Are You Future Ready? AdVAncing Your Professional Development

On this episode, Amy Parker, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Chief Learning Officer, is joined by Dr. Maureen Marks, the Executive Director for VA’s National Center for Organization Development (NCOD) and Billy McCloskey, a Senior Organizational Psychologist at NCOD. If you are listening from a VA Medical Center or Regional Office, you may know NCOD for the All Employee Survey (AES), but they also facilitate research, consulting, and organizational health initiatives aimed at increasing employee engagement and supporting VA leaders in building a positive organizational culture.

During this episode, Dr. Marks and Mr. McCloskey discuss the importance of bringing your whole self to work and the need to support your staff and peers at every level to improve employee morale and ultimately, improve service for our nation’s Veterans. Listeners will learn about the five key drivers of employee engagement, be inspired by success stories from the field, and uncover unexpected impacts of remote work on employee productivity and morale.

Show Notes

Tune in to hear about ways you can build a more positive workplace culture and become more engaged at work. Dr. Marks and Mr. McCloskey highlight actionable tactics you can use to begin building a better, more inclusive workplace. All listeners can learn more about NCOD’s research on and tools for employee engagement and organizational health at their website. VA employees can access their workgroup’s AES dashboard and Your Leadership Canvas  to begin conversations about making small steps with big impacts on your engagement at work. The Leadership Development Framework – a roadmap for your professional development journey – is also available to all VA public servants.

What is Are You Future Ready? AdVAncing Your Professional Development?

The Department of Veterans Affairs Human Capital Services Center proudly presents Are You Future Ready: AdVAncing Your Professional Development, a podcast about the skills you need to thrive at work and in life.

In each episode Amy Parker, VA’s Chief Learning Officer, and learning leaders from across VA will share strategies you can use to develop essential skills like emotional intelligence, problem solving, and critical thinking. Listen in as podcast guests share insights gained from leading their organizations through one of the most challenging eras in modern memory. While we cannot predict what the future holds, we can all become more future-ready by developing durable skills that empower us to confront complex problems with confidence.

Amy Parker
This is our you future ready advancing your professional development a podcast series for anyone who wants to grow and excel in their career or in life. I'm your host, Amy Parker, the Department of Veterans Affairs chief learning officer. This week, we are joined by Dr. Maureen marks the executive director for the National Center for organizational development, or NCO D. If you're listening from one of our VA medical centers or offices, you may know NCO D, for the all employee survey, but they do so much more. as Executive Director, Dr. Marks oversees research, consulting, operations, and organizational health initiatives aimed at increasing employee engagement and supporting VA leaders in building a positive organizational culture. We're so excited to have you with us today. Hi, Amy, it's great to be here with you. You're such an asset to the VA team to in so many different spaces, and NCR DS work touches all VA employees. So can you tell us a little bit about your mission in your role as director.

Maureen Marks
And our role is really about helping to support leaders in their role of creating highly engaged environments for their employees, you know, to make sure that work environments are set up to help employees be their best to bring everything they can to their work in and know that they've got a leader and an environment that's going to support them in doing that. And so I like to think of our work as a soft place for leaders to land when they're struggling and a launching pad for them to soar from when they're ready. Leaders reach out to us when they are having some challenges, but also, when they are just wanting to make things go from good to great, where they just want to be able to have opportunities to enhance what they're doing. Because we're never done, you know, employee engagement is, is something we're constantly striving for to improve. We're never going to be done. We'll never have it perfectly right. So there's all kinds of opportunities to improve and our role is NCO D is to support leaders in being able to create that.

Amy Parker
So the organizational support Ghostbusters. Yes, right. Right. Yeah, that's it. You just call us and we're

Unknown Speaker
gonna call

Unknown Speaker
and call and Cod. So I feel really lucky. It's I feel like I've got the best job in in VA is director of ncid.

Amy Parker
Yeah, absolutely. And we're joined today to by some another NCO D or another Ghostbuster. Maybe? Yes, he's one of our lead. Lungren lead Ghostbusters. Wonderful. Billy McCloskey is with us. He's a senior organizational development psychologist with NC od. And after beginning his VA career as a psychology intern, working with veterans at the Detroit VA Medical Center, Billy wanted to pursue avenues where he could use his psychology training to promote employee engagement, and organizational change, and seize the opportunity to take a postdoctoral fellowship with mcrd in Cincinnati, Ohio. And so Billy, thanks for joining us. what sparked your interest in organizational health?

Unknown Speaker
So it's a great question. During my clinical training, I love seeing patients working with PTSD, substance use disorders, General mental health, and I found myself feeling like I wanted to make more of an impact than than one to one services would really allow so I found myself gravitating toward group therapy and then into Program Evaluation Program Development and I I started become passionate about taking initiatives more at the at the global level more at the organization level to to improve the the working conditions of people so that they can provide more services to veterans site. For me, I felt that seeing traditional of seeing patients in a traditional way would be adding value. I feel like my role at NC od I'm able to multiply value because I can improve the lives and work conditions of number of providers so they can then provide the best services for veterans.

Amy Parker
That sounds like your why. That is my why I wanted to check in with Maureen. We know I know you said you've got the best job. I do try Maureen.

Unknown Speaker
Similar to Billy. I've been in VA for about 25 over 25 years now. And so most of my career has been with VA. I started as a psychology intern and and the first half of my career was at the Cincinnati VA Medical Center. I understood what it what it was like to not really understand why things had to be the way they were to me the Cincinnati VA was the whole VA and when I came to NC od in around 2010 I all of a sudden I started understanding oh my gosh, there were reasons why things felt the way they did it. facility, having both of those perspectives, has really helped me to understand that some of the pain points and try and figure out how can we from central office, do some things either make things more transparent, make them more understandable to meet the needs of frontline employees better. And one of the things that I know I experienced was that leaders, leaders were often really well intentioned, but they didn't always have the support that they needed to really be able to make some of the changes or to work with their employees the way that they wanted. And so for me, the opportunity to come to NC od was really about how I wanted to help them be able to make the workplace better for employees, which again, like Billy said, makes it better for our veterans. And so after 14 years of delivering direct care to pet to veterans, I decided, you know, what the system could use some support, and I think I can be helpful there. And it's just been, it's been a wonderful experience,

Amy Parker
and employee engagement I take it is very near and dear to your heart.

Unknown Speaker
Yes, it really is. And that's, you know, really what ncld, over time has really scoped its work. You know, to be more about that, because organizational health is a very broad topic, you could do all kinds of things under that umbrella. And we over time, really honed in on that employee engagement was the thing that we really wanted to focus on.

Amy Parker
What does an engaged employee look like? How will we know when we see one?

Unknown Speaker
Oh, my gosh, well, you know what, I bet as soon as you asked, asked that question, that everybody listening had somebody pop in their head, like they, they had a face that popped in their head and said, Oh, that's that's what that looks like, employee engagement really comes down to two big things. How much somebody feels like the organization cares about them as a person, and how meaningful is their work to the mission of the organization, we now want to know we care we're cared about and that what we do matters. And so the people who are really fully engaged are the ones who are, are just putting their whole selves into their work, that it's that gets them excited. They're they're willing to put in more than what they're asked for. They, it energizes them, and you can see it there. They're the ones raising their hands, to volunteer to do things and take things on, they've got ideas, they're innovative, they partner with others, you know, they're they're all about what can I do to help move this organization forward, and really bring my skills and talents to bear so that that's me kind of captures? I don't know, you know, Billy, if you've got other things that you would say, Oh, yeah,

Unknown Speaker
please. Engagement, for me is also not something that's static, it can change throughout our career, it can even change throughout our day to day work. I can, I can even think about myself. There are some times when I'm fully engaged, I'm the person that Maureen was talking about raising my hand, trying to get extra effort. And then honestly, there are days or even meetings or periods of time when maybe I'm not as engaged as I want to be for a variety of reasons. And I think our goal at NC od is not to make everyone 100% engaged all the time. That's not necessarily realistic. But it's to help people feel more engaged more of the time,

Unknown Speaker
right. And we we actually know that there are five main drivers of employee engagement. One is about effective leader behaviors. And in VA, we think about that as servant leadership employee, the use of employee workforce survey data. So you know, that's why we focus so much on data use in the old play survey and making sure that people are using the data and doing action planning, employee driven improvement processes, so that employees aren't having improvement done to them, but they're a part of the process, and even leading some of the projects, employee development opportunities, that's the fourth one. And then the fifth one is really that connection to the mission, you know, that it's that that you feel really committed to the work of VA. So those are the we know that those are the things that drive engagement.

Amy Parker
And there's so much that a supervisor and leader can take away from this you've got the the two signals and the five components and near and dear to my heart, of course, employee development. But Billy, you have a showcase for us, I think on how there was a great success story and improving ABS scores, the challenges

Unknown Speaker
that they were experiencing low employee engagement, low satisfaction scores, people may be familiar with that Best Places to Work metric. Those were a bit challenging. They've been challenging at that facility for for a few years. Leadership turnover and a variety of other reasons had contributed to some of that. And one of the big things that they were able to do with some of our help, but this is the most engaged leadership team that I've worked with and they're so committed to using the eight yes scheduled supervisor and manager briefings for the eight Yes. So we walked through with their levels of leadership just like we did with senior leadership, and got so much feedback from managers and supervisors saying this is so helpful, I now have an idea of where to start. And and that's more instead of being a soft place to land for leaders, we don't want people to go this alone. This is what we do every day. But many leaders do not do this every day. They're tasked with important things like running medical centers, running veterans benefits, regional offices. And this can sometimes feel like another thing to do. So part of our role was to help demystify some of the ies the all employee surveys. So we also met with the executive leadership team and did an entire consultation with them as a team to focus on them as individuals, helping them understand their own strengths and areas of development, their their development areas as a team as well, and how they can better impact the organization, the biggest outcome that we saw after the two years of working with them, they were one of the top 15, improved VHA facilities on terms of in terms of eight Yes, from 2019 to 2020, huge improvements and Best Places to Work, I want to say 10 to 15 point improvement on Best Place to Work where VA is really only seeing about four points or so improvement every year. So there are well outpacing those, those goals, improved employee engagement. And we also just got to talking with the leadership team, we're still engaged with them, talking with them on a regular basis, reporting higher levels of feeling like a team and working together as a team. And they are they're continuing to remain engaged. One of the most effective teams that I've worked with in my time at NC od.

Amy Parker
And Maureen, then what do you what would you say to the individual team members? How should they participate beyond just answering the all employee survey,

Unknown Speaker
what I would really say is that you're a frontline employee listening to this podcast, go to your debt, your workgroups dashboard. And in that dashboard, you'll not only be able to see the data, but you'll also have resources embedded in there that you can access as a frontline employee that help you to understand how you can be a productive partner, with your supervisor, so that when your supervisors sharing the data that you can join with that person in a conversation to be able to help identify what are some things that will help make me feel better in this work environment? What are the things that are important to me? And choose just one or two things? action plans don't have to be complicated? Just choose one or two things? Right? No, it's I think people sometimes make it so much more complicated. You don't have to have a big formal, complicated written plan, you just identify identify one or two things that you would be useful to work on. And and then you you know, find out who wants to partner together to work on those on behalf of the workgroup, hopefully, it's going to be, like I said, employees and managers. But when you do that, you hit on multiple engagement drivers, right, you're using workforce survey data, which is one of the five, hopefully, you have employees that are involved in the improvement process, maybe even leading some of it. That's another one, you are demonstrating effective leader behaviors, that servant leadership approach where you're collaborating and, you know, partnering with your staff, that's a third driver. And if you've got staff who are doing this as that kind of like a stretch for them that they've never been in charge of a project before that would be hitting on employee development. Yeah, exactly. So So I think, you know, just this process alone. it when it's it's collaborative, in that way, hits on multiple engagement drivers. And in fact, one of the things that we see from year to year is that when a workgroup when they're as data use score goes up, which means that the staff are saying, Yes, I know my data got used. When that goes up, the very next year, you see an elevation in scores across the board on the A s, that's what's typical. And it's because that process hits on so many engagement drivers that it tends to make a lot of other things better, in that through that process kind of in more indirectly or is that is an outcome of doing that process. So

Amy Parker
here you go, listeners, any mystery that may have been behind the all employee survey has now been unlocked. And the thing I love about you don't have to do everything. You could just do two things. I can always remember to pick up bread and eggs from the supermarket if I only have two things over the year to to, to get going on the eight Yes, I'm sure I can keep that in my mind. And remember, that's what I'm working on. Right.

Unknown Speaker
We want to demystify about the AAAS is that it's not meant to be a report card. It's people sometimes treat it like it's a report card. It's not it's an improvement tool. It's intended to provide data To inform conversations so that you can work on these things that are important to you to all of us in terms of get making the workplace better, I can't tell that you're passionate about

Amy Parker
this at all. I know.

Unknown Speaker
I love working for NCO D, because we get to work with executives, leaders at all levels that really do care about employee engagement. And, and what we see out in the field is that it's not just lip service, it's not just checking boxes for so many of these executives. It's it's people really wanting to do right by their team wanting to do right by the organization and wanting this to truly be, you know, that metrics as Best Place to Work wanting this to be a best place for people to want to come to work, not because they have to, but because they really want to,

Amy Parker
yes, it's great to see that feedback. And it's not for the scores sake, which I love what you both just said about that we're not just trying to hit a number, right, right. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker
I'm a recovering teacher, I was a teacher before I went to graduate school. And, you know, the teaching to a test aspect has always rubbed me the wrong way. The analogy for the ABS is, when we focus on changing a number from you know, a 3.5 to 3.7, we can do that. But it really doesn't change what matters, which is people's experience. If we change people's experience, that's where you're actually going to see the numbers follow. And I couldn't agree with more and more, one to two meaningful action steps. And I always say highlight bold, italicize that word meaningful, one to two meaningful actions are going to get you a whole lot farther than a 37 point action plan that gets put into a drawer. But focusing on what's meaningful for staff will help will help immensely will help people feel more ownership and will help leaders actually feel like their efforts are yielding fruit.

Amy Parker
Is there anything else more than you think those organizations you've seen really improve have in common?

Unknown Speaker
I'm constantly thinking about in what ways am I walking out servant leadership, so employee leaders across the system who really embrace that philosophy, you know, so that they are both motivating, inspiring partnering, we both want to see our culture, our supervisory culture to shift to more of a coaching culture where supervisors really think of themselves as coaches for their employees, to help them improve to help them aspire to, you know, something, if they want something more than where they are to develop and grow. And that that, that that's a big part of how I see my job, my job is to, you know, and that may mean that sometimes my staff leave to go somewhere else, but then I want them to stay in VA so that they can, you know, they can contribute to the whole organization. So do you

Amy Parker
have a call to action? Maureen, for folks? Is there something you really want to tell us about

Unknown Speaker
whether you are a supervisor, or an employee, I would really ask you if you have not done so, go to your workgroups dashboard, go to your workers as dashboard. If you don't know how to find it, you can email ncld, we will help you find it. But it go to your go to your dashboard and look at your data. Look at the resources that are in there to help you know how to partner with each other. And if you are at a computer regularly, ask your supervisor to print out the snapshot. There's a snapshot, a one pager that summarizes your workgroups data, ask your supervisor to print that out so you can look at it and you can get a sense of where things are for your workgroup. And then you know, encourage your supervisor to have a conversation with the group about what it says what it means you know what you like what you might want to work on. It also in the dashboard, we've got the link to your leadership canvas. So if you're a supervisor listening, you can go in the dashboard. And you can either find a resource in there that links you to this web page, your leadership canvas that will allow you to access all kinds of resources, including our new podcast that just dropped recently called the audacity to fail.

Amy Parker
Wonderful, we'll post links to to accompany this podcast, we'll make that easy. And I just feel like I have like a wealth of organizational developments, support and all employee survey information. Thank you guys.

Unknown Speaker
Good. Well, I'm really glad I you know, I think, you know, for me, it's really it's really comes down to that partnership, you know that the more that that leaders and frontline employees partner together to make improvements, the more we're going to be successful and have the kind of environment that we want. And one that feels that that really is inclusive, where people can bring their whole selves to work and know that that's valued. The more that we have these conversations, the more that will be able to be to happen on a regular basis. And that's just good for all of us.

Amy Parker
Maureen, did you have a piece of advice They are a quote that you'd like to leave us with today,

Unknown Speaker
I think in terms of a quote that really resonates with me. And that also drives the way that I tried to operate is actually one from Maya Angelou. And it's when she said, at the end of the day, people won't remember what you said or what you did. they'll remember how you made them feel. People need to know that you care. And if they know that you care, that's, that's what I want people to walk away with. And it may be that I cared enough to give them tough feedback. You know, it may be that I cared enough to challenge them and to to encourage them to raise to raise the bar. But but there's all kinds of ways that we can demonstrate caring, but it has to come in that kind of package. I can

Amy Parker
talk to you guys all day. I love this stuff. Yeah. Thanks. It's been a lot of fun.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, it has been fun. I appreciate the like, again, I appreciate the the opportunity to have this conversation. Absolutely. It's been wonderful.

Amy Parker
All right. Thanks very much. Thanks for joining us on our you future ready advancing your professional development. To find the resources highlighted today. Check out the vantage point blog linked in this episode's show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share this episode with a colleague friend or on your LinkedIn network.