When we looked at workplaces with vulnerable populations one of the things that stood out for us was our contact centers. We are dealing with people's life savings so we can talk to people who are going through financial hardship or have experienced a traumatic event such as a disability and wanting to access those funds. So it can be quite challenging to interact with members when we are talking about really challenging topics.

There might be twenty or thirty people waiting to get their calls answered.

And let's face it you don't ring your super fund when you've had the greatest day of your life. It's typically tough phone call after tough phone call.

You're trying really hard to give the member that you're talking to at that time the best service that you can give but also there's people waiting. So there's kind of pressure from every angle coming through at you. So it does get quite stressful and overwhelming at times.

Wellbeing on call is a project that we've been piloting with five contact centers that are associated with our partner superannuation funds and it's been made available because of the funding support from WorkSafe Victoria's WorkWell mental health Improvement fund.

When we went into the contact centers to understand what they were currently doing and the environment and those sorts of things we were also simultaneously looking at the research around job design and job control and really wanting to bring forth the evidence of best practice. It was about taking the teams and the team leaders on that journey together and co-designing, Really creating together what solutions in their environment in their context would work and what could be slotted into things that they were already doing. Which is really important factor for success.

Job design is a term that's used to define how a role is designed before you go and put a person in it it's really about what are the expectations of that role and there's a number of ingredients that goes into good job design. It's looking at the skill requirement to actually complete the job it's looking at the environmental factors in which an individual is doing that work and what are the risks. The psychological risk or the physical risk that they may come across and making sure that you've mitigated those as best you possibly can.

So some of the practical ways good job design can come to the fore is people having input into how shifts are designed. There isn't a huge amount of flexibility, because you know our phone lines are open from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and so, you know, we need to be available at those times. So we try and offer consultants the flexibility to start when they would prefer as much as possible. We also ensure that if a consultant has had a really tough call or interaction that they take some time away from their desks away away from their phone for 5-10 minutes afterward. It'll encourage them to just go for a walk. So that they can come back, you know, ready and refreshed.

Anyone who's in a people leader role such as a team leader is such a critical person for so many reasons. If you've got limited resources and you want to make a change around well-being, train your people leaders. What we're seeing is some tremendous indicators of success and that is things like absenteeism and unplanned leave going down, job satisfaction and a shift in mood within the team going up. We're really seeing the team engaged in the work and bringing forward ideas, bringing a sense of ownership and that is increased productivity. The other benefit that we've seen from this project which was completely unexpected was the contact center team leaders from the five organizations came together and through that coming together they were really learning from each other. You might think that you know you're doing all the right things at your own organization but inevitably there's always different ways to achieve goals. By talking to other people and hearing what they're doing you know you can really bring that on board and you can share your experiences, and that's been really important thing for us what we've actually seen out of this is that these contact center team leaders have recognized the benefit of having peer-to-peer support and that's amazing for well being.

When your employees are happy at work they're doing more work more effectively, more efficiently and then overall our members are getting exactly what they want, great service.