Chorus staff and volunteers roll up their sleeves and support people to live the life they choose, in their own home. With humility and a smile.
Chorus was created to do something different and 2019-20 was a year of creativeness, challenge and change.
As the year commenced, our intent was to achieve two things in parallel: consolidate our current core business and experiment with future ways of working.
For our core business, our focus was on our four commitments:
We achieved our purpose through our achievements against these four commitments. We know from feedback and growth in numbers that Chorus customers value our support. We have made great improvements in our safety performance, with the number of work-related injuries showing a consistent downward trend. Our financial performance was sound, and we navigated the short-term business interruption of COVID by both continuing to meet needs and ensure the health and safety of Chorus people. Our employee and volunteer surveys reveal a positive culture and good levels of engagement and optimism.
In working in different ways we were supported by the WA Government through a Lotterywest grant to launch the Fresh Approach program. Our intent was to test innovative ways of working that were more relational, nurtured the strength of local neighbourhoods, and had a positive impact on the wider health and care system.
Our Fresh Approach work was a deliberate and thoughtful effort to test our beliefs about how we could put the community back into community services. Over the course of 2019-20, we have worked with Chorus customers, employees and volunteers to show that services and teams could be re-designed to reduce administrative effort and have more time and energy to foster relationships. We have tested physical and virtual means of fostering stronger and more connected local neighbourhoods. And we have improved partnerships and coordination with other players in ‘local health ecosystems’.
While the Fresh Approach is visible everywhere in Chorus, we developed a structured program in two key locations: Bull Creek (in partnership with Lotterywest and the City of Melville) and Mandurah (in partnership with the WA Primary Health Alliance and the City of Mandurah). Our learnings from this structured program have provided us with a range of insights that will help us better reach our goals.
Even in a ‘normal’ year, best-laid plans tend to be disrupted; thanks to the seismic advent of COVID, our plans were shaken.
On reflection, though, and thanks to the extraordinary effort and commitment of all of Chorus – customers, volunteers, staff, directors, and supporters – we have been able to achieve and, in fact, accelerate our parallel goals of consolidation and innovation in 2019-20.
One of the fabulous things about being the Chair and the CEO of Chorus is that so-called ‘business as usual’ is extraordinarily inspiring. Every day, in big and small ways, Chorus people deliver on our purpose of enabling people to live the life they choose. Thank you to each and every one of you.
As a concrete milestone to signal the conclusion of post-merger integration and the creation of Chorus version 1.0, we celebrated the successful – though extremely challenging – implementation of a single IT system in September 2019. While to many this would be mundane-sounding, this achievement meant we were, for the first time, able to unify our view of the operational and financial performance of Chorus. This integrated view laid the foundation for further improvement in the way we support customers and communities, and also revealed our biggest challenges: customer processes were convoluted, and our financial sustainability was likely to come under increased pressure over the medium term.
The COVID onslaught was frightening and challenging to both our core business and our innovation work. We cannot be prouder of the way Chorus people rose to the dual challenge of continuing to meet needs while keeping safe and well. With the support of funding partners, we embraced unprecedented flexibility to adapt services, redeploy effort and hone in on what really mattered: the ongoing wellbeing of customers and all Chorus people.
In many ways, COVID has had a net positive effect on Chorus:
As 2019-20 came to a close, through a combination of planned and unexpected endeavours and a mix of long-term trends and more immediate issues, the people of Chorus were poised at the cusp of more substantial change. To achieve our potential, to consistently demonstrate the Fresh Approach to community service, and to have an expanding impact on Western Australia, we recognise and embrace the need to be different. To use an IT analogy, it is time for a major upgrade and in 2020-21 we will make some organisational changes to become Chorus 2.0.
As we reflect on the 2019-20 year and embark on a new year, customers remain at the forefront of our thinking and our actions. To ensure the best outcomes, our engagement in Chorus 2.0 will be through a touchstone of simple-local-efficient.
We thank all of you for your ongoing significant efforts and your commitment to progressing Chorus’ vision and strategy for achieving the Fresh Approach. In 2020-2021 we look excitedly to sharing the dividends of these different ways of being with people and communities across the State.
Dr Moira Watson (Chair) and Dan Minchin (CEO)
