As part of our business continuity planning in any ‘incident’ or ‘crisis’, the Library forms a welfare response group to assist managers in providing staff with welfare support.  The group helps in various ways including checking in with staff to find out concerns and to communicate major concerns back to the response team leaders.

During traffic light red the Library formed a welfare response group and we were blessed to have Kim Hall, Glenna Wong, Maria Veronese, Hugh Joughin, Kathryn Andrews and Anton Angelo serve in this capacity.  We met regularly as a group during term one to discuss broader issues, concerns and themes in an anonymous way arising from members of the group making individual contact with library staff to understand how things were going.

Library managers are sincerely grateful to these staff and their mahi over the first term.  We considered this to be very valuable.

The welfare group and managers have agreed the time is right to close this piece of work as we now in ‘orange’.  In any future new incident, significant event or crisis a welfare response group would be formed once again.

Library managers are aware that just because the work of this group has closed that this does not mean there won’t be ongoing welfare issues that need support.  Covid continues to be around us and impact us in various ways.  If you believe that there are Covid related issues that managers are not hearing then please feel free to have a chat your manager, or with Stuart or I (welfare response team leaders).

Tim Stedman