When the pandemic arrived, I personally promised our team that no one would be losing their jobs to COVID-19.  And if I just look at that, I think we’ve had a massive win on that front.  We didn’t have to make any tough decisions on implementing redundancies, although a few people have moved on from the company towards the end of the financial year.  So as a result, we’re currently working through recruitment plans; you’ll already have seen a job ad out on SEEK for a Support Coordinator role in Brisbane – and there’s more to come!

Bizarrely (and completely unexpectedly), the pandemic has also revealed a highlight for me – how well our team continued to deliver amazing results throughout the whole period – definitely some form of a silver lining in an otherwise very grey year.  It started when we ran trials of working from home, which went very smoothly, and we’ve continued to deliver successfully since then – although with us all working from home, it’s been really hard to maintain the “team” feeling we used to have when we were all in one office. 

To try to combat this isolation and fragmentation, there were also a whole bunch of really great things we did together, despite not being able to see each other all the time.  This is a testament to the many wonderful people I get to work with who organised and set up events like International Women’s Day, Harmony Week events, and yes, another metrogaine event – this time we ran one at Christmas.   It is a testament to our entire team that we all held it together during the year that was the last financial year, and still managed to both deliver what our clients needed, and what we needed as a team from each other, too.  Some of our blogs from the last year try to let others know what we learned as well, including help for trainers and parents – we’ll keep trying to share what we learned as well.  

You can’t beat a pandan cake, one of the delicious dishes from our Harmony Day event in Perth!

With our team all aligned as much as we could, we delivered on a large number of projects, many of which are listed in our online portfolio. There’s a number of these that are highlights from the last year, so a specific shout out to three of my favourite initiatives (although this is like trying to pick your favourite child – quite difficult!);

• Queensland State Archives (QSA) – we implemented a new Archival Management System for QSA which was a major accomplishment for us – we delivered the biggest project we’ve done to date at Gaia Resources, and thanks to our partners of Hudson Molonglo and Recordkeeping Innovation, we did it on time and budget,  
• Fishscale – we worked with our partners at Griffith University to implement a new innovative proof of concept project, thanks to Commonwealth Government funding, that utilises artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify fish species from video footage, and this is just the sort of innovative technology project we love doing,
• Northern Australian Fire Index – both the new mobile app and the QGIS plugin were great projects that make a big difference for the northern rangelands of Australia; providing information straight into the hands of people that work on the land – something very close to my own heart – especially when it includes open source software!

Some business highlights that I’ve also been personally very keen on were also achieved, including becoming Carbon Neutral (after a lot of research about the process) and passing another of our ISO Quality System audits – this last one with zero non-compliances!

We also worked really hard to make sure that we were set up for the recovery on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic, including a whole raft of changes to our processes, tooling and the like.  Leading into this year, we’re focusing on the approaches that will deliver the best outcomes for the company in that area, including:

• Working closely with ADAPT by Design, who are helping us to transform Gaia Resources into a more resilient business, 
• Retooling the company across a range of different areas, including our knowledgebase, ticketing systems and support systems, 
• Undertaking a holistic review of our quality management system – all processes and procedures are being reviewed to capture the learnings from using them for over a year, using the “Opportunity for Improvement” model that ISO brings, and
• A brand new marketing plan that I’ve developed in conjunction with our new Marketing Coordinator, Rachel (with loads of things to come from that).

As a result of all the hard work from the last financial year, we’re in a good position to start working the next financial year, and to build on our success.

So, as we head into a new financial year, we’re taking a breath before we start on what looks to be a year filled with a range of new projects and opportunities, with a bunch of great ideas from the team to implement, and a solid plan for those changes to happen.  So now, we just need a global pandemic to play ball and things should all be good – easy, right?

In any case, I’m hoping for our colleagues and clients that the next financial year brings about some really positive experiences – and let’s keep looking for those silver linings that these trying times can bring.

If you’d like to know more, you can get in touch with me directly or strike up a conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook

Piers

The post Wrapping up another financial year appeared first on Gaia Resources.

So at the time of writing this, it’s only Jeff – who’s based in Hobart – who’s happily mask free and we hope that this stays that way for him, and we all go back to it soon.  While we continue to do what is required under the restrictions and mandates, we also thank the people we know in the incident control centres, testing centres, labs and associated infrastructure around the country for looking out for all of us (which, for some of us, includes our partners)!

We’re by no means experts in pandemics, transmissions vectors and the like, but we’re fast becoming experts in how to respond when these things happen.  Much of that is thanks to our ISO procedures, like our Business Continuity Plan (BCP).  Our BCP is something we’ve been reviewing regularly since the start of the pandemic, and amending approaches to things as we need to.  Our BCP has really helped us to respond quickly to changing conditions, and as part of the building up of our resilience around incidents, there really is minimal change for our teams when we need to switch things up.

Apart from our flexible approach to working, our partnership with Amazon Web Services for the delivery of pretty much all our infrastructure also means that our systems are much more robust than the “good old days” of managing our own infrastructure.  The ability to spin up infrastructure quickly using cloud services has certainly made a big difference – we can adapt and respond to rapidly changing circumstances faster than ever before.

Back in February https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/february-covid-update/ I wrote about how we responded to lockdowns.  We kept an eye on our team and tried to make sure everyone was well – mentally and physically – and we kept on working with our clients in the most productive ways we could.  We still work remotely for parts of our weeks, and while we enjoy getting back to our offices in the coworking spaces we use around Australia – it’ll be even better when we will be able to do that without masks or other restrictions.

Once these current restrictions end, we look forward to catching up again as a team for our usual end of financial year recaps and workshops – and we’ll publish our usual online recaps, too!

This pandemic continues to remind us that we need to avoid complacency and look out for each other.  We’ll continue to do this and if there is anything we can do to help our clients, or if you would like to just chat about how we’re doing, feel free to drop me a line, give us a call on (08) 9227 7309 or strike up a conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Piers

The post An Ongoing Pandemic appeared first on Gaia Resources.

For Gaia Resources, the lockdown impacted the majority of our staff, namely those of us based in Perth. While we do have other team members in Brisbane, Darwin and Hobart, we’ve all been quite lucky in our respective states, and this Western Australian lockdown is really no more than a reminder that COVID is still here. Thanks to our planning around business continuity under our ISO accreditations, we were able to quickly contact our team, let them know to work from home, and to make sure they took care of themselves and their loved ones by following health directions. As a result, our Perth-based team were able to continue to work productively from our home offices starting Monday morning.

The lockdown is not something we are just taking for granted, though, and we still need to look after each other during this period, and it is a reminder that the old ways of working don’t necessarily make sense for the future.

Since more widespread lockdowns finished up late last year across Australia, we have been implementing our “return to the office” plan to enable our team to have some face time with each other. As we tracked with our team last year, while we were still “productive” as a team when we were fully remote, it was getting hard on us from a perspective of mental health. Part of that was due to the isolation we were experiencing – despite all the digital tools we were using for regular communication, there is no perfect substitute for seeing other people in person.

This importance of face time is also important to consider for our clients with respect to how we deliver our services. With the States in Australia changing their quarantine responses readily, we are not able to travel as freely as we used to, and this is something I for one am very thankful for – travel puts a lot of strain on people and families. Hence, travel is something that we will be treating very differently in the future, and minimising it wherever possible – and when it is required we will be looking at a “shared responsibility” approach to the environmental impacts of travel with our clients.

So, getting some interaction with other human beings was something we have been working on as a team. Returning to the office spaces has been an important part of the plan, and we’ve been doing it gradually and with consideration of the change, it imparts on our team. Working from home has many benefits for our team members that we didn’t want to lose – more time with their families, dedicated time that you can focus on tasks and concentrate, and simply having more time back in the day instead of commuting. As we’ve also mentioned before, it also has benefits for the planet, too – something we really take seriously.

As a result, we haven’t charged back to full-time working in the offices, and to be honest, we won’t be doing that anyway. The benefits for the individual and for the planet mean that our “way forward” we started last year will be more people and planet friendly, and it means that lockdowns like this won’t have as much of an impact on us as they might to other groups.

So apart from looking after each other, and our clients, we’re also making sure to look after ourselves. That’s part of what we do here at Gaia Resources, and we are working to ensure that this terrible pandemic will deliver a fundamental positive change in how “work” will happen in the future – better for clients, better for people and better for the planet. It is my hope that this represents something good happening out of all this tragedy.

If you’d like to find out more on any aspect of how we’re working in this new way, feel free to contact me directly at piers.higgs@gaiaresources.com.au, give me a call on (08) 92277309 or check our social media Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Piers

The post February COVID Update appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Firstly, we are now a carbon neutral company, thanks to the analysis and offsetting that we have done via Carbon Neutral. This means that the carbon emissions that we produced as a byproduct of our operations is being offset through the use of Gold Standard certified offsets – which in our case means biodiverse planting in the Yarra Yarra Biodiversity Corridor in Western Australia (around 400km north of Perth).

Gaia Resources 2019-20 carbon emissions, by type

As you can see from our summary graph from the assessment report (shown on the right), our carbon dioxide emissions totalled up to 38.03 tonnes, across a range of different areas, but primarily from our commutes to work and our air travel (which we offset through the airlines own carbon offset approaches).

This whole “commuting” part made us think more broadly around our emissions, and especially so in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has had our teams working primarily from home.  When thinking about carbon emissions under this new way of working, we realised that there was a positive to this – this means that our “staff commuting” total has certainly reduced.  However, at the same time, our staff are actually at home more than they are usually, so there must also be some more emissions produced there that we also are at least partially responsible for.

Hence our second initiative – we became a partner with ClimateClever, in order to assist our staff in managing their own home emissions – and through this we have purchased each of our staff a membership to the Home version of the app.  We discuss a bit more of the detail behind the reasons why we went down this path with the ClimateClever team in an article that you can find over on their LinkedIn page.

ClimateClever’s approach is a three-step process – Measure, Examine and Action. Through this approach, our team can first Measure what their carbon footprint is (and compare it with others, including amongst our team), then undertake an Audit in their own homes to see what they have in place, and finally, take real and positive Action to systematically reduce their carbon footprint.  You can see how this works in the ClimateClever introduction video, embedded below.

Our team are steadily working through their Measure stage of the process, working through their home bills and finding ways to reduce their carbon footprint, and to make the world just a little bit better.

These are just the first two new initiatives that you will see coming from us over the 2020-21 Financial year that relate to our environmental sustainability.  For example, we are working on new policies – for example, to reduce that air travel component as much as possible through virtual meetings – and we have several new initiatives to get our clients involved in this journey towards carbon neutrality.

Of course, our existing policies don’t change – including small actions such as purchasing sustainable office products (like our new pens, which are primarily made from wheat waste), to much larger ones, like choosing Amazon Web Services as our cloud provider because of their commitment to achieving 100% renewable energy.

In summing up, I think I said it best in the ClimateClever piece:

Making these changes is important to me, it’s important for our staff, it’s important for their children – and it’s important for our planet.  Without those things, we don’t have a company.  So it is obvious for me personally, and for our company collectively, that action needs to be taken.

These sorts of approaches are all why I used the word “Gaia” in our business name – to remind us that we’re all part of the same complex system that is this planet and we need to think holistically about how we improve our part in that system.

Throughout the rest of this financial year, we will be implementing more ways to make the world a better place through our sustainability strategy, and we will be inviting our clients and suppliers to come on this journey with us. If you’d like to know more, then get in touch with me directly, and let’s make a difference together.

Piers

The post Living up to our name appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The mythical phoenix (source: Wikipedia)

The webinar isn’t a new concept, but it has largely taken the place of conferences and face-to-face workshops all over the world – and fair enough too, because we are necessarily less mobile but there is a lot of great work continuing out there in our industries and important topics to discuss. What I have noticed is a significant increase in the number of available webinars and their accessibility; I am able to attend interesting events hosted in Melbourne, Brisbane or anywhere globally really, from my home office. The accessible nature of the online registration process makes it quick and painless to jump in, and importantly the format opens up more opportunities for mums, dads and remote people to participate.

The webinar experience (Image source: Alexandra Koch)

 
Hats off to the organisers too, I know it is not a simple matter to coordinate and facilitate these events and must take many hours of preparation.

I also have to say the invites are coming into my inbox thick and fast, and I have this extra step in my morning routine now to do a quick review if a webinar is worthwhile to attend. As a team we regularly talk about upcoming events, and often we’ll identify a particular webinar as something more interesting to a colleague’s area of expertise or professional development. For example, this little process has seen our team attend data science workshops like the ones offered by the Western Australia Data Science Innovation Hub (WADSIH) and Machine Learning webinars from Amazon Web Services.

If I can wind the clock back one year, I recall a conference in a regional centre with a “pre-conference workshop” on environmental regulation being held the day before. I couldn’t make the trip that day earlier but asked if it might be made available on-line. I don’t think organisers were even thinking of a remote audience back then, and for this one they simply couldn’t offer a video feed as an option. I can tell you they are now. Conference organisers are adapting quickly to survive; however, by engaging the remote audience I would suspect their audience is scaling up, not down.  Take the Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand for instance who have chapters in each State and Territory and would previously advertise their events in capital cities around the country. I wouldn’t usually think to get on a plane for a short workshop in another city, so as interesting and relevant as some of those events were it wasn’t feasible to attend, and dialling in via video conferencing wasn’t really a thing.

Fast forward into the “new normal” and these groups are now running regular webinars available to anyone, anywhere. There is sometimes a small fee, or a non-member price, that I am happy to pay where I can see value. There is also the environmental value of reduced carbon emissions for people not needing to commute to meeting places. We’ve touched on this in a previous blog entry from our company’s working-from-home perspective (and we’ll post more about that soon), but for webinars it could be thought of more broadly as a cumulative benefit across industries.

The networking aspect is another important challenge to look at. As you can imagine it is tougher to get those break-out conversations going following an intriguing presentation – and so it will be interesting to see if the traditional webinar format evolves to incorporate this aspect, and I am sure the usual technology providers are already pivoting their products. I actually went along to one of the EIANZ events in Darwin (while practicing good social distancing) for a presentation from the Northern Territory government on ‘What’s new for the NT in environmental impact assessment.’ I found out today that there were somewhere in the range of 70 online participants representing every State and Territory! It was really interesting to see the positive and proactive policy and administrative changes being put in place around environmental assessment following the establishment of the NT Environmental Protection Act (2019).

The onset of this pandemic has really challenged the way we work and our ability to connect and stay in touch with the rest of the world. I have been able to attend a number of webinars here from my base in Darwin that previously have been only offered through physical attendance. It has certainly broadened my horizons, and it seems that organisations are ramping up their presence in this online space, recognising there is an audience beyond their own borders and improving on the “old ways” of working!

Tell us about your own experience with webinars, and feel free to leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

Chris

The post The rise of Webinars appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We’ve been working from home for some time under the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, and erring on the side of caution when it comes to looking after each other, and doing our bit to protect the broader community.   As part of this, we’ve been talking for a while now about “the way forward”, and it’s deliberately not being called a “return” as already mentioned in our last update blog on coronavirus.  That sentiment still stands – there are a few things that have been positive for us out of this terrible situation.

So we thought it was worth taking a moment to recap on a few of the things in our “way forward”.

Working from home

On a very personal note, when we started working from home, I really disliked it – I’ve been working hard to create a work/life separation for my own mental health, and this felt like a step backwards.  However, after being in it, a new way of working (with better boundaries) has been created and I now really enjoy working from home.  That’s been borne out by our team as well, who’ve been continuing to fill out our daily polls, with the values ticking along as below on the weekly averages.

Our graphs showing the weekly “mental health check”, the “productivity check” and the “productivity indicator” that we have developed – fed through from our daily polls.

So we will all be working from home for some part of the working week, due to reasons such as:

• quality of life – we spend less time commuting, and more time being able to be part of our families,
• reduction in financial cost – catching buses and the like to work does cost money – this is something we’ve all noticed we’re saving during the pandemic, and
• reduction in environmental cost – commuting also costs the environment, through emissions from transport (even with public transport).

We even did a straw poll of how much carbon emissions have been saved by our team during the pandemic, and we’ll post more about that in due course.  We are also looking at the savings that we’ve made from the decreased travel; previously I’ve spent a fair amount of time on aeroplanes, and despite our use of carbon offsets for all of that air travel, that still produces carbon.  This is a big enough topic that I’ll save it until we’ve finished our calculations to see how much of a positive impact working from home will have on the environment.

The use of online meetings has certainly reduced our carbon footprint and our local travel time, but does have some drawbacks – although I have to say, I’ve noticed those are getting less as time goes on, as everyone gets more in tune with using remote meeting technology and we’d like to keep using this too.

Office space

We made the decision a couple of years ago to embrace co-working (such as FLUX, our Perth hosts) for the flexibility and opportunity that it presented – and that’s been an excellent move.  As restrictions lessen we’re starting to spend time back in our office spaces again, although we will be moving our Brisbane office to find a space that better suits our growing team (more on that soon, too).

Our office arrangements will change across the board in the next few months as we adjust to the other approaches outlined above – ending up with a mixture of desk sharing and permanent desks.

Keeping to health guidelines

We’ve also noticed how much healthier we are working from home, with the guidelines around health in place (more hand washing, physical distancing, etc).  So this is something that we will definitely keep in the way forward as well – encouraging this sort of public health will mean that there is less illness in our offices.   We’ll also be keeping quarantine rules that we’re running now around not coming to the office spaces when we’re sick – but also staying away from our office spaces, commuting and the like until we’re symptom-free.

We’re still working through the challenges of commuting on public transport; the 1.5m physical distancing public health guideline is really difficult to keep on public transport and there are quite differing opinions on whether public transport is really safe.  But for now, at least for our Western Australian office, public transport is back on the cards, and our team are using it as long as they feel safe to do so when they do come in – otherwise, they keep working from home.

There are a range of challenges in the future for us – making sure people have the best setup possible in their home offices, striking the balance of working from home and being productive, and all that.  But so far, there are also some positive things coming from this situation.

We’re here and happy to talk about our experiences, either through an email to me directly or via our social media feeds on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.  In the meantime, stay safe, healthy and happy.

Piers

The post Starting the way forward appeared first on Gaia Resources.

It certainly has helped to be part of a great team that are all approaching this all with a “can do” attitude, a good sense of humour and a lot of care and consideration for each other (which I also recently mentioned in an interview with our Perth office hosts, Spacecubed).

We’ve also been doing the best we can to maintain the mental health and productivity of our staff.  Some of the things that we’ve implemented internally have included:

• taking our previous team meeting and duplicating it, creating one that is about Projects and one that is about People,
• making time to support our new starters – some of whom we haven’t met face to face yet!
• adding in space for morning virtual “coffee meetings” that our team are actively engaging in,
• converting our Friday drinks to virtual drinks,
• testing out virtual training facilities using Google Classroom and other related technologies,
• adding in polls every day about how we’re feeling and how productive we’re being, and
• spicing things up with a few different events and things as we go (like our recent Metrogaine event).

The numbers we’ve been tracking in our team polls have really helped us to work out what we needed to do to support our teams better.  For example, after the Easter long weekend, some sort of malaise set into the company and a lot of people struggled to be productive; so we talked it through and the next week we had a session specifically aiming at finding ways that people get out of a “productivity rut”, which was really useful – and our productivity spiked back up again.

Daily polling of people’s perception about working from home (Positive/Negative), and their productivity (More, the same, or Less than usual) has given us ways to see how things are tracking, and respond quickly

It’s not all about the numbers though.

While (being the scientists and engineers we are) we do capture data on and report back to the team about in all of our team meetings very transparently, this is not the be-all and end-all of how we’re going as a team.  That also plays out in what we hear from our clients, and collaborators about how we’re working – and it’s been very heartening to hear from our clients that they’re still seeing us deliver high-quality work across a range of different projects.

Unfortunately, a lot of what is going on around this “coronavirus situation” that is impacting people has nothing to do with work – it’s other things you can’t currently do in your personal lives.  So we’re focusing on what we can do in the work environment, and we are all doing little things to try to make sure that people aren’t isolated, blocked, or spiralling into a bad place – as well as a few little gestures such as things that are turning up in the mail here and there from people to each other (usually with some sort of cryptic clue as to who the anonymous poster was).

We have also been talking about “the way forward” as a team – not a “return”, as we want to take the advantage to move in new directions as well.  In our recent People team meeting, we asked what everyone wanted the new way of working to look like, and got a lot of positive feedback about some of the initiatives we were now doing, and some of the things that the team wanted to keep doing, such as:

• keeping the working from home for some part of the week,
• maintaining the double team meeting approach, with the two separate themes of Projects and People, and
• keeping social distancing and isolation around illness (as we’ve had waves of “Gaia-bola” run through the Perth office in the past few years).

The ‘new way forward’ for us is filled with some promise and some really valuable learnings, and we’ll talk more about that in due course.

For now, please feel free to reach out to me or the team if there is anything we can do to assist you – even if it’s just for a chat about how you are going.  You can reach out to us on email (piers.higgs@gaiaresources.com.au) to arrange a video chat, via phone (08 92277309 in Perth, 07 3063 0418 in Brisbane and 0491 205 462 in Darwin), or by starting a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

There’s still a way to go before ‘the new way forward’ is implemented, but in the meantime, we hope that you, your colleagues and your families can all stay safe, healthy and happy in these trying times.

Piers

The post An update on our Coronavirus response appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The virtual scavenger hunt worked like this:

• There were two “field officers” (in this case, myself and Andrew) who were equipped with phones mounted on chest harnesses,
• There rest of our staff were split up into two teams to guide the two field officers (aptly named Team 1 and Team A) through a Google Meet hangout, and
• Team Zebra consisted of Voon Li, in his “bunker” (pictured below) where he guided the action as our moderator and game master.

All the game-specific technology for the app was written from scratch by Voon-Li:

• an Android app on the field officers’ phones which provided super-fast positioning of the field officer via a back-end API,
• the back-end API which accepted the phone data,
• a web application that connected to the API to obtain the latest coordinates and display them on the map, along with target points. Questions to answer at each point would come up as the field officer moved into range.

Meanwhile, a Google Meet Hangout was also running with the team on it, providing instructions to the field officer about where to go, and providing the rest of the team a view of what was going on out in the field.

At the start of the game, we were provided with a set of target points from Voon-Li, which were displayed on the map (see below). Only the team back in their homes (we’re not office based at the moment due to COVID-19 of course) could see these points on the map, not the Field Officers.  So the teams guided the field officers to these points through the Google Meet setup – our chest-mounted phones were also showing a live feed of us running around – and once the phone’s reported location was near the point, then a question popped up for the teams to then answer.

This was a pretty fun and safe way to spend a bit of time on a Friday afternoon, and Andrew and I got to exercise and still remain physically distant from people around us.  For the team back in their home offices, they remained socially connected while physically distant, and for Voon-Li, well, he had a great time being the game master and listening and watching us run around in circles.

We learned a lot about various pieces of technology that we used in the project, so there were also a bunch of good outcomes for us there apart from just morale-building, but in these interesting times with a lot of stuff going on around us all, it was great to have some downtime and a bit of fun.

I hope you are all finding ways to stay safe, healthy and happy as well.

Piers

The post Virtual Scavenger Hunt – Metrogaining! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

One of my personal aims for this year was to make better use of the opportunities to access different learning communities and as most of these have been face-to-face meetups, I have had to adapt my expectations on this!

I have been recently accessing the resources of the SheCodes community. I’ve been lucky enough to attend some of their one-day workshops in the past. When a Virtual Coding Party was announced for the 18th April, it seemed to look too good an opportunity to miss. The SheCodes workshops are a really positive and supportive environment to learn a new skill and the step-by-step tutorials are a great way to see your code in action quickly. I was a little uncertain how they would manage to maintain that environment when delivered online to a large number of women coding from home in multiple locations.

There might have been a few more hiccups behind the scenes, but from my perspective, they managed the transition fairly seamlessly. Participants had access to mentors through different chat channels, with the opportunity for ‘face-to-face’ support on video chats if you hit a real blocker. All of the mentors were really responsive online, and mine (thanks Sam!) made sure to check in with our group regularly if he didn’t hear from us.

Despite any initial hesitation I had in how the delivery of the day proceeded, I was able to make it through the Django tutorial on the day (albeit with an extra fifteen minutes at the end to just get that last couple of tasks …). This gave me the ability to see and post to a simple blog, and there are follow-up tutorial steps I can do to take my learning further. Now that I have been able to see Django work with Python scripts, CSS and HTML that I wrote (celebratory moment, there) I feel a lot more confident in my understanding and ability to go back and build on these learnings, either by myself or by reaching out to the marvellous communities I have in my life and work.

Shout out to our own Senior Software Engineer Brianna Williams, who has made sure I feel supported when I need to ask ‘silly’ coding questions or just vent a little bit when things don’t go to plan (when I write bad code). Knowing I have a judgement-free zone to work through the beginner issues makes it so much easier to move on from them instead of getting blocked and losing momentum before I can get really underway. Even when I can’t apply everything I have learnt immediately, I have really enjoyed getting a better understanding of all the different skills that go into the final product, increasing my already significant appreciation of our technical team!

if you’d like to know more about She Codes then please leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via sophie.darnell@gaiaresources.com.au.

Sophie

The post SheCodes in Shutdown appeared first on Gaia Resources.

There is always excitement, tinged with trepidation, as you start your new job on the first day; starting a new job during a global pandemic further adds to the mix of emotions.

Day One was not your normal first day on the job. For starters, I didn’t leave the house; I had the best car park; I also knew which of the two coffee shops down the road provided the best coffee; where the amenities were and how to escape the building if there was a fire alarm.

What I didn’t know was the culture of the company, how everyone interacted, what was expected of me and who was who in the business.

Gaia Resources already had their Business Continuity Plan in place for a few weeks before I joined and the team had all chosen to transition to a ‘work from home’ solution to the COVID-19 shutdown.

The executive team had run surveys and feedback sessions to understand what would be helpful for everyone to work from home. The way Gaia managed the changing environment by engaging the team really resonated with me. There were morning video coffee chats set up; a simple emoji ‘whereabouts log’ created, and an end of week discussion and survey to check-in to ensure everyone was OK.

So, what are the main differences from starting a new job in an office compared to working from home? Well firstly, you don’t normally stand at the front of an office and meet everyone at once as you do in a video call; there is no way to listen and observe the intricate social interactions, which often create the working relationships; and it’s hard to know what is expected without asking those awkward questions.  Gaia Resources has made great efforts to accommodate these communications.

The video chats and calls are created in a relaxed environment with humour and good nature, which helps the meetings flow. My first group team meeting, where my screen was filled with new faces, did not feel as overwhelming as I had expected. Everyone took the time to say hi, introduce themselves and explain a little more of their background.

I was teamed up with a mentor and a team buddy, and having them both to hand gave me a sense of direction and understanding, helping me ease into my new role. My mentor, who is in fact the company’s CEO Piers Higgs, provided the guidance and encouragement for me to excel and grow quickly within the team. There were lots of opportunities for me to clarify meeting outcomes and provide post-meeting feedback, which ensured I didn’t feel isolated. In fact, the new working day interspersed with video calls and chats is actually starting to feel like a normal workday!

Another big factor to working from home when starting a new job is ensuring you are staying healthy by exercising and having family time. It is a little too easy to work and not know what is acceptable for the start and end of the day. Having the ‘whereabouts log’ was reassuring in that everyone is aware of their wellbeing and that there still needs to be a division between work and home life.

I have been impressed with how Gaia Resources has transitioned their company (which has staff in Perth, Brisbane and Darwin) into a productive work-from-home solution so successfully. With such support and direction, I plan to be working with them for many years to come.

Tania

Thank you, and welcome Tania! If you would like to know about Gaia Resources response to the COVID-19 shutdown, please contact us directly via email, or drop us a note on our social media channels: Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post Starting a new job during a Pandemic appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Not unexpectedly, we’ve had a rise in the number of people asking us for our freely available online QGIS training materials (currently for version 2.18, which is pretty old now – but the course is getting a makeover for version 3.10 soon).  So we did a little digging on who’s using our course now — there’s been a bit more of a spread across the world:

QGIS online training users by country

The uptick in requests this year perhaps coinciding with people looking for things to do when they are at home in isolation.

This approach – create a series of videos that people watch and work through training guides – is one way to deliver online training. We thought we should identify some alternatives and how they might also be deployed.

We could deliver training workshops for our clients in exactly the same way – write a script, record a bunch of screencasts, record separate voice-overs, and then mash them all together with a blend of editing magic to create a course.  While great for our free online QGIS course, it’s not an adequate replacement for face-to-face classroom training.

Lately, we’ve been investigating the capacity of all of our different internet connections from home to see if we can offer a live-streaming style approach.  At the moment, most of us could do that, but there are always going to be issues – connections can drop for a bunch of reasons. So, if a live-streaming approach was going to happen (through whatever videoconferencing software our clients want us to use) it’d be best to break the training up into smaller pieces. This is an advantage, as it’s hard to focus on this type of videoconference for a long period of time (although we’re all getting used to it!).

We’ve also been looking at what schools are doing, using systems such as Google Classroom.  Through this platform, in particular, you can create a nice blend of the two approaches: put together teaching materials, set up videoconferencing sessions to cover those materials, and then combine them with the available assessment frameworks.  With training courses due for some projects in the next few months, we’re working on how these tools may be able to help deliver them, in these new circumstances we find ourselves in.

Necessity is certainly the mother of invention! In the last couple of weeks we’ve gone from having simple stored videos to creating full classes in Google Classroom, so we should be able to resume custom training for all of our clients within another week or so once we finalise our trials.  And then, perhaps, all the people on this map (showing where people who have asked for training live) can have an even better experience!

If you are interested in some classroom based remote training (or even in being our guinea pigs in a couple of external ones that we intend to trial in the next few weeks), then please get in touch with us via training@gaiaresources.com.au and let us know what you are interested in!  Or you can drop us a line on our social media streams – Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Stay safe and healthy, and see you online!

Piers

The post Remote training options appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We thought it would be a good idea to provide some insights into what is working for us so that others can learn from it, and hopefully this will help.  We’ll note straight away that this might not work for every business, but might help some.

Team meetings

We have changed up our “full” team meeting, which we used to hold on a Wednesday morning (Perth time, or lunchtime in Brisbane and Darwin).  This meeting has now been split into two; we now hold them on Tuesdays and Thursdays, again in the morning (but shifted a little earlier, so that we can make sure that the Brisbane and Darwin crew have a bigger opportunity for lunch!).

On Tuesdays, we pretty much do our usual meeting, focused on project work, “blockers” and “wins”.  On Thursdays, we’ve changed the focus to be more about people – so we’re using it to touch base around what’s working well in the individual setups for working from home, so we can learn from each other (more on that below).  This split has been great already, and it gives us in the executive a good handle on what’s happening with our team – so we can resolve those “blockers”.

Both meetings also have a little executive briefing at the beginning about any issues we might have been hitting, and a “future look” at the end – which at the moment is all about what we’re doing at the executive level around Coronavirus, so that our team knows that we’re working hard to maintain our entire team in these challenging times.

The most important part of these team meetings is about maintaining contact between all our team members, so that no one ends up not knowing what’s going on – there’s nothing like uncertainty and fear to kill productivity, so these team meetings are aimed at removing those things.

Where are you?

We’ve had an ongoing issue in our organisation since having multiple offices that we can’t seem to settle on a way to let each other know when we’re around.  It’s easy in a single office environment to do this – you just look around. But in this distributed, online workforce, we have to find other ways to make this work.

There are heaps of “sign in, sign out” boards – and we’re putting together a bunch of ideas on this, ranging from new systems to chatbots, to all sorts of things – but right now what we’re using is a pretty simple chat thread in our Google Chat rooms.  Of course, with our team there was a gadget built to do it in the space of hours…

Voon-Li’s Arduino that does our daily roll call

But basically, by being able to react to your name with your status as an emoji, you can quickly and clearly see who is “in” and working – so you know who you can and can’t contact, or at least set the expectation that you won’t get an answer until they finish lunch!

Virtual coffee and virtual beer

Two other things we’ve set up are “ad hoc” virtual coffee chats – anytime anyone wants one, they can sing out in the “Virtual Coffee” chat room and set up a virtual meeting, and whoever has a cuppa (or needs one) jumps into that room for a chat.  It’s totally ad hoc (although we’re now thinking of setting it up at particular times), and we’ve all found that it can really shake you up out of a “I’m at home by myself” funk pretty quickly.

On top of that we’ve scheduled in our usual Friday drinks for all the offices as virtual ones.  While Andrew and I as the exec turn up to all of them, we certainly don’t start drinking alcohol at 2.30pm local time!  This is a good way to decompress after the week and to just catch up on how our team all are (and no, there are no pictures available for that – what happens at virtual beers, stays at virtual beers).

As an added bonus, last week it turned into a games session and a bunch of people hung around to play some games together, which was for many a highlight of the week (and reported in the team meeting as a “win”!).

Trends

On a more serious note, we also wanted to keep an eye on our team’s mental health and productivity, so we instigated some polls early on in the piece.  We do two polls daily:

• Is working from home a positive or negative experience?, and
• How productive are you today (more than usual, about the same, less than usual)?

So far these polls are showing that it’s an overwhelmingly positive experience for most of the time (tracking at around 93% positive working from home, and on average, we’re as productive as we are at the office environment).

These two polls are used to track on a daily basis, and we report on them in the team meetings as well; so that we can all see how we’re going.  It’s going to be a very interesting set of data to analyse and see how it all went!

Other miscellaneous things – looking out for each other

As a team, we also did some general discussion in our team meetings about what is working for you from home, and came up with a range of things that are working well for the team from home, as summarised in the chart below (Editor’s note: yeah I know there are labels missing, but you get the gist).  This was a great thing for us to do as it got us to come up with a list of things – which some of us took on board and tried here and there, and reported back on it the next week with what worked for each of us (and a few new things).

We’ve also offered our staff access to fitness and support to help them with their exercise (one of the key things indicated on the chart above).  I’ve personally shifted my training to remote for the last couple of weeks since the gyms closed down, and it’s a very different way of training – but hopefully will still keep me fit enough over this period!  This is very much aimed at helping our mental health as well – and we’ve even compiled some resources for each other, like the Headspace and Smiling Mind apps to help with some mindfulness meditation and support.

It’s also about using the tools that you have – we use Google Suite for our email, calendar, chat and the like – and this is something that you have to push and reinforce.  We have a lot of channels in Chat, so that we can weed out the fun chats (which are still important) from the official chats, and we encourage people to use them as much as they can.  It’s also important that when chats are going around in circles, you drop out of that method and move to a video call or something similar to have a discussion and to make sure things are clear.

There are also little things that pop up during the week that are also helping with team cohesion – things that seem silly at first but every little bit helps.  For example, we’re all submitting our favourite songs to a group Spotify playlist, so that we can share our musical tastes, and we even contributed our ambient “home office noises” to some creative work that Meg was doing with NoizeMaschin (Editors note: maybe NSFW due to a swear in a hashtag).  The games session (even if it was only an hour) also helped keep us all connected. 

The next few months are going to be really interesting for everyone, but I think it’s critically important that as colleagues and teams we don’t lose what worked before – which is all about looking out for each other.  Everything we’re doing here is all about that, to make sure that we can work well as a team and that we can continue to deliver on our clients requirements and projects right through this difficult period.

Again, from all of us at Gaia Resources we really appreciate the support our suppliers and clients are giving us, and we hope to continue to also give back as much as we can.  If there is anything in here that you would like to know more about, please contact me directly via email, or drop us a note on our social media channels, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Stay safe, healthy and happy,

Piers

The post Staying connected appeared first on Gaia Resources.