eResearch Community Continuity During a Pandemic: The MeRC Community Cohesion Strategy
<p>This presentation was given at the 2020 eResearch Australasia Virtual Conference, 19-23 October 2020.</p><p><br></p><p>Abstract:</p><p>The transition to an increasingly remote workplace due to the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need to rapidly mitigate three key risks in the Monash eResearch Centre (MeRC) to ensure cohesive team operations and undisrupted support to researchers:</p><ol><li>The absence of common, remote internal communication channels to effectively replicate the coordination of operations in-office in a timely manner;</li><li>The absence of a centre-wide channel for external key stakeholder and user communication to ensure standardised and timely notifications; and</li><li>The inability to “self-serve” accurate stakeholder and user contact information for communication purposes across the centre.</li></ol><p>As a result, a Community Cohesion Strategy and Team were established to address gaps that emerged in the operational management of MeRC as staff transitioned to a remote working environment, and to facilitate the rapid dissemination of key centre and operational updates to stakeholders. This drastic change in working environments provided a unique opportunity to implement a framework by which working-from-home arrangements and wellbeing of partially or fully remote teams might be supervised successfully.</p><p>In this presentation, we highlight the elements that were implemented to address these gaps, in accordance with a number of principal purposes. The strategies were a mixture of social and cultural changes as well as technological solutions.</p><p>The implementation of the Community Cohesion Strategy within MeRC resulted in the successful transition to a remote workforce supporting researchers at an unreduced capacity, and has improved operational management and preserved team culture that will extend beyond the initial duration of remote working.</p>
