Leaving Home, Returning Home

by Rebecca Barnett

From the very first AMT meeting – held rather aptly at Science House in The Rocks on the 8th March 1966 – AMT has called a variety of spaces across Sydney “home”.

For its first 25 years or so, AMT’s home was either the actual home of a committee member (usually the President) or their clinic/work address doubled as the “office”. As the Association gradually professionalised and started employing paid staff, AMT grew out of home digs and “moved out” in the 1990s, taking commercial leases in Bondi Junction and then Newtown. We moved from Newtown to our Ultimo office in 2014.

And now, in a full circle moment, we have packed up and left home … to move back home. Or to multiple homes, to be precise. Two weeks ago, we bid a fond nostalgia-laden goodbye to our home of 11 years, effectively formalising arrangements that had largely been our “new normal” since March 2020, when the COVID crisis saw AMT staff working ludicrously long hours remotely.

In other words, AMT is now officially at the forefront of remote work, with seven full and part-time staff members officially working 100% from home.

What this means for you

In a fundamental sense, this is just business as usual. We have mostly been working from home for 5 years so it’s kind of a nothingburger proposition.

The main barrier to cementing work from home earlier was the monumental task of sorting through 60 years of accumulated paper files, tightly wedged into a dozen filing cabinets, and digitising the records of around 1500 long-term AMT members. Yes, there was audible cursing¹, especially due to the 20 years of hybrid paper and digital records, when we filed multiple paper backups of electronic originals. It turns out that the road to the paperless office is paved with copies in triplicate and, yes folks, sometimes quadruplicate.

Eight secure destruct bins later², we are footloose and paper free (well, apart from the historical archives which will hopefully be digitised one day …). But we no longer have the massive albatross of a stark row of accusatory filing cabinets tying us to an underused physical space.

Full credit to AMT staff, who painstakingly and methodically sorted, scanned and uploaded thousands of documents to AMT’s database. It’s difficult to encapsulate just how monumental the task has been, from conception one year ago to execution and completion.

The benefits of being virtual

Packing up AMT’s physical head office and working 100% remote comes with a range of benefits. Obviously, not paying commercial rent has a huge impact on AMT’s financial bottom line. Our office rental was $50,000 a year or around 6% of annual turnover. Not only do those savings take a significant amount of pressure out of our budget, especially during lean and uncertain times, but they can also be reinvested directly into member services and technological improvements that benefit the entire membership.

Being a flexible employer also has massive advantages in terms of retaining and attracting new staff: Staff members regain valuable time that was once eaten up by commuting between home and work; greater flexibility supports staff members with care-giving and other family responsibilities; and it saves money in a range of ways. Other benefits are increasingly being documented, including improvements in mental health.

From the recruitment side of the equation, AMT can now employ talent from anywhere in Australia, increasing the pool of candidates for future positions. This is especially significant in the current context where companies are struggling to retain and recruit staff, and flexible/remote roles are increasingly coveted.

The circular economy

Apart from 6 very old and dodgy office chairs that were overdue for retirement, we managed to give every single stick of furniture in the office a second life through a company called Greenchair. Well chuffed!

We also arranged to have all the old, disused electronic equipment recycled through FlipTech. (When it was consolidated at one end of the office, there was a lot. Four trolley-loads in fact …). Well chuffed again!

New mailing address

For the foreseeable future, AMT’s official registered office address is our accounting firm, Byrons.

However, for all routine snail mail our new Post Office Box address is:

Association of Massage Therapists
PO Box 1022
Glenquarie NSW 2564

What happens next?

Honestly, not much changes from your perspective. You still have the same dedicated team and we still take your phone calls, except now you know for sure that the thing that sounds exactly like a bulldog loudly snoring in the background is, in fact, a bulldog loudly snoring in the background. Just be grateful smell phones have not been invented cause the farts are reputedly epic.³

AMT’s phone and email contacts remain exactly the same, so just reach out whenever you need us.

Thanks for being part of this journey with us. Here’s to the next chapter of AMT – leaner, greener, and even more connected to what really matters: supporting you, our amazing massage therapy community.

1. Mostly me, FFSing alone in the cold and dark, long after business hours, shaking my fist at the paper gods who tricked us into thinking we needed to keep cc’s long after electronic backups and the cloud were invented. ↩︎
2. I am not sure what the paper cut count is. ↩︎
3. And that’s not even the bulldog farts. ↩︎

About the author

Rebecca Barnett has been around long enough to remember visiting AMT Head Office in Bondi Junction. In those days, members hadn’t figured out how to attach documents to emails so they snail-mailed in newsletter articles or, on a good day, mailed a 5-inch floppy disk. She may have found some of these floppy disks one cold, sweary evening in Ultimo recently. And the occasional microfiche. Which is not entirely unlike a Gen Z’er stumbling across a rotary phone.

Rebecca may have occasionally committed the third footnote silently during a phone call but nobody was harmed.