EXPERT EDITION

INSIDE THIS ISSUE:Data is Guiding Employee Engagement

Workforce to Drive Success of Shared Services

Insight on NASA’s Employee Engagement

FAA Using Bonuses to Bolster Employee Engagement

BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

COURAGEOUS HR

Management tools for the real heroes of your organization

Learn how to grow your superpowers at www.csod.com/hrsuperhero

You are an HR superhero! Your challenges may be great, but the rewards are much greater. You must take risks, manage people and organizations, juggle many initiatives all at once AND be a change agent. Your job requires you to be quick thinking, responsive, innovative and also courageous. You have the skills to help your employees realize their potential and the tenacity to achieve mission goals.

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: COURAGEOUS HR 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Slicing, Dicing Data Gives Agencies Roadmap to Better Employee Engagement…2

Why the Workforce Must Drive the Success of Shared Services…4

NASA’s Gibbs: Employee Engagement Needs Honest Conversations…6

FAA Ties Supervisor Bonuses to Employee Engagement Improvements…8

Introduction

High employee engagement is the brass ring for federal chief human capital officers. CHCOs and the Office of Personnel Management are developing and perfecting techniques to get as close as possible to grabbing it.

In this Expert Edition: Courageous HR, you’ll learn from those at the peak of their performance, how they achieved victory in the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and landed at the top of the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places to Work list.

What is NASA’s secret sauce? Hint: It has to do with how they transform technology into a tool for communication across all vectors.

The Federal Aviation Administration has a different recipe that includes financial incentives for their executives and a ‘Shark Tank’-like competition for employee-suggested ideas.

While many techniques are practical – like the National Institutes of Health tool to comb through past FEVS or OPM’s Unlocktalent.gov site that lets agencies slice data geographically, by office and job description – some are ideological.

The General Services Administration’s Shared Solutions Performance Improvement (SSPI) Office witnessed the organic creation of the Feds-to-Feds solutions team – ultimately intended to give employees and managers a similar stake in change management.

In all cases, these agencies, highlighted in this eBook, strive to create the workplace environment at the nexus of engagement, mission and efficiency.

Lisa Wolfe Editor-in-Chief FederalNewsRadio.com

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: COURAGEOUS HR2

The Commerce Department laid out a roadmap to guide managers and employees.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development developed a scorecard and used videos to train and emphasize it.

The Social Security Administration and the State Department discussed their individual agency journeys in a series of online discussions.

All four of these departments and many others found different approaches to achieve the same goal: improve employee engagement.

The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) found for a sixth straight year in 2017 that employees are more engaged and overall satisfied with their work experience. Overall, employee engagement topped 67 percent in 2017, a 2 percent bump over last year’s score of 65. The Obama administration had wanted to reach an engagement goal of 67 percent by 2016, yet agencies finally reached that mark one year later.

Julie Brill, the acting deputy associate director for the Senior Executive Service and Performance Management at the Office of Personnel Management, said these agency examples are but a few of the innovations that have emerged over the last decade.

“Organizations have been emphasizing employee engagement, but if you are a manager, a leader or a supervisor and you want to improve employee engagement, what does that mean? OPM started by making it clear with a definition of employee engagement,” Brill said on the Courageous HR show. “From there, we did some analysis of the FEVS results and those indicated its performance feedback, leadership, training, work-life balance; it’s not rocket science. But it helped those organizations

who were developing action plans to hone in on the areas they could move that needle on.”

During the course of the rise of employee engagement, OPM also developed a series of tools, including the Unlocktalent.gov portal in 2014, with an interactive dashboard.

Brill said the nearly four-year-old tool has been instrumental in helping agencies

find best practices and move the needle further to the right on employee engagement and other related areas such as morale and job satisfaction.

“The Unlocktalent.gov site has a community of practice, which has been

very active. Agencies have provided various examples of things that they have done that

have helped them make great strides in turning their FEVS results into effective action and then ultimately increasing employee engagement and organizational performance,” she said. “We’ve highlighted SSA and State through webinars that we’ve recorded and put on the community of practice site where they have talked about their journey. The State Department took that strategic approach, did a thorough analysis to get to the why behind their data and to develop action plans. They kept to the course of their action plan and checked in each year. They kept with that original action plan and used the data as an evaluation point to make sure they were doing the right thing or tweak it if necessary.”

But maybe the biggest thing OPM has done through Unlocktalent.gov, and FEVS more broadly, is to slice and dice the data in ways that make it more valuable and let agencies address root causes of problems geographically, by office and by job description. OPM also developed a data exploratory tool to help agencies dig deeper into the FEVS results.

Slicing, Dicing Data Gives Agencies a Roadmap to Better Employee Engagement

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: COURAGEOUS HR 3

“Technology is going to allow agencies to pull information from different systems and then make those connections,” Brill said. “You’d like to be able to connect them to your strategic goals and the metrics you are using to track that as well as critical human resources directly. What are the levers? You can do those kinds of big data analysis in terms of connecting all of those pieces.”

And with all of this data, agencies then are innovating in how they use it.

The National Institutes of Health, for example, developed a tool to help agency managers sift through piles of annual FEVS more quickly. The tool, which NIH analysts are handing out to other agencies for no charge, gives managers a better picture of employee engagement over the past year, and it can kick start an organization’s conversations about the results and ways to improve them sooner in the coming year.

Brill said her office is using the FEVS information to look at the SES more closely.

“A lot of the policy offices are looking at the cuts of the data that apply to their areas. We slice out how the SES are responding, what are they saying, and different policy offices will do that as well,” she said. “The data is really powerful, especially as we are moving toward emphasizing making data-driven decisions, this is really extremely valuable. The team has worked hard to make sure they can get the data to the agencies as fast as possible.”

To keep the momentum going around employee engagement, Brill said there is more agencies can do, especially through growth of advanced technology capabilities.

She said a small number of agencies are using technology to support and improve the drivers of engagement such as performance feedback through things like more regular online surveys to gauge progress.

“The key to innovation is it starts at the top. Improving employee engagement requires the commitment of senior leaders and managers. If you are going to be innovative you have to have a senior

leader that is going to support risks, innovation and collaboration, to examine challenges, barriers and promising practices related to employee engagement,” Brill said. “It’s not a one-size fits all, but it really does start at the top. OPM also encourages agencies to be creative and step outside of the processes and systems that we’ve always used, but might not have had optimal results in the past.”

The challenge going forward is to keep the employee engagement scores moving in the right direction. The change of administration, new leadership with new priorities and budget uncertainty all become potential downward pressures on how employees feel about their jobs.

Brill said OPM recognizes all of the challenges employees face every day could impact employee satisfaction.

“One way to keep that moving forward is to make sure we are supporting our supervisors to make sure they are building those soft skills to lead organizations, to be able to understand an individual employee’s situation and apply work-life flexibilities appropriately, that they should be informed and support employee’s career development and have those ongoing conversations and provide that feedback,” she said. “We will continue to encourage agencies to focus on engagement improvement goals and we will provide support as agencies move forward.”

“If you are going to be innovative you have to have a senior leader that is going to support risks, innovation and collaboration… OPM encourages agencies to be creative and step outside of the processes and systems that we’ve always used, but might not have had optimal results in the past.” — JULIE BRILL, ACTING DEPUTY ASSOCIATE

DIRECTOR, SENIOR EXECUTIVE SERVICE AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT, OPM

4

Why the Workforce Must Drive the Success of Shared Services

For the second year in a row, the Unified Shared Services Management

Office in the General Services Administration came out a winner in the Congressional budget process.

In the fiscal 2018 budget deal that Congress agreed upon March 21, the USSM once again is receiving funding from Congress to the tune of $2 million.

And the funding couldn’t come at a better time for USSM as the move to shared services is at the center of the Trump administration’s new President’s Management Agenda. And there are no signs that this focus will let up anytime soon as GSA mentions shared services 99 times in its fiscal 2019 budget justification to Congress.

Beth Angerman, the acting associate administrator of the Office of Government-wide Policy and the director of the Shared Solutions Performance Improvement (SSPI) Office at GSA, said the workforce will drive the success of shared services. GSA recently renamed the USSM to the SSPI.

“One of the things that we are learning and seeing in government is engagement of stakeholders as part of the planning process for large transformational work, whether IT modernization, business process or to shared

services,” Angerman said on the Courageous HR show. “The biggest lessons we’ve had from both our successes and challenges over the years are we need better engagement of people earlier in the process.”

The challenge for many federal programs is defining the stakeholders. Many times it’s all or some of the citizens and businesses as well as other federal, state and local governments.

“It’s an important exercise at the very early stage to map who your stakeholders are. You need to map them from who has the direct touch or closest impact to the change you are trying to implement all the way to ‘why are we doing this?’ The why are we doing this should always land in a story to the taxpayer. Even if you are talking about mission support, we should be making mission support functions more efficient and effective and bring IT to do that,” she said. “Part of the challenge that we’ve had in government is being able to make that tie early to explain what problem we are trying to solve as early as possible and helping employees understand what that problem is and how they can be a real player in making effective change.”

“...we need to think about better contracts, smarter contracts that really articulate the need the government has and the dependency on industry for the innovation piece, the compliance piece and the expectation they will bring the robots and all the cool stuff ...”— BETH ANGERMAN, ACTING ASSOCIATE ADMINISTRATOR OF OFFICE OF

GOVERNMENT-WIDE POLICY/DIRECTOR OF SSPI OFFICE, GSA

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: COURAGEOUS HR

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: COURAGEOUS HR 5

Angerman said agencies can’t do shared services or IT modernization or really any mission or operational efforts without buy-in from the people doing the work.

“It’s the ‘so-what’ that matters, the ‘why’ and tying that to the mission of the agency, tying that to the work of the people and helping them see themselves in a future where the thing they have done for the last 30 years may actually be something new and contribute to higher value work. That is a leadership problem and leadership challenge to help the workforce see that,” she said. “When we talk about human resources and the nexus to HR, there is a role for the HR community in these agencies to help these business leaders really understand how to engage their staffs, how to help their staffs see opportunities for the future, how to right-size their workforce, all of these things are really key to the role of the chief human capital officers in our agencies.”

One way the SSPI is ensuring people are at the front edge of the implementation of shared services is through a new initiative called the Feds-to-Feds solutions team.

Angerman said the team’s goal is to bring lessons-learned based on what has worked or what hasn’t at other agencies.

She said the Feds-to-Feds team helps agencies in person or virtually.

“We put as many of the tools as we can online. It’s really nice because we’ve also brought in all the tools the Performance Improvement Council staff has worked on with the PIC,” Angerman said. “We have guidance and tools to help agencies think through the metrics and figure out how they can identify the problem they are trying to solve before they start moving through the transformation.”

Angerman said the Feds-to-Feds team developed organically as agencies began calling the SSPI for help in developing their path to move to shared services.

“The role of our office is to give agencies tools, templates and processes to help them think through what all of those aspects of change management are,” Angerman said. “The M3 playbook that we

rolled out, we have over 19 agencies working with my office now on the earliest phases of the playbook. What do I want? How will I approach change management? How will I define success for this thing I’m doing? It’s really understanding what the process needs to be.”

Angerman said even with all this talk about people, technology will play a key role in helping with the transformation. She said the SSPI is in the market research phase to discover applications that can give agencies new processes and innovation, and move them off low-value work.

“When we talk about the benefits of shared services, you can get standardization and that will drive scale and efficiency,” she said. “You have to do standards first and agree on what you want. We have to agree on what we want in terms of outcomes and not the way we’ve always done it.”

Angerman said the standards for financial management, led by the Treasury Department, are making progress, including the recent release of the draft of the data definitions on GitHub.

The Office of Personnel Management completed the standards for payroll and work schedule leave management, and continue to work on standards for the other components of HR.

While people and technology are important to transform agencies, industry’s role is expanding too.

Angerman said the use of software-as-a-service is creating a different type of partnership with vendors.

“Their role is to tell us what they got, what they are investing in, what they are building, what they are seeing as best practices to inform how we will go,” she said. “I think we have successfully engaged them to think about the path forward and help us inform what will come next. I think we need to think about better contracts, smarter contracts that really articulate the need the government has and the dependency on industry for the innovation piece, the compliance piece and the expectation they will bring the robots and all the cool stuff that everyone talks about so our communities can focus directly on HR management, financial management, the work and the acquisition piece.”

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: COURAGEOUS HR6

The Tools HR Needs to Be CourageousBy Steve Dobberowsky, Senior Principal, Thought Leadership and Advisory Services at Cornerstone OnDemand

With technology and automation now a major part of individuals’ daily routines and data changing how decisions are made, the skills needed for in-demand roles are shifting. According to Deloitte’s latest human capital research, 47 percent of HR and business leaders consider developing new career trajectories and skills to be very important. The caveat? More than 54 percent say they don’t yet have programs in place to build the skills of the future.

In order to be competitive in today’s world of work, organizations need to adjust how they approach talent management. Rather than relying on tried-and-true job descriptions, HR managers must expand their search to candidates from non-traditional backgrounds with the openness needed to grasp new skills. To assure organizations are able to continue to succeed, HR organizations must drive how we develop and deploy our workforce. This isn’t easy and it’s going to rely on HR’s ability to face the changes needed and drive them to implementation and adoption—because this is different.

In the late 90’s with the advent of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), we were all about “automation.” That carries through to today where organizations are so focused on transactions. For years, HR leaders have put too much emphasis on the transactions that facilitate compliance and account for costs. But a transaction data-focused model creates silos—workflows become entirely compliance-focused and efficient rather than effective. Plus, this focus causes organizations to overlook the bigger opportunity: employee relationship-building.

In our economy, where skills drive results, we must shift our approach to more personalized expectations. Rather than basing hiring or career-growth decisions solely on organization data, HR leaders must start using a different decision-making context, one that is based on candidates’ and employees’ skills. Relationship-centric solutions that are powered by real-time people analytics data—interview debrief data, performance review results and employee survey information—can help HR leaders make the transition.

By focusing on people analytics, HR can start delivering the personalized experience that employees need. For years, we’ve put

I N S I G H T B Y

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: COURAGEOUS HR 7

far too much emphasis on the transactions that help us “perform compliance” and “account for the costs”. But in the new connected skills economy, the personalized expectations change our approach. A people-focused model creates the relationship between teams and leadership that, in turn, creates the employee stickiness required in this new economy.

Build a Culture of Employee Engagement It is now more critical than ever for government agencies to find ways to re-skill or retrain their current employees and upskill other employees not only to close skills gaps, but to keep employees engaged. Through Unlocktalent.gov, OPM is taking positive steps to encourage agencies to start thinking about how to adapt in this new digital age and to focus on the skills that are needed for the future.

Employee engagement and well-being are becoming the focus of the people function. Today’s employees have new expectations of work, continuous learning, career development, real-time performance feedback, and intelligent talent decisions. But how do you keep employees engaged?

■ There are five elements that drive engagement: meaningful work, hands-on management, positive work environment, growth opportunity and a focus on simplicity.

■ Skills are the new currency in today’s economy. Organizations that build and embrace a learning culture increase productivity by 50 percent. Learning today must be easy to access, bite-sized, and real-time. Give employees the continuous learning they desire by creating a holistic learning experience with modern tools that can deliver customized, just-in-time learning.

■ 78 percent of employees say a clear career path would compel them to stay with an organization longer. The Commerce Department laid out a roadmap to guide managers and employees to achieve career development results.

Governments are implementing some of the following strategies to boost engagement and morale (source: HCMG State of Human Capital Management in Government).

■ 81 percent - employee recognition programs

■ 39 percent - one-on-one coaching

■ 71 percent - work from home options

As we move towards a workforce in which adaptability is an asset, HR leaders must work to build strong cultures of learning that empower employees to cultivate the skills needed for the future. By re-inventing learning strategies like NASA and FAA have done, organizations can empower employees to take control over their learning and career development. It takes courage to reconsider once dependable processes and upend traditional learning approaches, but change is necessary in order to grow and thrive.

I N S I G H T B Y

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: COURAGEOUS HR6

NASA’s Gibbs: Employee Engagement Needs Honest Conversations

When NASA Chief Human Capital Officer Bob Gibbs talks about why employee engagement has improved each of the past six years, he

offers the typical platitudes.

Gibbs, who also is the assistant administrator for human capital, brings up senior leadership commitment. He brings up training. He says the space agency has a committed and passionate workforce.

Basically, Gibbs is offering the same reasons that nearly every other agency senior leader would point to as to why any program or project is successful.

But it’s when Gibbs talks about the culture of NASA — the idea that employees are encouraged to speak their minds because the mission of flight and space travel demand it — that may be the reason why NASA employee engagement scores on the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) and their ranking on the Best Places to Work list from the Partnership for Public Service remain the government’s pace setter.

“One of the things that is unique about NASA is that willingness for supervisors to be open, transparent and willing to work with employees,” Gibbs said on the Courageous HR program. “Employees don’t hesitate to express their points of view pretty much to anyone in leadership or anyone across the agency. That is the culture. What is remarkable is there is an honest conversation about what is going on within the agency and our mission. You may not always like the answers, but that honest conversation helps us reinforce our commitment to engagement.”

NASA scored an 80.9 in the 2017 Best Places to Work rankings, up from 78.6 in 2016, to earn the top spot among large agencies. Under FEVS, NASA also earned the highest score among large agencies of 82 percent, well above the average score of 69 percent for others in their size class.

Gibbs, who came to NASA in May 2017 after spending the previous four years as the Energy Department’s CHCO, said employee engagement starts with a plan, but really needs to happen organically across the agency.

He said FEVS is a helpful starting point to understand the broad pain points or successes across an agency, but only through small group discussions can an organization create a set of actions to improve engagement.

“We have a pretty strong focus on leadership development, employee development and communications across the board,” Gibbs said. “I also would argue that communications start with listening. What we are hearing from employees, not just through FEVs but writ large across the agency, helps us understand our challenges.”

Gibbs said these small group discussions happen frequently but tend to be more ad hoc than planned by management. He said sometimes they address human resources challenges, but other times they are focused on technical problems or just a way to encourage collaboration.

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: COURAGEOUS HR 7

NASA also has invested in the technology to promote engagement.

Gibbs said the agency hosts virtual executive summits where leaders have the opportunity to discuss challenges or goals.

He said NASA also just moved its learning management system to the cloud, which makes it easier to take courses from anywhere and provides cost savings. Additionally, the agency uses video teleconferencing to give and receive input as a way to ensure employees continually are engaged.

“We invest a lot in other tools. We have organization development folks who work to support leadership and solve problems at their lowest level, and make sure we are talking about the same sorts of things by having that constructive discussion,” Gibbs said. “One of the principles Robert Lightfoot, our acting administrator, pushes is assume positive intent. It sounds soft or squishy, but there is so much power in having that conversation and believing the other person you are talking to is having an honest conversation for the right reasons. If you put your mindset around that, it’s very helpful.”

Gibbs said NASA’s plans to continue to transform and improve the human resources processes tie back to the focus on increasing engagement.

“We have an established shared service center and we are looking to expand the things we do at the shared

service center to be more efficient in the transactional end of our business so we can invest in the strategic partnering with the missions and centers to help make them successful,” he said. “For the transactional things, we will look to consolidate at one place in our shared service center. For the things that have to be done onsite, supporting the missions of the specific centers and headquarters, they are really different. I don’t see where we would be able to collapse everything into one place because of the diversity of mission.”

Gibbs said while NASA’s success is steeped in its culture of transparency and innovation, there are lessons other agencies can take from their experience.

“From a human resources perspective, the first thing you really have to know is your business inside and out, top to bottom. Know your costs. Know what your drivers are and know what your key performance indicators are all the way through business. Often when I have discussions with agencies as they are going forward through some measure of transformation, this is a step they have to take back and make sure they really understand where they are headed and why,” he said. “From an engagement perspective, it has to grow organically from your mission within your agency. There is no magic potion I can give you that worked at NASA and will work at your agency. The last thing I would say, it’s work. There is no way around this. It requires a lot of work and complete commitment from everyone at the agency to make this really successful.”

“Employees don’t hesitate to express their points of view pretty much to anyone in leadership or anyone across the agency... You may not always like the answers, but that honest conversation helps us reinforce our commitment to engagement.”— BOB GIBBS, CHCO, NASA

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: COURAGEOUS HR8

For executives at the Federal Aviation Administration, employee engagement is all about the money.

FAA senior leaders’ performance plans and bonuses are tied, in part, to how they approach and improve their employees’ morale, mission results and their overall leadership.

“Each executive is assigned four-to-seven goals that are in the business plan. They have to meet those goals to receive an incentive at the end of each year. Every executive in the FAA is required to have as part of their business plan goals for employee engagement. So every executive in the agency is committed to maintaining or improving employee engagement and if they don’t, they have a financial impact at the end of the year,” said Gwen Defilippi, the deputy assistant administrator for human resource management at the FAA, on the Courageous HR program. “That causes everyone to get motivated around it.”

Defilippi said by tying financial rewards to employee engagement and the oversight by the FAA business council, the administration’s scores have increased over the last four years. In 2017,

the FAA’s employee engagement score on the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) rose to 68 percent from 62 percent in 2014.

The Office of Personnel Management reported in October that overall employee engagement topped 67 percent in 2017, a 2 percent bump over last year’s score of 65.

The FAA is a bit different than most agencies. Its employees come under

Title 49 of the U.S. Code and are able to design their own compensation structure, while most federal employees fall under Title 5.

But Defilippi said based on her experience at other agencies, she

believes Title 5 employees also could have their performance goals tied to their

incentives.

“I had struggled hard in other agencies to try to figure out how to bring the organizational achievement with the individual accomplishment. As I looked at the way the FAA did it, I thought this could really have a lot of application in the Title 5 world as well. The Title 5 world for executives is rewarding their leaders based on the leadership competencies—the Executive Core Qualifications

FAA Ties Supervisor Bonuses to Employee Engagement Improvements

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: COURAGEOUS HR 9

(ECQs) that OPM designed, published and have been in place for many years,” she said. “One of those is results driven, and what the FAA has done really effectively is put structure around that results-driven objective – every year they design goals to drive the agency forward.”

One of the big differences for Defilippi in the Title 49 world, as compared to the Title 5 world, is how the objectives are focused. She said in other agencies, most of the time performance objectives are focused on the individual person and what they will accomplish. But the FAA is requiring at least 40 percent of a manager’s plan to relate to cross-agency goals.

“That really drives teamwork toward the mission goals of the agency, which I think is kind of neat as well,” she said. “The fact we do have alignment helps us with our employee engagement because when people have clarity of mission, it’s easier to see how you fit into the organization, that what you do matters and how people are being held accountable so that’s certainly one of the areas we focus on with employee engagement conversations.”

At the same time, Defilippi said the FAA requires each component to have a specific plan to improve employee engagement.

“The plans they make to improve engagement are often posted in shared areas so that every employee in the organization has the ability to go in and see what the strategies are and monitor the progress on those,” she said. “It really is fairly transparent in the FAA what the objectives are, how an organization is trying to accomplish them and whether they are meeting their goals or having to revise their plans because reality hit.”

Part of the way Defilippi’s office helps components with their strategies is by bringing in successful executives and national labor partners to share best practices during an agency-wide training conference. At the conference, the managers

break up into smaller groups to design action plans they can take back to their offices.

“The reality is employee engagement is a local thing. It’s the boss and the subordinate. It’s not really something you can mandate across the board. In the end, engagement happens where the subordinate and the supervisor sit down in the specific location, it’s the relationship they are building, it’s about how they are being recognized and rewarded, and what kind of communication they have,” she said. “Each line of business or staff office has an employee engagement champion, who is helping the executive team in that organization and making sure employee engagement stays front and center. They are helping to design the engagement, keeping us on track to execute the plan, communicating with employees and things like that.”

While a lot of the employee engagement effort is focused on the supervisors and managers, Defilippi said the employees’ input on how to improve engagement also is playing a big role.

FAA uses IdeaHub to request ideas to help improve the operations of the agency or improve engagement. More recently, the administration took those suggestions and created a “Shark Tank” competition where employees presented their ideas to the leadership team, who then voted to implement the best ones.

“We’ve been hosting a working group with representatives from across the agency about what we could do differently to reward and recognize our employees. Part of this is to get some standardization across the agency so one organization is not offering something that another is ignoring,” Defilippi said. “At the end of that, all of those ideas were brought to the leadership team in a ‘Shark Tank’-like way and I think that kind of methodology makes it a little more fun to bring forward the proposals for the people who are receiving it as well as for the people who are putting forward their ideas.”

FAA Ties Supervisor Bonuses to Employee Engagement Improvements

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: COURAGEOUS HR10

EXPERT EDITIONCOURAGEOUS HR