We Are Family

The twice yearly Epic Pharmacy National Managers Days are two of Stuart and my favourite days on the calendar each year. They see our Leadership team from around the country come together and share what we’re all working on, celebrating our successes and learning from the ideas that didn’t work out the way we thought they might.

Regular readers would be aware that there is always a theme, and the vast majority of the attendees turn up in full costume inspired by the chosen topic.

This September’s theme was ‘All in the Family’, as we welcomed representatives of our new sister businesses Icon Cancer Care, Radiation Oncology Centres and Slade Health to the day. We encouraged people to take inspiration from famous families of TV and film to incorporate into both their outfits and their presentations, and it made for a hugely entertaining day.

Dressing up has become a hugely important part of our culture, it acts as an immediate ice breaker and conversation starter as everyone falls around in fits of laughter over each other’s outfits as we all arrive, and people definitely think and act differently when they’re not dressed in their usual work attire!

All in the Family turned out to be a cracking theme, with the Icon Core Services team presenting as an absolutely brilliant Brady Bunch,

the Epic Operations team delivering no shortage of 80’s flashback moments with their Neighbours inspiration,

and the business unit leaders representing the very Modern Family that we are, led off by Stuart in his best Jay Pritchett inspired Epic onesie leisure suit!

My outfit had to cover two personas for the day, I’m currently leading our Brand and Communications team while their long-time manager Jenny is on maternity leave, and as an all female team we decided that we couldn’t go past the ultimate brand managers of their generation, the Kardashians. We had a huge amount of fun getting our outfits ready, capped off by a call from Amex while I was in London recently advising that my card had been locked down after a suspicious transaction – fortunately I had just received an email letting me know that the team had used my card to purchase multiple pairs of Kim Kardashian butt enhancing underpants to form part of their outfits on the day, so much to the amusement of the Amex rep I was able to confirm the purchase was completely legitimate and return to my own retail activities!

Later in the day I had to morph from ‘Momager’ Kris Jenner to Judy Jetson, so whipped off the wig, removed my Kris signature black jacket and wiped away the red lipstick to take the team through an update on the work the Epic Digital team has been doing.

We always have a special guest in attendance, and this time were fortunate enough to have two. Anita Heiss, who has been working with Stuart and I for a while now is joining the team in a formal role as Manager of the Epic Good Foundation, so came along to join in the action and meet the rest of the team. Anita turned her Indigenous Pop Quiz into a Family Feud for the day, and the Kooris and the Murris battled it out to demonstrate their knowledge of our Indigenous heritage. Much fun was had by all, but I think we were all a little confronted by how poor our knowledge of this part of our culture is, which of course was the whole point of the exercise. We’re really looking forward to working with and learning from Anita as we strive to address this knowledge imbalance which so many Australians sadly share.

Our other special guest appeared in a slightly different form. We were all disappointed when Rachel Taylor, our Pharmacy Manager from Port Macquarie was unable to join us for the day as she’s always a keen participant. We found a way for Rachel to join us that not only allowed her to not miss out on the fun, but also demonstrated some technology that we’re pretty excited about exploring further.

We recently acquired a Double robot, which I’ve been having a lot of fun driving around the office. The Double is kind of like a Segway with an iPad, controlled remotely by an app. It allows you to manoeuvre it around and engage in conversations, similar to a Skype or FaceTime call but with the added bonus that you control your own mobility and therefore access the view and perspective that you want.

Rachel had a great time driving around the room, saying hi to people and watching the presentations, and it gave everyone great food for thought as to how we can use this type of technology in our workplace. Watch this space for more on that….

All in all it was a truly Epic day, with great presentations and great conversations stimulating lots of new ideas and new connections. It was fantastic to have many of our team members at sites contribute to the day by making videos that their managers included in their presentations, and the day as a whole gave the attendees from our new family member businesses a great insight into the way we do things at Epic!