Coronavirus: How Andy Penn got Telstra ahead of the COVID curve

Telstra was one of the first corporations to tell staff - including its CEO - to work from home in a workplace change that has swept the country.

Telstra chief executive Andy Penn at work in his home office. Picture: Aaron Francis.

It’s a month since Andy Penn led his employees out of the office and into a giant workplace experiment. And the Telstra chief executive is pretty happy with how it has gone.

The decision to move early and quickly to remote working was all but inevitable according to Penn, who says the virus has accelerated a permanent transformation already under way at the telco.

“I’ve got no doubt that once we are through this crisis, some of the changes in work practices will become more permanent,” he says from his house on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.

“People will work virtually more, and of course we will go back to working from the office as well, but some of these changes will become more permanent.”

For the 56-year-old the professional challenges of leading a remote operation have been matched by the impact of the virus on his personal life.

“This is impacting all of us,” the chief executive tells The Deal.

“My daughter has just lost her hospitality job. We found out my wife’s sister was diagnosed with COVID-19 this morning. She lives in the US. And my parents, who live in the UK, are quite unwell. Everyone’s got their own stories and I haven’t met anyone this hasn’t touched in one way, shape or form.”

Telstra was one of the first companies to move, with its March 13 Telstra announcement that the vast majority of its 25,000 workers would work remotely. It took just a week to execute the shift, but the challenges continue.

The company has frozen its job cuts for the next six months, brought forward $500m of expenditure to 2020 to fast-track its 5G build, and will suspend late payment fees and disconnections for small businesses and consumers until at least the end of this month.

Says Penn: “We’ve got a pretty tried and tested approach to what I call crisis management. Prior to this, we stood up our crisis management team during the bushfires and we’ve created this pretty rigorous process for what we do in situations like these.

“With COVID-19 it became clear fairly early that there was a degree of inevitability that more people were going to have to work from home, and it (would) just become more problematic and unhelpful for our people to be working in offices because of public transport and people who might need to self-isolate.

“We made the decision to get ahead of it and move to work from home for our Australian-based office staff early so we could iron out the wrinkles and just get it done.”

The move was eased by the fact Telstra has had an effective flexible working policy for a decade. It meant that last month, when all the staff left the office, the company had technology in place as well as systems for running meetings remotely, for example.

As Penn says, “We knew we would be in a strong position to move 25,000 people to work from home.”

-

“This is an unprecedented situation that we are all going through, and it is going to require all of us to make some changes and adapt our behaviour.”
— Andy Penn, Telstra CEO

-

Telstra’s executive in charge of contact centres, Claire Johnston, says she has been impressed with how quickly the whole company has steered itself in a new direction.

“The past few weeks have been absolutely crazy, as we mobilise everybody and get equipment home and people set up and comfortable,” she says.

“It has been a massive relief for our people to feel that they can be safe and work from home and not have to worry about travelling to work.

“This will become a new normal, I think.”

The national workplace relocation is putting unprecedented strain on network infrastructure. Even those who are not working are adding to the load as they use Zoom videoconferencing or other systems to hold remote dinner parties or play the latest Call of Duty game with eight mates over the internet.

Internet download and upload rates — and congestion — are hitting unprecedented levels. Some customers are fed up but Penn says that some of the issues that plagued people’s experiences in recent weeks were not network issues at all.

“If you think about what’s happening at a practical level, if you’re working in an office or studying at a school, you’re working at a place that has got a fixed dedicated pipe fibre network, generally speaking, then if you start working from home you’re coming over a VPN (virtual private network) from outside of the organisation’s core network,” he says.

“That’s creating capacity issues in the applications you’re dialling into. And we’re seeing a number of customers running into problems because they haven’t got enough capacity in their applications, and the applications aren’t configured to suddenly handle thousands of people. That’s where the wrinkles tend to be, in that dimension.”

Penn manages his own daily workflow with multiple applications including Microsoft Teams and Webex. He advocates a diversification strategy — using different apps for different purposes — rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

“I’ve got a videoconference with the US tomorrow on Zoom, which is a function of the people we’re on a videoconference with, rather than it being the preferred platform of Telstra,” he says. “The ability to operate with multiple different technologies is the key to success.”

On a more personal level, Penn says a crucial way he has managed the transition to home has been establishing a separate physical space to be able to get away psychologically from work, and away from a videoconference screen.

His morning routine is structured around getting exercise, spending time with his wife, and taking his dog for a walk around the leafy peninsula suburb of Red Hill.

“I have some structured time during the day to make sure I don’t completely conflate my personal life with my work life,” he says. “Otherwise your work life just sort of invades everything, including your own emotional wellbeing.”

Andy Penn is a keen painter in his spare time. Picture: Aaron Francis/The Australian

Penn, a high school dropout, is a keen painter in his spare time and has a home studio where he works on paintings he describes as “experimental”. He cites Eng­lish romantic artist JMW Turner as an influence, but says he hasn’t had time yet to take to the easel during the pandemic.

“You’ve got to create the head space to do it as well as the actual time,” he says.

COVID-19 has forced Telstra, and most of the companies around Australia, to be experimental and do things differently. The “big five” telcos — Telstra, Optus, Vodafone Hutchinson, TPG and Vocus — and NBN Co, have banded together in a rare show of co-operation to grapple with issues relating to network congestion and help customers with financial difficulties. The tie-up between the competitors required special authorisation from watchdog the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

The work from home revolution also has affected everyone from corporate heavyweights — including big four accounting firms EY, KPMG, Deloitte and PwC — to tech companies Atlassian and Seek, whose thousands of employees are co-ordinating themselves from lounge rooms and bedrooms, rather than cubicles and board rooms.

Atlassian’s co-chief executive Scott Farquhar, who has shifted his 4000-plus workforce to working remotely, says unprecedented events are rapidly changing the way teams are working together.

“While working remotely is the right thing to do during this time of social distancing, making the transition with little or no warning is unavoidably disruptive,” Farquhar says.

“Virtually every familiar feature of office life — from the bulletin board where your team tracks work in progress to the whiteboard you use for brainstorming — has to undergo its own version of digital transformation.”

Global identity software maker Okta chief executive Todd McKinnon tells The Deal that the key for leadership during COVID-19 is to “just get out there and talk”. His workforce of thousands is working remotely but gets regular briefings and updates from McKinnon.

“Even if you don’t have all the answers, just No 1 is getting out there and showing your face so that employees can feel reassured,” he says.

“And the other thing is the natural tendency for leaders is to want to stick with the old plan for too long, even though it’s obviously a different world. Things are dramatically different now, so you need to be flexible and open minded about what you’re doing.”

Schools and universities are also keeping their students at home and will likely emerge at the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic with a vastly different approach to online communication.

Says Penn: “This is an unprecedented situation that we are all going through, and it is going to require all of us to make some changes and adapt our behaviour. All of us will need to make a contribution towards getting through this as successfully as we possibly can, whether that’s the government, big business or small business, or as individuals as well.

“If we can all work together and adopt some pretty reasonable and sensible approaches and behaviours, we are going to get through this a lot better than if we don’t. And I think a bit of kindness, and a bit of patience and tolerance with each other is really what’s crucially important right now.”