Team of the Year 2020: Remote Working Heroes

Why this matters

For the third year in a row, Apolitical will be celebrating innovative, groundbreaking teams that get the job done through our Public Service Team of the Year Awards. This has been a challenging year, and public servants have been pushed to be more creative, innovative, and flexible than ever before — and we want to celebrate their work.

As countries around the world have gone into lockdown, developing new ways of working has never been more important. From quickly pivoting to working from home, to developing ways to keep hybrid teams connected, this award will recognise teams that have gone above and beyond in developing new ways of working.

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How we selected the finalists

Our team received hundreds of nominations from teams all over the world. We then reviewed each nomination individually, and a panel of judges at Apolitical decided on a shortlist of teams for each category.

Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO)’s Strategy and Learning Team, Australia

This team has been remote working for many years. But when the pandemic hit, it wasn’t just their know-how of technology that helped them through – it was also their team culture. The team has created a culture with psychological safety, inclusion and trust at its core which drives their high performance and creates an environment where everyone wants to do their best work. During the pandemic the team were able to tweak their existing remote working practices, trial and adopt new technology made available in the pandemic and enhance their online team building to better support each other.

Connect2LACity, Los Angeles’s Information Technology Agency, US

In order to accommodate teleworking for many of the city government’s 50,000 employees, Los Angeles’s Information Technology Agency created Connect2LACity.org, a work-from-home resources platform that shows city workers how to access their Google mail and calendar, connect to their work computer and where to turn for help. The team was able to work quickly to develop the platform starting off with proofs-of-concept. They then had to do levels of testing to ensure that they could scale. On March 13, there were 12 people working on Connect2LACity. A week later they had 2,159 people on the platform, and by April 1, they had processed 11,600 people.

Southwark Council’s Smart Working Programme Team, UK

The Smart Working Technology Team has embarked on an expedited laptop rollout to deliver over 4,000 laptops to staff over the last four months. The team also introduced Microsoft Teams for the first time. To support staff with the rapid deployment of technology, video learning was created and made available for staff on the council’s Digital Skills Learning Portal – which has been viewed over 2,000 times by staff. The Smart Working Team are now working on defining what Southwark’s long term, post-pandemic future of work will look like and have facilitated a pan-London workshop to gain insights for other London boroughs on what the new ways of working will look like

Systems Directorate of the Undersecretary of Administration of the Ministry of Public Space and Urban Hygiene, Government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Like many other governments all over the world the Ministry of Public Space and Urban Hygiene had to create a new modality of work. In addition to enabling telework, the Systems Directorate launched a variety of activities to promote and enhance communication, relationships, teamwork, and recreation. This included virtual breakfasts for Directorates across the government to facilitate collaborative projects, virtual training and workshops with external partners and a support system to ensure older employees were provided for during their isolation. The team also enabled employees to volunteer on other Covid-19 initiatives by adapting workloads.

Brazilian National School of Public Administration (ENAP), Brazil

Enap has carried out a wide range of working from home initiatives to enable government to continue working throughout the pandemic. They were part of a team that gathered more than 36,000 responses from federal workers on remote work which will help refine government teleworking policies. They also helped to collect 46,000 responses on a survey to help inform more effective design of policies for returning to face-to-face work. The school also made distance learning courses available in their Virtual School of Government catalog with over 80,000 people enrolled. They also undertook a rapid upskilling of public servants with their “Coffee with Technology” initiative to minimise the difficulties faced by some public servants in adapting to the new way of working.

Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, Canada

This team was instrumental in accelerating digital transformation within the province by breaking down long-standing workplace cultures and silos. Over ten days IT staff coordinated the provision of equipment to enable all staff to work from home. Pre-Covid-19, about 1% of staff were capable of working from home; within two weeks more than 99% of staff were working from home. Looking forward the team has started to conduct surveys and focus groups to understand work personas and mobility requirements in order to help create safer, more collaborative and productive workspaces.