considered why that might be? Equally, if you've had a very frustrating episode, have you been through the same process of trying to identify the causes of that? So this is really important. This is about identifying the things that are influencing the way that you feel.

Number 2, it's the trigger that we're really after. So once you've identified the way you're feeling, what's caused it?  Has it been because I have been very focussed and that's because I switched off my email, or is it because I've connected with somebody and they've made me feel more productive or they've given me some ideas?  Whatever it might be, the trigger is really important to identify.

And then, thirdly, once we've identified the trigger of those more productive periods during our day, to actively seek and pursue these activities that generate positive emotions for us. So if you've found benefit in taking regular breaks and you've identified the break has energised you, has allowed you to reset, then that's the thing that we would suggest you actively seek and pursue during the working day.

Step 2, we would really like to see people try different ways of working. As I've said already, what might work for some people might not work for others, so it's very much about experimenting, trying to break out of any habits that you've developed over the last couple of weeks that aren't working and implement some new, fresh ideas. So stretch yourself. I often like to use the analogy of a rubber band. You know, stretch it to something new and let's see how you feel. It will almost certainly come back to where it wants to be at rest. So if you're not somebody who's been doing a lot of physical activity recently, set a goal to actually start walking for 5 or 10 minutes and see what benefit you derive from that. The goal really with this is to identify which working from home activities work for you. Experiment with different things, see if you can find the ones that work for you.

Finally, step 3, practise being present in all of these activities. So if you've decided you're going to build a walk into your day, practise being present during your walk. Smelling the air, being very conscious of your heart rate and being conscious of the route you're taking could be a great way of really giving this the best opportunity to influence positively how you're feeling.

Equally, if you're trying to avoid checking email when you're on a meeting, practise being present in that meeting and try really hard to avoid being distracted. That's once again about being present in the moment with whatever you're doing ‑ a fantastic skill that we can take with us throughout life.

And finally, every opportunity there is to cultivate focus is a good one. So that focus could be when you are hanging out the washing, going for a walk, writing an email. Every task that we complete gives us an opportunity to get better and better at the task of situational focus or mindfulness, if you want to describe it that way. There's an abundance of opportunities that we can use.

So what I'd like to do is take a final poll and ‑ oh, finally, sorry, my last dot point, be kind to yourself too. Accept that it's not going to be a perfect formula, there will be times when you get frustrated, and if you do lose focus or if something that you try isn't working, it's all part of the process, and the more we practise, the more skilled that we'll become at it.

So I would like to take another poll before we conclude the webinar just to see which of these strategies you're thinking that might be beneficial for you. So I'm going to pull up the poll and launch the second poll. What I'm going to invite you to do here is think about which of the strategies that we've just spoken about over the last 30 minutes are the ones that you're most likely to focus on.  So we talked about boundaries, we talked about building relationships outside of what we would normally do, we've talked about managing distractions and also ways to stay motivated.

So I can see we've got just over 20% of you have voted already, fantastic. They're coming in very quickly. Up to 70%. Thank you very much for the speed at which you're doing this. And what I'll do ‑ as soon as the poll closes, I'll share it with Brett and Losh. 85%. So I'll just leave the poll open for another 30 seconds to catch anyone else who wants to complete it.

So I'm going to end that poll now, share the results. Brett and Losh, if you could give me a thumbs up when you can see the results. Yep, wonderful. So can I hand over to you.  What are you noticing around the strategies that those on the webinar tonight are most likely to experiment with and try to increase their productivity whilst working from home? 

BRETT BELL:  Well, the key one there is obviously setting those boundaries. So I think, you know, we just need to make sure we try doing that and there's been lots of chat around the need to do that. I think perhaps the biggest one is around just that permission to set the boundaries. I think we all know it, but it's actually saying it's okay to do that. There was a comment there about ‑ and I think all our staff in education are the same ‑ we're all good at looking after others, but we're ‑ we sort of look after ourselves last.

Recently ‑ I think it might have been in one of the principal forums ‑ we were basically told, like that old first aid thing, you can't help others unless you help yourself first. You've got to protect yourself so that you are able to do that. And I think we need to just take that permission and know it's okay to do that. And I think these presentations give us that reassurance which someone else said ‑ I feel really good that I'm not alone in this, that we're actually all facing a similar idea. So I think those are the sort of feelings that I was getting through reading those comments just recently.

IAN HAMILTON:  Yeah. I think it's really significant what Brett has just said there, you know, looking after yourself, so the boundaries about protecting your own energy, your own productivity, considering that we're in this probably for the short to medium term at least, and so it won't be possible to work extraordinarily long hours over the long term without it having some impact on us.

Losh, what are you noticing coming through from the way people have voted? 

 

LOSH PILLAY:  I think the next big one there is managing distractions, Ian. So there are a number of strategies that came up through the chat in terms of managing distractions and, you know, having a to‑do list as well as having some strategies to juggle that and have a balance between managing your own family at home as well as your work responsibilities. So I think those are the two big ones.

But the other thing that's coming through a little bit more recently through the chat is those ways to stay motivated and coping with your own stress levels. And somebody mentioned just now about the department having the employee assistance line as well. So if someone is feeling quite distressed, there is that free service that the department offers.

IAN HAMILTON:  Wonderful. Thank you for that too, yes. And I think what I'm noticing here is they're all relevant. So a lot of what we've spoken about today feels like it's things that we can all experiment with.

So I'm just going to stop sharing that poll and just bring the webinar to a conclusion by doing a summary. I'm slightly over time, so I'm going to invite you to do this after the webinar, but what I think would be really useful is to take a couple of minutes after the webinar finishes in a moment to think about what might be one or two things that you're motivated and excited to try that could help you manage your home working environment and I would be delighted in the last sort of 30 seconds or so, if you've got any immediate ideas, to share those in the chat box and we'll certainly collate those and they'll be very, very useful for us to look at when we bring all of the webinars together.

So, in summary, what does the research tell us?  Well, if you're going to enhance your productivity when working from home and your working from home environment, what you need to do is intentionally engage in activities that are going to bring out the best in you and support your productivity. So one of the ways to do that is to identify what they are, what's going to work for you, what's going to really enrich your day and make you feel as productive as you can be, and to do that you've got to identify the triggers of both positive and unproductive emotions, manage better around the unproductive ones and actively seek opportunities to do the ones that bring out the best in us.

It's experimental. As I've said lots of times in the webinar, there isn't a formula, unfortunately, that we can give you that will help you achieve this. It's different for everybody, but be brave, experiment, try different ways of working and share your success with others. I think one of the ways to give these techniques the very best opportunity is practise being present with every one of them. Whatever it is, bring absolute presence and focus to it and see how it works for you and be open to the fact that some approaches will work and others won't and it's all about trial and error.

And so just before I conclude the webinar, I might just see has anyone posted any little great things they're thinking of trying just before we close things off, Brett or Losh?  Anything coming through? 

LOSH PILLAY:  Yes, certainly.  I think again the idea of using the spare room came up, having a to‑do list, using sticky notes, starting the day with coffee on the couch.

IAN HAMILTON:  Oh, right. Great.

LOSH PILLAY:  So a whole range of ideas are coming up now very quickly.

IAN HAMILTON:  Great. Anything you'd like to share there, Brett, before I conclude? 

BRETT BELL:  Yeah, no, just going very quickly, I've sort of documented it, but it's just ‑ there was someone about finding getting to sleep difficult. I just find having that notepad by the bed, just write it out, get it out, then it doesn't have to keep spinning and look at it tomorrow, I think that can really help.

And we didn't touch on it much tonight, but grabbing ‑ you know, asking your principal can I get some furniture from school and getting it home ‑ if that's the barrier, then get that set up, you know, get an office chair or a table or whatever you need to set that space. If that's still not helping you get that safe space, then borrow it, get it happening.

IAN HAMILTON:  Yeah, thank you for raising that. I did touch lightly on ergonomic set‑up, but thinking about who can assist you to ensure that you don't pick up a soft tissue injury through poor posture, that can be really debilitating. Neck pain can creep up on you quickly. So thinking about your ergonomics, thinking about your posture, building activity into your working day is critically important. I speak from somebody who certainly gets neck pain periodically and it erodes your wellbeing very, very quickly.

BRETT BELL:  Absolutely.

IAN HAMILTON:  Thank you very much. Let me bring the webinar to a close. What I'd like to do is thank you all for staying with us for the last hour and five minutes. I hope you've found benefit in some of the ideas and suggestions that we've presented to you. There will be a recording of the webinar. Feel free to share this with others. We'll be running this again tomorrow morning and I wish you the best of luck. You're doing a tremendously important job. I wish you every success and I hope to connect with you into the future. Thank you very much for joining us tonight.