hello and welcome today to today's atarc webinar my name is jonathan albaum i'm the federal cto at servicenow and i have the pleasure of moderating today's panel the president's management agenda was really was released late last year it has already made a big impact on the fed on the federal community the pma focuses on three priorities the federal workforce improving customer service and the business of government today we're going to be focusing on that first priority strengthening and empowering the federal workforce but before we get started i want to say welcome to all of our attendees and i want to offer special thanks to kim eastridge from atarc and connie coleman and the entire team at servicenow for helping to organize today's session during our session today you're going to hear from some really great panelists we're going to offer a few poll questions and we're going to we will also have the opportunity for q a from our audience if you have questions that you want to ask the panelists please submit them in the q a section of this platform and also be sure to answer the poll questions if you want to receive cpe credit now as i mentioned we have great panelists today i want to go ahead and have our panelists introduce themselves so as i call your name please turn on your camera and tell us a little bit about your about your background and what you're working on today let's begin with robin reeds hi jonathan thanks so much for having me here today and thank you so much to all of you who are doing my name is robin reese i work at the department of the interior as a senior advisor for human capital transformation under our director for human capital and our chief our deputy chief human capital officer i came to the department my background is really more in information technology not in human capital and i think it's important to know a little bit about about the context of where i come from in order to understand why i'm so interested in the workforce and particularly in the work that i've been doing in ready in the workforce so up until about three years ago when i came to the department i was in the information technology field i started as a vendor supporting program control financial management strategic staffing for federal i.t contracts so i remember when i first came to the area and said oh what are you working in you're like i'm a defense contractor everybody knew what that meant you were doing information technology contracts for the government um and i i spent almost a decade doing that and then i transitioned into the federal government doing capital planning and investment control at the national science foundation where i then moved into managing central i.t governance and then acting as a senior advisor to the chief information officer and i wanted to give that context because um i'm really a business person you know i don't really identify as an i.t person i don't identify as a human capital person i really care about the business and making sure that we're moving the missions for the american people so when i came to doi within human capital i came with a specific focus of giving the workforce the tools they need in order to continue delivering on the mission and jonathan just what that means to me is that i want to unlock human capital data i want to combine it with business data strategic workforce planning data learning and development data so that we can really be ever ready that's how i call it and i've done that uh just as a way of background at the department community initiative we call my doi career which we built from scratch over the past three years it has a public pacing component on doi.gov slash careers to raise awareness of careers but it also has an internally facing component where we are prototyping intelligent technology-based tools that can be deployed for use by people that are trying really hard to deliver on missions but that are overburdened or who might be looking to more easily and organically evolve their careers um so in effect what i'm really focusing on right now is how do we provide centralized capabilities that can be deployed to the field to assist our employees with carrying out permissions so workforce is the the top priority to me when i'm talking about mission thank you for getting off to getting us off to a great start rob and there's a lot there and i want to get back to my doi career later in the in the conversation um next uh i'd like brigadier general sean campbell to introduce himself thanks jonathan and uh thank you for all those who are attending i see that several of my teammates are actually on probably here to give me some feedback afterward and one of my old mentors mr sitterly is on so dana i see you out there as well so no questions from you because he'll throw something hard at me so i am currently doing the director of manpower organization resources for the us air force and i just came to the job about six weeks ago so my perspective for this panel really comes from my previous job the one that i left after almost two years which was as the deputy chief human capital officer helping build the united states space force so this this topic is right in the wheelhouse of everything that we we've been doing in the space force to build if you will a startup military enterprise first time we've done it in the united states in 73 years so there's no playbook for us to to use which gave us an ability to think differently about the talent management life cycle and the ways that we can deliberately and deeply develop our guardians and then how we empower them to do their jobs and the reason that that is very very important to us and i think just as a little bit of context setting for why we needed to develop the space force as a standalone military service even though we've been in the space environment for decades and decades comes from a speech that's almost 65 years to the day today 19 february 1957 the general bernard trevor who we call the father of u.s air force missiles and space programs he delivered the speech about space and one of the things he says in there is in the long haul the safety of our nation may depend on our achieving space superiority remind you that was 65 years ago we hadn't even launched anything into space at that point in time and in that speech he continues on and says decades from now the most important battles may not be sea battles or air battles but space battles six months after he gave that speech the russians were then soviets launched sputnik and it touched off what we know as the space race so here we are 65 years later where we have near pure competitors on the global stage and we have to have a deliberate focus on space and as an environment is exceedingly difficult in which to operate so i'm hoping we'll have an opportunity to talk a little bit about how we're getting after doing that in this deliberate development of our guardians i think there's a lot there's a lot there to come back to also um sean especially how do you how do you hire and train for the skill set that you know is going to be critical to to the future of our country and our security so uh a lot a lot more to discuss i would like john jensen to introduce himself next well good afternoon everyone and thank you for the invitation to participate in this panel i'm really looking forward to also hearing from the panelists as well as any questions from those attending um this is personal to me this is this is who i am as a person i have been uh really since the day i first swore allegiance to the united states and joined the army in 1989 yeah i know i don't look that old but that's old i am um and spent 25 years in the army and i retired in 20 2014 uh as a first sergeant e8 who managed staff that's what my role was all along and i spent my last several years in congressional affairs and that led me to the va uh where i participated in that and it's really about strategic communication speaking with everyone and everyone's voices being heard and projected across the government and obviously to the hill and that led me to the role here is the vha chief of staff where we have about 371 000 employees spread across united states including uh other territories and we even have a very small clinic in the philippines uh so uh understanding and knowing how our employees uh and what their needs are every day is what i feel my role is uh and we're in to over the second year of a pandemic where uh our health care providers have been at the front lines of this for two years and having served in combat three different times i can't imagine doing two years of straight combat which they have done so ensuring that our employees have the tools and resources necessary to do the work that they need to do is a key component of what we do every single day and our focus is on um and you can imagine that in the second plus year of a pandemic it's not good enough just to pat people on the back and say thanks for what you're doing there has to be actually concrete examples to keep them on board and if you're all at all familiar with what's happening in healthcare today uh nurses can receive fifty thousand dollar sign on bonuses um to go to another health care system uh and so how do we ensure that we keep the talent that we have uh mission tends to hold our staff uh with us um because the mission is so great but that's not enough um and so we're looking for tons of new resources and opportunities to be able to focus on that one thing we're working on today is called the reboot effort it's reducing employee burnout and optimizing um transition for our staff and what that really gets to is to look at that we listen to them it's created a sharepoint website where they can offer comments thoughts suggestions we try to respond to many of them we have a group that's spread throughout the united states that's on that to answer it as you can imagine me trying to answer all that would be very difficult uh and then we listen to them we're actually just getting ready to send a message out that um talks to uh supervisors managers and leaders about how you talk to your employees about maybe looking at a new way of scheduling the work that they do um in a healthcare environment is a little different or could be a little bit different so that's some of the major initiatives that we're working on it's a it's uh a blessing to be able to be with an organization with so many caring people uh that's doing a mission that uh is so important for our country so thank you thanks john i think there's a lot to get back to there as well especially on retention and retention strategies that is a topic on the minds of a lot of people i want to conclude the introductions by asking mike serrano to introduce himself great thank you john and kimberly uh thanks again for for uh hosting and having all of the panelists come together and and having me it's uh as a participant very excited about the discussion a little bit of background here my current role as the director of the defense manpower data center we have a significant portfolio of direct services that we provide across all of dod and beyond we manage about 58 million identities that include all of those individuals affiliated with dod so there's the those in direct support of dod contractors government military about 8 million and then the rest are mostly veterans or other nation partners nato country affiliations dependents of military members so it's a very broad group that we support for managing many many services across the department billions of transactions every year for things such as patient identity services with the electronic health care record and and uh just transactions of all the the benefits of you know life insurance uh support for the payroll systems in terms of personnel actions and capturing much of the the data of a military service member's record which we share extensively with the va for support to our veterans and their families so we have a pretty broad mission with what i've been doing here for the last five years prior to that worked uh air force uh with with some colleagues who are also on the line here and uh uh spent a few years as working in the cio lane and in the financial management community and prior to that 20 years with the sba's disaster loan program which was a great mission set for uh launching me off into the the scs career very very excited about the discussion today uh really wanted to center in on the realities that we've all been experiencing and and what we're doing about it over the uh particularly through the pandemic period what technologies what retooling for individuals what does the workforce look like and what's it going to look like how do we include different sets of thought out there right the diversity and inclusion aspects and in how do we automate you know how do we get better at some of these problems such as uh time to hire and and again there's a pretty large transition happening we're very much my organization itself um about 350 government about 2000 contract support and a handful of military folks but we certainly you know in support of the entire department from an hrit service delivery focus have a great uh impact on what kind of services can get prioritized and delivered and how do we ensure that those services are the right things to make our uh not only our customers on the end point uh that are you know the beneficiaries or affiliations but the actual individuals who are also executing the dod mission the the military members and and the civilians that support that in the contract so we play a big role in that we play a big role in the uh icam focus in terms of uh managing identities and credential issuance but also how do we make those things much more efficient for what we see as the modernization opportunities of the future the requirements of of today and tomorrow and i look forward to the the further dialogue on how we are going about that and how everyone else is experiencing the uh the realities of life today i think you know there's a couple of themes that are really uh you know emerging from these introductions uh i i hear a lot about data i i've heard about uh some basic or challenging ongoing issues retention uh time to hire uh ultimately coming back to do we have the the tools in place to have the right workforce to meet the the missions which which vary but have some overlapping uh requirements i think that we heard you know maybe between the va and and the dod so there's there's a lot there's a lot here for us to continue to talk about i want to i want to uh push forward though and begin by asking our audience to answer a poll question so we get that first poll question up there the question here is what is the biggest workforce challenge facing your agency so please go ahead and answer the poll question remember you need to answer these poll questions if you do want to receive cpe credit for for this event so we'll get the answers uh here in a moment um but as we as we await for those uh robin i'd like to ask your uh ask you to take this first question about the pma itself and this fact that the very first priority of the pma is around uh strengthening and empowering the federal workforce why do you think that was uh that was necessary i know you i know you've worked in the space you know for a while and you have the i.t background i'd love to get your perspective on this i think my simple answer to that jonathan is quite simply that the work is not done um so we know that under the prior administration we had presidents management agenda priorities that focused on the workforce and um and i came out of that administration being tied to that capital team the cross agency priority goal team with a very strong conviction that we had a lot of work left to do and we needed this this priority to transcend to transcend administrations right i also think that the the longer answer to that is that um as i reflect back on the time that i've spent in the information technology field um i think that my experience has been that we've come through a period where information technology uh helped us maybe handle the transactions of our work a little bit easier and so people still did the work but they needed to record it somewhere maybe process it somewhere and then we moved into the space where we were really focusing on how information technology could help our customers interact with us so now instead of it just being in support of my particular function at my desk it's in support of a communication tool between the two parties so then we move through that and we've spent so much time focusing on modernizing information technology and making that experience really wonderful for the customer that we've forgotten that the customer inside the organization is the employee delivering the mission and if we don't arm them with the tools to actually deliver the mission and tools by tools i don't just need technology tools i mean how do we turn data about what we need or predict that we need in order to deliver on missions into a capability that allows our employees to be ready to meet those missions right how do we operate our business functions in a better way leveraging data um and leveraging technology to help the citizen the employees actually deliver the citizen services that are being demanded of them so uh again simply the work is not done and maybe it's just time to turn the focus well and and i think that you reference this and i'm curious what the with the others on the panel think but the data really seems to be a key and understanding the work of the agency and the data that gets created how flows through the organization and how people use it to get their jobs done is is really important and i heard that um mike when you referenced uh supporting the va and uh i heard that from uh you know i've heard that in other places well i'm curious if if if you want to comment on that or or john perhaps because of the interchange that naturally exists john i'd like to jump in because there's something that we are on the verge of and i hate to get in front of my bosses with an announcement so it's really not an announcement it's not done but we are working jointly with the va under the joint executive committee which brings together the under secretary for personnel and readiness who i report to as well as the uh deputy secretary for the va under a joint executive committee where we are me and my co-partner over at the va the chief data officer tremendous paul are working a joint strategy between the two organizations so clearly we have already a data sharing relationship but we understand one of the most important things is that there's a there's a journey that every service member and every veteran take and so as we we look at our you know service members today that are active in their families um their experience and the outcomes that they have we want to maximize those and as they transition over to the va we want to make that as seamless and as clean and and smooth as possible and there are so many opportunities to do that this joint strategy as it comes together is is uh coined at doing that we're focused as well on the civilian experience we're focused well on you know our contractor experience too because there's no there's no uh onboarding or outboarding process or anything in between that can do wonders to ruin a relationship right if you don't do it right so we're really want to get it right and so using tools you know collaboration tools you know that are out there that we have today and and maximizing not just the technology but how we handle those populations you know and mikey um the opportunity to build trust is is is there at every step that you're describing you know you build trust in drops and loses in buckets you know one bad experience and you know a veteran transitioning is going to trust the process perhaps so you know you have a big opportunity through those small actions to make uh to make a big difference i think john just just curious if you have any uh you know thoughts on that on the receiving end of maybe some of that data yeah i know definitely and i appreciate mike's perspective on that as we modernize our electronic health record which we've had for a long long time uh it's not been an easy process it's been a bumpy process but one of the things that we began early on is to listen to our physicians and our clinicians that are actually doing the work in the electronic health record what works best for them is about job satisfaction it also uh bends to what have what mike just mentioned about the customer and how the customer responds to that you know physicians asking 65 questions in your 30 minute or 15 minute uh appointment you're not really getting to what the customer needs what the employee or the veteran is actually asking or in there for and so we worked really hard on that we have lots more work to do with that but we really have to listen to our our employees the ones on the ground that are actually dealing with our veterans uh to hear their issues and concerns with how we modernize our electronic health record process and it's a system that is replacing a system that we developed ourselves and so there's a lot of buy into that so there's a lot of change management that goes into that and we'll continue to go that and go into that into the future and just while we're talking about it and mighty modernization and how that has impacted us and will impact us into the future the ita has modernized so quickly over the last two years and the ability for us to have this conversation right now and the conversations throughout is significant and we can't overlook the amount advances that we've made in the last two years when we first jumped into the pandemic in march of 2020 we began having online telephone calls that you can imagine with 165 leaders spread throughout the country and in fact the world conversations about how things go on what are you seeing on the ground what can we do to help what can we assist with and as we developed into microsoft teams which you utilize today those conversations are seamless they happen every single day for an hour updates that everyone gets buy into everybody hears what's going on throughout our system and that kind of advancement in communications through it is huge in how our our employees are able to know what's going on and be able to respond uh quicker faster and better we've all been changed through the pandemic we have it's really an incredible an incredible switch and one of the big changes you're describing and i want to ask sean to jump in here is on hybrid teams and hybrid workforce and the space force being new as you were standing that up um how how did this concept of hybrid workforce impact any of the decisions you were making or the planning you were doing in your in your prior role and the data around that in the kind of what you do the security aspect of it how how does that factor in i think there's uh there's a lot there as well there's a tremendous amount there so first if we just start with using the technology that was available to us we went out and looked at all the different digital platforms right away zoom ms teams slack all the different platforms that are available we recognize very quickly particularly in our environment we couldn't use most of it because it was not cleared by the the federal government for us to use those platforms to to what you just described because the safety and security of the data and what was going across our networks even just having a vocal form like this we were very concerned and so until zoom for government was available to us and ms teams for government was available to us it did create some challenges what was really interesting is think about that the national defense authorization act that stood up the space force was in december it was signed in december of 2019 four months later we shut we shut the world down but we we were given direction essentially by congress to build a new force and get to initial operating capability in 18 months we had planned for a five year window they gave us 18 months and so as a result we had to learn very quickly how to use the technology that was available to us in order to not just build the service i was person number five in the human capital office we're around 50 or so over there now so we're trying to build a new startup and we're doing it in a distributed manner so we had men and women from across the country who were building the service but one of the unintended uh consequences and a positive consequence was it taught us that we didn't have to do things the way that the department of defense traditionally does things meaning everybody has to be on the same patch of dirt together what we learned is and it was part of one of the was one of the responses in the poll question about the multi-general multi-generational workforce this is the first time in human history there are five generations in the workforce and so we have to recognize people just think differently now with respect to the kinetic end of what we do you have to be potted together that's there's no way to to do our mission sets distributed but building the service we were able to do that in distributed manner so much so that we we would have left it absent covet we would have left talent on the table meaning there were men and women who are experts at what they do that we needed inside our formation that we just simply wouldn't have hired because they would have said no i'm not moving to dc i'm not going to move to colorado springs i'm not going to move to los angeles so that the locus of of control for the space force those centers we we would have lost alice from talent but because we were working in a distributed manner we hired a whole slew of people some of our very best and brightest that were available to us out there in the country some with military backgrounds some with none no military backgrounds but we we got to tap into that multi-generational talent by by going into a hybrid work environment and the last thing i'll say on this is we're never going back we're not now with respect to what we do again at the front end of our business we'll have to do that together because that's how that's how you know modern warfare works but with respect to things like staff staff work we're never going to have 100 of our teammates back inside the office and and that's okay and and we have to be comfortable and i think we now are with this is how this is how it is and and we want to meet people where they are and it really gets after this idea of generating enthusiasm to stay inside my organization and and hopefully we'll get to that later in in the discussion about that deliberate development how we're doing that and why that's so important to the retention which was the highest percentage of the responsibility yeah i was gonna i was gonna reference that recruiting and retention 44 of our our respondents said that was the biggest challenge facing them and i i want to jump back to robin and ask um from a recruiting and retention perspective and hybrid work workforce perspective uh you know what is the department of the interior doing and how are you thinking about you know these things in the interrelationship between these uh these topics and then you know how does that play into my doi career which i know you've worked on so diligently oh my gosh i just i just love hearing sean say we're never going back i think that there's still a little bit of a tendency in human nature to once you are able to go back to the offices to revert to old ways because you know them and they're just you know force of habit it happens some of the things that we're doing to try to intentionally uh sustain a new culture is to deploy tools that help our hiring managers and hr specialists jump start a conversation about whether that job really can be remote so if you've been working remote for two years and then somebody retires do you need to backfill that position with an on-site person just because we're back in the office now or can you advertise it as remote right up front and i think that the knee jerk response when we're moving quickly with too much work to do and we have an 80 day hiring time frame is to just post it and get them back in the office because then they can run alongside us and train up and get acclimated to the team and we will miss talent doing that we will end up with the same diversity demographics that we've had for the past 10 years if we continue doing that so specifically one of the internal prototype tools that we're developing under the idy career initiative we call it the remote job predictor where we can just simply process a physician description or a job analysis and say if i were to make a suggestion to do to you about whether this job could be remote i think it's highly likely moderately likely or not at all likely because really this is a law enforcement officer at a park right but the notion is not so much to make a decision about whether the position should be remote but more to jump start that conversation so that we can evolve the culture of the organization to thinking about remote before we automatically default on site that is going to be a huge factor with respect to recruiting and getting candidates to apply for positions that also meet our desires to really embrace diversity equity inclusion and accessibility we can't embrace it if we're just looking at what's around us in the three mile radius for my office well well you know robin you know i worked in the federal government for a number of years before you know i joined servicenow and the idea that i could recruit uh the best i.t professional from across the country to fill a role versus the people who happen to be available in a city where where we operated you know it it is an incredible idea that you can get the very best person and it doesn't matter where they live now we need the policies to support that and we need agency leadership to support that uh doi sounds like as a as a department you guys have embraced this idea and the policies and procedures around this are are in place so um it's a it's a great stride and yeah and i would say also um you know policies or policies and procedures and procedures there's not a whole lot we had to change in order to stimulate a conversation about whether that job should be remote and if you look at the business data right it just is a common sense discussion to have yep well i i want to i want to jump over to john and ask him to uh share his perspective on this topic specifically how it really as how it relates to culture so we've talked uh you and i robin we talked previously about onboarding and getting people into the organization how do they how do they adjust to the culture if they're not in the office uh full-time or meeting people so john i'm curious uh you know the role and how you see that and what what role does communication play in that and how does agency culture evolve yeah i mean it's a conversation we've had for all almost two years uh across our system and it's a unique piece in dha where we have the preponderance of our staff are clinical almost 320 000 of the 370 000 are clinical so obviously that's a lot of in-person work but you talked about technology earlier our advances in telehealth where we were providing 1500 percent more telehealth today than we did pre-pandemic so we're able to do kind of that hybrid approach and so communicating the availability of that how it works trying you know convincing people of it and it's all about communication and conversations uh with our staff to do that um we just our dep sec deputy secretary just yesterday announced that uh march 14th is our future of work date um which is really when the hybrid timeline starts and so the communications that we've had for again almost two years has been i can't tell you as a manager leader how the work needs to be accomplished you have to tell us and so it's a two-way conversation and we talk about that almost every week especially in 21 that we talk about every week tell us what is best for you and we'll make the policies regulations work for you because it's all about how the employees can do the work we have about 20 000 employees signed here to central office in dc today and throughout the pandemic we've had somewhere between including myself uh less than 10 to maybe 50 over the last two years that have been in person and that's variable and so the questions that we ask and again tell us what works best for you the purposeful communication of do you want to do a four hour uh telework in the morning and four hours in the afternoon in person if you need to be in person do you we need to go virtual and your virtual time may bring you to dc to a collaboration meeting um quarterly or monthly or never it just really depends on the work workforce and it's it becomes a bit difficult when you have a lot of people as i mentioned ingrained in kind of an old way of thinking of things but this is a new way we have a new way of doing things we have a technologies to help us do them and the key is to really communicate and over communicate that with our leaders managers and staff themselves surprisingly or maybe not surprisingly to you a lot of the people that i'm going to see back in the office here in the next 45 days are employees that just want to be back they just want to be here and that's okay but the opportunities are there and i just want to take one more step back to the it discussion the next step for me then is to create this hybrid approach of i have an in-person meeting but i also have a home meeting and to combine those two things together because i don't know if you tried to do them they're not the same it's not the same i mean just a as an anecdote i was in a i went in my office and i was in a meeting and i had my laptop at the conference room table as did the other folks so we could all have the experience that we're used to right now seeing each other face to face so we don't necessarily have the technology um routinely in place to make it to make it work so we will have to adjust you know this is it it's it's an ongoing process of uh of learning and going back into the office we'll create some new challenges um you know i i recognize uh you know what you what you're saying there it's great to get put put it in the hands of the employees to let them think about how they want to uh want to work and they have a lot of uh control and power in that that you know there is something also about the manager being able to uh create the workforce they need to and i'm curious how you're gonna strike that uh that balance as this evolves and we have some more people back in in this hybrid kind of environment people in the office and people at home so yeah go ahead i can just say jonathan i think that one thing if you were to ask and i think i've read a lot of the research that's gone on over the last two years it talks about employees asking for flexibility and to be frank what i have seen is inflexibility actually they want to be flexible for what the employee wants but the inflexibility is going well you want me to come back in i'm not flexible in that so we have to overcome that by ensuring that we are flexible in that and there are some places and i think robin mentioned it my police officers at my hospitals you're gonna have to be there but that doesn't mean you have to be there eight hours a day if you're doing a report our clinicians do much of their uh uh reporting and uh their their notes at home and they always have they might do eight hours at the hospital seeing patients and they'll go home for four hours and do their notes they've been doing that all along but if we can give them the time to do that during the day that's how we create those opportunities and so it's about flexibility at all levels and that's how we get to success in my mind so um i want i want to pause here and bring up our our second um poll question building on something uh you you um you noted uh john the fact that uh we need technology solutions that support this kind of environment so the second poll question is what technology solutions best support your agency's hr strategy we should see that up in a second and we'll come back to the answer on that as soon as we have it so if i can if i can jump back to uh uh mike sorrento mike um just just thinking about uh the idea of hybrid and creating a workforce that can um support the agency's mission that can work from anywhere i think that plays into this idea of of the mission resiliency which became really critical uh during the those early days of the pandemic uh how does communication and and non-work related communication and sometimes play into strengthening the workforce and and the way we drive resilience and mission resiliency yeah well thanks for that question here it's a we experienced it on on day one when we didn't have all the tools and all the end points in place uh and and the idea was hey pick up the phone um talk and you know what the reality was when we went to maximum telework we had a small number of individuals right across the department less than 10 that were remote workers in a you know slightly larger number that teleworked on a regular basis not everybody telework when when almost everyone or at least greater than 50 went to this maximum telework um it changed the dichotomy right the the idea of teleworking was the person generally was working on something that they you know that they could do by themselves and didn't mean to communicate and collaborate with a whole lot of folks not not across the board but a very large percentage of individuals would telework or you know be remote workers because they were very it was very conducive for them to do you know catch up on their appraisals catch up on documents that they had to write or read or testing things of that nature that you generally only needed to touch base once in a while but that changed overnight and as the tools came in place and the eod was very quick to get some tools in place to help collaboration and bring people together it was a little spotty but we got there within within a short a few few weeks to to get everybody on board we had to change the way in which we interacted and obviously executed what was normally a meeting in a building with a lot of folks you know you had everybody plugging in and coming together and the other thing you know as far as getting folks connected how do you make sure they participate and aren't just there on the call and you don't really see them or interact so we had to find ways in which we could go around the horn right and get everybody involved and the third thing that i really put in place uh aggressively was focus groups i spend an hour uh about six times a month i spent an hour with different group segments of my organization just having something i call a fireside chat and bringing that group together it's usually 15 to 20 people no more and it's you know it's either individuals who are um frontline supervisors or branch chiefs or div chiefs you know directors and we just have a conversation about what's going on and then we also extend that to hey what's you know you have a linkedin profile do you have a another type of collaboration form what other things are you doing outside the office that maybe we can plug into that are virtual because we've been very very much you know in the virtual world how do we get more people plugged in so that we can participate by asking people what are you what are you doing and are you willing to share and it's really gone a long way to bring people together and help combat what is very very uh difficult scenario is the burnout right and i think a lot of our folks have have faced uh across the department and certainly my organization you you wake up in the morning if you're working at home you start working a lot earlier than you normally would have because you're not driving to the office yep and then you're and then you're working until all hours of the night and you're really constantly working right or do you live at work i got asked that question right yeah so uh there there is something there's something there about having some real separation you know and even that drive to work or metro to work is a is a is a break that you know we we used to have and you know some of us might have might have looked forward to so uh there there is uh there's a psychology i think behind some of this that we're gonna have to continue to to adjust to and you know we'll we'll see it's it i think it makes come going into an office from time to time maybe more attractive than we might uh we might consider uh right now but i just want to note our that last poll question um about the technology because technology continues to come up uh the the answer uh that was the um i think 70 plus people thought that having an employee portal with access to all hr systems and data was the most important thing to support an organization's hr strategy i want to build on that for for for just a second and you know get get a perspective from each of our each of our panelists here starting with with robin around uh the the number of systems that support employees and your perspective is it easy to interact with this data and can we make it can we make it less complex i'm starting with you because of the work you're doing on my doi career and where did you start and how did you push forward to get something that was maybe less complex and more customer friendly um data so the number of systems are many the level of complexity is high i think that uh when i consider what i do at home when i go to look something up and i just do a search on the internet and it brings everything to the middle for me and then i can choose what's relevant or if i'm doing online banking and i have a number of different things with the banking institution that i can go to i have i have an expectation of how easy it is to interact and get to where i need to get to and then i go to the office and i uh even if i have single sign-on i'm going through multiple systems and the dots aren't connected for me so the the underlying premise of my dui career or call it anything it doesn't matter the underlying premise of enabling an ever-ready workforce is how do i give them back their time in the day and make it easy for them to interact with the organization and by interacting with the organization i'm leaving behind any single system i really don't care about it i care about the data in those systems i want to bring it to the middle i want to be able to connect those data sets against each other through whatever means data ontologies might not resonate with everybody but a way to connect the data sets so that then i can deploy a capability ask a question and answer it for the user so they don't really care what's happening right behind the pretty interface right they just want it to be easier so if we start with data first and then be smart about cloud and advanced technologies i think we can deliver those things without fully modernizing the back-end systems that's really the approach so so sean just building on that do you think it's possible to provide uh government employees a technology experience at work that's the same kind of experience they have at home so age old question i think here not only do i think we can i think it's a necessity necessity i i don't so if we think about data we think about it across a full spectrum it's not just human resource data it's it's all the other data that we have so in military perspective i'm looking at readiness rates that's data how what's my up time for my aircraft for my different weapons platforms that i need all of that data i need the health data to know whether or not the human weapons system is ready to deploy so i need access to all that data so just to give you a little bit of a perspective and the part of the air force the challenge we have 118 different systems on which just hr data resides then when you bring in health data and readiness data and all of those other elements you're into the hundreds of systems so the department of the air force comprised of the air force and space force has been on a multi-year journey to nick that down so i think we're down to 116 hr systems that we're trying to drive basically down to five and so are you getting five by uh eliminating systems or combining it's an approach right so some of it is just sun setting systems where the provider isn't even going to support it anymore so we have no choice but to move that data somewhere else yeah and then you layer in the complexity of all the flat file data that we have we've got to be able to move that out and make it readable and use customer process language so so we can get after some of that data so we covet again helped us because we recognized on the readiness side we didn't have a really good way to pull all of that together we went into these disparate systems pulled out data and then put it onto a powerpoint presentation or into a spreadsheet and that's that's how we used it so that is terribly unsatisfying to someone like me who wants to be able to do what robin just described i just want to go in and do a quote a google search and find the information that i need but it's it's two sides of the same coin it's i as an individual i want to be able to access my my records and access my work platforms through a single portal where everything's there and the air force is moving that direction so i wouldn't suggest we're we're just ignoring it we're not it's but it's it's bloody complicated and we're talking about billions of dollars worth of effort to get after that but we now have some clean data lakes where those different pieces of data are residing so now we're able to do things with it to make data-driven decisions that are risk informed to give commanders the kind of tools and information they need to make better decisions and and so i i would offer the other side of that coin is enlarging the access of our employees our airmen and our guardians to that data i don't want to make mike's head explode but but my idea is i want every airman and guardian to have a higher level of access to hr related data particularly those that are making decisions about hiring people about looking at the talent management landscape how do i know where people's gaps are so that i can get them developed and connect them digitally to developmental opportunities and and so i i want to open up the aperture there's ways obviously we can limit what you can access and what you can manipulate so we don't break systems but i want to give more of that access to to people so they can make those decisions and frankly i want to be out of a job they don't need me because they can gain access to that data and make decisions on their own and and really i think it i think about this way organizational effectiveness operates at the speed of trust i i often say this and some of my teammates have heard me say this i trust right now as we're here on this call there there is a 25 year old who's flying a quarter of a billion dollar aircraft or a 20 year old who's responsible on console for flying a multi-billion dollar satellite i trust that human implicitly but i won't give you access to hr data i gotta jump in and just thank you sean for that because we really have come through this space where we are now capable of decentralizing the information so that more people are affected at the point of need and if we have to empower them or we won't sustain mission delivery rob that's a really good point i want to i want to jump to john on a similar vein and you know this idea of uh i should have the same technology at work that i use at home if i if i look at a commercial hospital and the clinicians uh inside it and the technologies they use how does that compare or or how does that compare to what um you know vha offers at your facilities and if there's not parity how do you achieve it yeah thanks for that i i think uh you hit on something that's key for us and we're still trying to really understand how we can stay up with the technology as it continues to advance and and you know items in healthcare costs a lot of money and they continue to go up and cost every single year and the it uh interfaces that happen in a hospital are surprising to most everyone the things that you can get from a radiology machine to an mri machine you name it all those things can link back to the patient's record uh and then link back to how the physician or clinician actually reviews those records and so um that also limits us a bit about what the information is how we get that information to be at your home as the clinician so to be able to review those things and ensuring that we have the security necessary for how those things are being shifted we talked about data a lot and i know mike brought up schminder paul who's our chief data officer our very first one in va you know that's something we have to look at is how this data comes in we actually have entered uh entered an agreement with the department of energy who has these huge computer models to to track a lot of the data that comes up in our veterans who we at one point will be able to monitor their health care from when they're 18 years old when they join the military until they pass and then we also have hot uh cemeteries where they reside upon their passing so and ensuring where that data is at and how it comes there as well as finding in there some things that we may be able to find some commonalities on for instance deserts uh desert storm uh and and and that kind of thing what happens after post covid who tracks what happens to you after that what that's going to look like into the future so understanding all the data first step i think and understanding what we have available to us and then how we can transmit that to when does it get to how you can coordinate with that through your phone or at home uh and all these other modalities right expectations have changed you know and that that is uh you can't go back we're not going back you've all said it in one form or another where we are today is setting up a big challenge for all of us who work in the space to give people the people that work for us work in our organizations the tools they can acquire commercially at a very low price and you know used to run their lives so um i want i want to i want to jump over to mike uh from a dod further dod perspective on uh this this idea of creating technology experiences and employee experiences that people uh that people crave and how that ties to retention do you think you have a risk of potentially losing people if you can't give them those kinds of capabilities absolutely true absolutely and and i experienced it when i worked with the air force that we would hire brand new or bring bring in new recruits and they'd come in and say well i'm going to be working on this new financial system we'd send them down and they'd be working on an old cobalt system right so the experience wasn't good we wanted you you you were spending all your day on your apple phone as an individual then you go work on a cobalt system or a basic so i just want to share this experience that you know i wear multiple hats within my organization i'm also the cio and the and the portfolio representative for the rep for the department's hrit portfolio and uh we collaborate with all of the servicemen the services and across all of the the fourth and state agencies and we've delivered this last year uh what is called a functional strategy that aligns under the defense business council type of process so we have in our functional strategy now a set of goals that are focused on modernizing that experience not only for the customers the endpoints the entire communities that we support but our own employee right well our employees are our customers our service members our customers and that strategy is focused on modernizing getting to the cloud leveraging multi-cloud approach and also having these outcomes that we talked about what are those real outcomes you're looking for um can you go to and so we we have um several initiatives you know one of them is to move our personnel system particularly our our uh civilian personnel system to a cloud-based environment it'll operate off of multi-cloud functions you know it'll leverage some some things like servicenow and other types of capabilities within integrating them different uh complimentary services but we are looking for that single look and feel just like as an individual we all experience when you get your your phone or your computer and it's you know you're kind of going to that that banking experience or that that other uh forum that you're at and we're we're on our way we're on a journey to do that and the key is the data plan right how do we integrate in data it doesn't all have to be in the same place but how do you bring it together when you need it what are those real-time transactions and how do you make that accessible just like we all are used to in our daily life and i would offer that just the just the step of trying to understand what all the data is and how the data flows through the organizations a really valuable exercise for any organization because it helps to understand these processes that have grown out organically over years and they're not necessarily the processes that support the digital organizations that were that we're talking about so we're we have about five minutes left i want to i want to ask for our last poll question to be placed up there which is about why um why do employees leave and be very curious what what people what people think here um but as we as we you know head into the conclusion um i'm really interested in any final thoughts you all have about how we work together between industry and government to do the do the things that are necessary to strengthen the federal strengthen and empower the federal workforce the president you know was very thoughtful of putting this as the number one priority in his management agenda so it's something we're going to be focusing on for at least the next three years and probably longer robin shared that in the beginning this is a lot of carry through so robin start starting with you what are your what are your thoughts for uh for the next uh three years for the future on how we work together to really strengthen the workforce gosh there's that's a big question jonathan um you know it's hard for me to imagine in in any way doing this without partnering because we know so much of what we deliver in the federal government is delivering with our partners in the private sector when i think about the things that we're doing related to delivering for our employees delivering for our customers and putting deia at the center of that i think we need to be bold we need to be really agile like truly r d learn something throw it away if it doesn't work and and try something else um and i think that we also need to be um always thinking about the really the cultures of the organization and how we're being truly inclusive so what that means for me is that you know if i at the department have a certain set of principles and then the the partners that i bring in on the private sector side to help me deliver those things don't don't model the same principles and i have an incongruency and the product isn't going to be what i want it to be at the end with respect to really being uh forward leaning on prototyping and learning i think we need to get better at working together between the government and the private sector with respect to really doing things in small increments that aren't super well defined way out that has a lot to do with our contract structures um and and also just the sales delivery model right if you're gonna sell me something that i have to sign up for for a few years forget it but if i if i can buy it in pieces and learn about it on the way then that's going to fit my model of moving into the space where we don't i think i i think that that's that's great advice thank you thank you i'm going to take that back to our team i think that's a really good really good perspective uh sean yeah so i i opened with a quote so maybe i'll close with a quote so this one comes from liddell hart who was a very early air power enthusiast back in the at the early part of the 1900s and he said the only thing harder than getting a new idea into the mind of a military member is to get an old one out and so we we have to think differently about the way that we engage our our private partners you hear a lot the the last few weeks on on the hill about goodness gracious maybe we've over classified all kinds of things and and that actually creates barriers to being able to work with our industry partners but to bring it back to this discussion about empowering the workforce as we set upon our deliberate journey to develop the human capital strategy what we call the guardian ideal so you google that for for those who are interested it will come up and and you'll get you'll get a view as into my brain is that that was what my primary task was was to to develop that and deliver it for the u.s space force and we did not do it alone we we deliberately went out to the aerospace industries association working with our former under secretary acting under secretary eric fanning and he connected us to partners in industry and they pressure tested the things that we were we were trying to develop inside that that ideal and i'll say the reason we call it the ideal not the adjective but the noun is because we're trying to develop and deliver the very best version of each of our humans our guardians what i like to refer to as our fifth generation human weapon system we didn't do it alone we we went deliberately to industry and talked with experts and engaged them and they helped us develop a strategy to get after some of this idea about making you the best version of you and and what we know is if you do that people will stay and that syncs with the the answer to our last poll question the biggest challenges the two two that were leading were lack of a career path and lack of training and development opportunities so i think you're you're you're right on with the uh with what the audience thinks here so uh john um final thoughts on on how we move forward yeah i think uh i think robin maybe touched on it with agility i think the ability to be agile is key i think in this environment as we have advancements in i.t and in our case advancements in health care and in medicine we need to look for new and better opportunities we have to partner with our industry partners in order to get to that we do a lot of advancements inside of va we really do we have the largest healthcare research arm in the world in fact and so we're able to make create advancements but it doesn't do us a lot of good if we can have the manufacturer to actually do it we can do it in a small part we did this actually with ppe early on in the pandemic we rallied all of our 3d printers together to start creating it but we could produce maybe a thousand a day that's not going to do us a lot of good we have 370 000 employees and 9 million veterans that we see so we have to partner with industry to do stuff so looking looking for new and better ways to look for agility and to embrace that agility i think it's key and that's what we use it utilize our industry partners with every single day and work in conjunction with that well um thank you thank you for that and mike why don't you why don't you bring us home we've heard agility we've heard data we've heard partnering what what what else can you suggest to help uh advance the workforce and power the workforce over over the next few years obviously yeah my colleagues really nailed a lot of great points so i won't go over all them but the threat that i pull through all of that is you know the the government got to where it is not because of a lot of bad behavior and dumb things it just grew to be the most complex business in the world associated with every potential industry you could think about and and as it grew over time it had a lot of complex processes and systems and things so untangling that is is difficult it's hard it's a complex problem and i think everybody talked about the agility that's not the mindset of the the you know the person who's executing a one-year budget right the mindset is is is i need to execute these dollars on what's important today and maybe next year it's a different thing we really have to start looking at those building blocks and how to create synergy and if there's one thing i can say about partnerships with the government and industry is to try to bring in that change management piece of it too because we need to have vision for to get to this place that we might need to be in five years or three years from now is going to take building blocks but steps and and integrated steps along the way but decision points and so we might think we want to be somewhere in five years but in one year from now or two years that might shift to something else logically and realistically so bring that to the table and i think we start moving in in the right direction which might not be the direction we think it is at this moment right and i think that goes back to a rob instead of small digestible chunks uh you know don't bite off too much don't bite off a five-year project bite off the five-month project and i think that's a that's a great way for us to uh conclude this uh the panel we've had i think it's really tremendous conversation and a lot of great great ideas and some really actionable ideas for uh for our audience and for members of uh industry and government alike start think think about the data take uh bite-sized chunks and focus on those and get those right and learn move forward be able to integrate systems and data give a user experience that that mirrors what people see outside of their workloads all great concepts that we can we can apply um as as we as we conclude i want to let the audience know there's one final poll question about cpe credits please place that up there and answer accordingly if you want to get your ce credits and i just want to say one last thank you to all of our panelists uh you were you were really great and i really appreciated the the depth of our our conversation today you made my job very easy and i want to thank everyone at atarc and all of my colleagues at servicenow that helped to make this session possible thanks for everybody who joined um i hope that we'll you'll be back on february 17th for the next atari webinar which is on strengthening the future of devops devops through emerging technology but also note that uh my my colleagues at servicenow will be back for some other webinars on the presence management agenda one on customer service and one on the business of government so lots of great conversations to come this is a tremendous time i think to be part of the the federal community so thanks for joining i hope to see you at our future webinars and have a great rest of your day thank you very much