It’s a dilemma facing any HR team tasked with managing teams dispersed over broad geographic regions: how to keep those employees engaged and retain them in the long run.

Medibank Health Solutions, the health services delivery arm of Medibank, has faced just such a problem. The company has around 4,000 people in total and Medibank Health Solutions is the biggest part of that in people terms, with around 2,500 employees. Approximately 1,500 of those are clinicians, including a raft of psychologists, doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals – 600 of whom work remotely.

The company provides a range of telephone, face to face and online services. Alongside a suite of health and wellness tools, the company offers visa medicals, travel medicine, workplace injury and assessment. Phone and online tools include the Nurse on Call service in Victoria, healthdirect in other states, and GP After Hours, whereby any member of the public can call through to the health lines, and if they need a GP consultation they can have that on the phone (and soon via video conference).

Retaining remote workers

Denise Moore, general manager, people & culture, Medibank Health Solutions, says it’s been an “interesting” path to address retention issues for its remote staff. “Initially we were hiring nurses and the nursing work pool is very limited; there’s a lot of competition for talent. We went towards the work at home model as an attraction strategy. And that was great, as it was really popular, but we learned a great deal as we went along,” she says.

Moore concedes her team found out very quickly where the “pain points” were: they had to tidy up documentation and change the way the OHS environment was addressed. They also kept it limited to employees based within one hour of a metro centre. “If we had to call people into a call centre we could do so. So there was really a safety net. However, we quickly found that the pools ran dry, so then we had to go remote.”

The recruitment team determined where the demographics lay for this type of work, and targeted those demographics in their recruitment efforts.

“We have an online recruitment system and we would do initial screening over the phone,” Moore explains. “We would then travel to the location, interview people in a hotel and go through the whole assessment centre process. We’d then come back to the office, do all the credentialing, and basically hire them remotely. They would then come back into that hotel environment for two weeks of training ... then they would go home and we’d never see them again.”

It quickly became apparent that these new hires were not being properly socialised with their team leaders. “Little things, like every event we had, the work at home people became a bit of an afterthought,” says Moore. In addition, staff members were not given the moral and emotional support needed to help them cope with an emotionally draining job – fielding distress call after distress call from patients is emotionally challenging for anyone, even the professionally trained.

An employee engagement team was formed, which kicked off a range of initiatives, including reward & recognition programs and, most importantly, new technology.”We wanted to ensure we had regular interface so we use things like instant messaging and so on. But a big piece in the last couple of years has been the introduction of Citrix GoToMeetings, which has been fantastic for just having team leaders engage with their teams.”

This tool enables remote teams to be included in presentations, and for ‘face to face’ meetings to occur with half a dozen people present. It’s also now used for real-time training as well. “If we need to upskill our remote workforce it gives us the opportunity to bring together a whole bunch of people online, and then they can actually do a practice session; you can give them control of the key board and the mouse and you can actually say ‘now you try it’. People love to see each other’s faces, or even just hear the voices. It’s enabled us to do all sorts of things like Movember and Pink Ribbon Day.”

It appears to be paying off. In the last employee engagement survey conducted by Medibank Health Solutions, the work at home team actually ranked higher in almost all categories than office-based workers. Areas such as supervisor relations, information sharing, and understanding goals and objectives came out particularly strong.

A transformed company

In addition to challenges around the remote workforce, Moore has had to handle significant change in the past two years. The private health insurance division is the original organisation and over the past two years it has acquired a number of different organisations.

Moore says the HR challenge has been pulling it all together. Not only have a number of different corporate cultures come together, but also different policies and procedures. “There’s a whole myriad of terms and conditions, different employee collective agreements and so on. My team has had to grow dramatically, since we put all this together, which is only back in November 2010.”

Medibank Health Solutions as a discrete division really came together in its current form last November, so it’s been a matter of building the team – around 30 HR professionals now work across functional streams: a business partner stream, partnering directly with the lines of business; a recruitment team; an organisation development team; a workplace relations team; and a remuneration & benefits team. “We also work very closely with the group people and culture team, rolling out those programs across Medibank,” Moore says.

Moore has concentrated on the elements that cause the biggest pain for the organisation; she gives the example of performance management. At one point managers within a team may have been running four different performance management remuneration systems. Although some of the other significant issues, such as the terms and conditions integration, can’t happen until there is consolidation of the employee collective agreements, Moore says the master plan is moving full-steam ahead.

“Bringing together disparate cultures would have to be the most significant and that is going to take time. The first piece is understanding what those disparate cultures are. What we’re trying to do is not get too airy fairy about this but actually try and translate it into real things; ‘this is the way we do things’.

“We’re spending a lot of time communicating what we’re doing, where we’re going and how we want to go about it, and I think that’s making a difference. But it’s slow; you don’t turn the Queen Mary around quickly mid-stream. I’m fairly confident that next year when we do an employee engagement survey we’ll start to see some significant shifts.”