Department of Transport and Planning Victoria

The Department of Transport and Planning Victoria (DTP) employs 4,800 people spread across the state. DTP partnered with Swinburne Edge to tackle leading in hybrid in the wake of COVID – their ‘biggest challenge’ in 30 years in terms of their ways of working. 

'There is no formula,’ explains Fiona Moore, DTP’s Organisational Development Manager – Leadership. ‘So, it’s an adaptive challenge. We were thinking about: how do we work to uplift the capability of our people leaders and shift their minds?’

To effectively implement their hybrid working model, DTP needed their people leaders to be comfortable leading in hybrid. They also needed their leaders to increase their effectiveness to purposefully impact four areas:

• engagement 
• collaboration 
• connection  
• productivity. 

The solution

After engaging with their key stakeholders, DTP worked with Swinburne Edge to design a 90-minute online session called ‘Leading DTP’s Hybrid Future’. They ran the sessions 20 times with over 1,000 people attending. 

There were also breakout rooms where leaders were invited to share what they were already doing that was working well. 

The results

DTP collated everything their leaders shared in their breakout rooms across the four key areas: engagement, collaboration, connection and productivity.

‘All of that’s been put into a fabulous report that Swinburne has produced,’ Fiona says. 

Next steps include: 

• presenting key recommendations to key stakeholders 

• sharing the recommendations of the collated outputs from the hundreds of breakout rooms to people leaders

• partnering with internal stakeholders for implementation. 

‘The main thing is shifting that mindset to testing and learning,’ Fiona notes.