Dale Dickson is CEO of the City of Gold Coast, located in the south-east of Queensland. They are the second most populous local government area in Australia and service over 600,000 residents.

The City of Gold Coast (City) workforce is comprised of a close-knit community of indoor and outdoor employees that have always taken pride in strong face-to-face customer service. While we have many support structures for our employees, the one thing we couldn’t anticipate was the large-scale remote working and safety changes that COVID-19 would require.

As the first impacts of the closures and restrictions were felt in March 2020, the City rapidly introduced new technologies, like remote working desktops and digital team management platforms, to enable efficient working-from-home capabilities. This was complemented by physical and mental wellbeing initiatives, like at-home ergonomic assessments and an online wellbeing hub.

We also altered the way our outdoor workforce operated to reduce in-person interactions and implement safe distancing and additional cleaning measures. Not only did we increase cleaning and sanitisation within City buildings, our City Maintenance team escalated the cleaning of public toilets and facilities up to five times a day to ensure the safety of our community.

These changes allowed us to centralise our workforce allocation, reassigning employees to busy work streams and deploying them to assist the community in transitioning through to our ‘new normal’. For example our Environmental Health Officers (EHO’s) worked with local restaurants and cafes to help them convert to takeaway and delivery operations, as well as assisting Queensland Health with airport screening, contact tracing and compliance checks of people with self-quarantine orders.

Together we have created a more flexible workforce with increased technical capabilities.

Dale Dickson PSM
Chief Executive Officer
City of Gold Coast