[Music] foreign now we're going to be joined by Andrea Goldstein acting director forced resiliency in the U.S Navy and John Carbone acting director of Civilian Force management of the U.S Air Force as well as Kevin Brooks field CTO and executive strategist for defense and National Security at servicenow we'll examine how federal agencies are using Digital Services to evolve their mission and support employee well-being please join me in welcoming our panelists to the stage thanks everyone for being here so as Steve said I'm Kevin Brooks I am today transitioning to a new job but we'll get into that I want to take a time to hear for a moment to let our guests introduce themselves so we're going to start here to my left immediate left this uh this ghosting good afternoon everyone director for forced resiliency with the Department of the Navy so supporting the 900 000 Personnel in the Navy and the Marine Corps on addressing interpersonal and self-directed harm and promoting the well-being of our Force yeah good afternoon everyone my name is John Carbone I'm the deputy director of Civilian Force management at the Department of Air Force our office writes the HR policy for over 200 000 different civilians worldwide I've been in the federal government for about 20 years now and uh just happy to be here today great thanks so we're going to start with uh Mr Carbone first you know we're starting to get Beyond me okay okay nope okay we're starting to get beyond the pandemic it's we're starting to recede so we want to take stock of all the things that have gone on uh with our federal Workforce in that time particularly around the topic of Wellness in what ways has the pandemic made Workforce well-being even more of a priority than before I think that the pandemic definitely was sort of the ultimate stress test no matter which type of Workforce you were in whether you were in a white collar job blue collar job a military member it really had a profound impact on our professional and personal lives and I think work-life balance is probably the number one priority right now um something about being faced with your own mortality the mortality of your family members your friends it makes you really take stock like you said and people said hey I want more of the Life part of that work life bounce equation and that means having more control in how they perform work how they perform it when they perform it what locations and having access to different programs to help them and their families with challenges that arise that means that we have to become more proficient in the federal government of managing things like alternative work schedules using gliding scheduling using Maxi Flex schedules where employees can choose their start and stop times in a day as long as they fulfill eight hours a day it doesn't matter when they start and stop they can meet their personal obligations drop their children off at school or things like that Maxi Flex many of you are familiar with you put in the 80 hours within a pay period it doesn't matter how many days a week you're putting in your 80 hours the mission's not being compromised maximizing telework and remote work uh more resources towards child care and Elder Care and and a stronger emphasis on those employee assistance programs that help with all the day-to-day problems but then also the complex problems like substance abuse domestic violence and mental health issues so I'd say work-life balance number one priority number two priority would be be more cognizant of the prevalence of mental health issues work on understanding that and work on destigmatizing mental health issues at the beginning of the pandemic or sorry through the pandemic cases of anxiety and depression quadrupled and the numbers are still pretty static that could be a good news story because maybe destigmatizing mental health issues is attributing to that we're actually hearing more about what's going on but we have to make sure that we have the resources available to help our employees and their families because it's it's just going to get it's just going to get worse if we don't okay thank you Andrea so John talked about that burnout factor and how we have to elevate our game really to take care of our Workforce with cases of burnout surging as you mentioned in the military and the federal Workforce you know that many are likely to leave their jobs it's going to be recruiting and retention issue what should leaders be doing to address the wellness issue when it comes to talent management so that question so when I'm asked this I ask people to zoom out because in one of my roles in in cultural transformation it's not just about destigmatizing mental health we really need to be asking the questions of how people are getting to burn out in the first place because we talk about a lot of interventions but if we want to talk about prevention we need to think about everything that people are bringing to the table to include what is their family situation what is their financial situation what are their different identities you're speaking for myself I'm you know American queer Jewish woman so that means that Rising anti-Semitism on the in the outside world is going to impact me and so all of us are coming coming to work with might we have an ailing family member a special needs child so all of that is going to take a lot of energy just before just before you get to that point so that awareness is key but one of the things I I ask my colleagues to do is to start with their themselves what kind of behavior are they modeling everyone on my team can see that I go to therapy every other Thursday morning they can see that on my calendar so it's not just about well we need to give other people the tools we need to model that behavior ourselves we also have to be thinking about what are we doing that's contributing to burnout for example are you emailing your team at 10 pm and they think that they need to respond you know some of us work best at odd hours if I happen to be sending a one-off email to a team member well outside of working hours I will typically put in the subject heading for Monday for tomorrow um and also managing uh and also managing time ourselves how we respond to things and um and and that is a great place and a great place to start the other thing is also giving people adequate resources um we have a really big part of taking care of our people and this is something that we talk about within my team my team is responsible for taking care of the workforce so how are we also taking care of those who are taking care of others and ensuring that we have um adequate Personnel that we're hiring people on time at their I.T works Etc I can definitely relate to the burnout question because many of you are familiar with the office of personnel management federal employee view survey the Department of Defense also has many different climate surveys and oftentimes uh the the percentages of people feeling moderate or extreme stress hits 40 percent or higher and I know for our organization burnout has been a real thing and we've done exact exactly what you said we've kind of looked at how we task things I'm sure there's some air force people from headquarters in the room but we have you know hot hot hot hot lava hot lightning cords flash cords and so it's like everything's coming down is super intense and so we're we're actually looking at the way we task things now and trying to use different language what's the true suspense what's the true prioritization to try to take some of that pressure off a little bit that's a great segue that hot hot hot so it talks about you know the culture of the workplace and the Federal in any federal agency name an agency tends to be go slow go go slow go slow no now go now yeah so how do we evolve our policies and our digital strategies to provide a supportive workplace culture you know so get away from that everything's hot at the last minute and build a much more inclusive and robust Wellness system for our employees so I mean well we talked a little bit I mean we have set up focus groups to kind of look at workflow and things like that but really if you if you're looking to build a supportive Workforce I think a lot of we've made a lot of progress in DOD and the military services and advancing the diversity equity and inclusion and accessibility policies I can speak from my office's perspective and and deia policies we took a deep look at our civilian Workforce specifically our senior leader positions and we looked at representation and it was pretty consistent that we had underrepresentation across the board race race national origin and gender in GS 13 and equivalent and above positions up to SES so we conducted a pretty thorough root cause analysis of what was causing that under representation we developed countermeasures many of which are policies things like a diversity and recruitment strategy we developed unconscious bias training and then we mandated that all selecting officials and hiring officials complete that training before serving on any selection board and then we also looked at our career road maps our leadership road maps and we tried to see if there was any training or requirements within them that would dissuade somebody for taking that leadership route because one part of having a supportive Workforce is definitely having that inclusion and accessibility some key key things we saw just give some examples were Mobility agreements and professional military education we almost across the board had mandatory you know no matter if you wanted to be an Enterprise leader and we're looking across all 22 plus career fields and trying to make some adjustments where it makes sense without compromising the mission thanks so Andrea um in what ways UC technology transforming the quality of the support we give to that Workforce so we can do quantity of probably that qualitative part of that so three years ago you couldn't you it was much more challenging at telework people did but um I mean I I'm also Navy reservist and uh just got over covid and was tele-drilling this pastual weekend and had the ability to have complete contact with my unit to include the ability to access encrypted email from my personal device at home and um during the days that I was you know in isolation and had to be working from home and was not on sick leave had the ability to completely interact with my team I have a team member who lives in Washington state and we see her four times a year this was sure we had we had conference calls but I never have a hundred percent of my team in the office I never have more than about a third of my team in the office at any given time which has also enabled me to grow my team because we're no longer fighting for actual real estate in the office um we've also seen Wi-Fi going out to some of our larger ships so um certainly when I was on the USS palulu which was has been long decommissioned that was a there were 3 000 people on board that ship you had no Wi-Fi there were times where you would go weeks without being able to check on classified email now you have Sailors who are able to while on deployment FaceTime with their family members go to Telehealth appointments and we're seeing that not only is it improving morale but we're seeing usually when a ship pulls into Port there'll be a spike in issues that chaplain's dealing with that the Jags dealing with because people are getting information from home it's the first time they're able to deal with it and that's we're seeing anecdotally when there's Wi-Fi some of those spikes and challenges are also going down so people both are happier because they're more connected but they also have the ability to have access to resources continuously so our our office is often involved in articulating like the competitive advantage of having a hybrid Workforce when you're in a big military service though it is challenging sometimes because you have again white collar workers blue collar workers you have military members a lot of people not in the traditional office setting and that's where it gets a little bit challenging so we're taking steps now to study a little bit more like the impact to Readiness and you you just brought up some amazing points there really we need this from a Readiness and warfighting capability perspective to maintain continuity of operations if there's a significant weather event somewhere or haven't forbid some national defense strategy somewhere you have to be able to work anywhere at any time and so getting really proficient at telework remote work hybrid work is very important so Andrew I'm going to come back to you what are some of the steps that your agency is taking as you plan the support employee Wellness things that's done already a little bit and do any of these measures represent an evolution of your workplace culture or Mission or are they revolutionary so the number one step that the entire department of fence is taking is hiring an integrated prevention Workforce this is an organizational transformation that has never taken place on the scale before I'm and it is entirely new capability we're hiring thousands across all of the military departments within the department of the Navy across both my staff the U.S Navy and U.S Marine Corps we're hiring about 400 of these prevention Personnel across the entire force and some of them are actually going to be embedded they're going to be deploying with our operational units and their role is one of the biggest findings of the efforts that are associated with the independent review Commission on sexual assault in the military which came out in mid-2021 is that response activities are not the same as prevention response is incredibly important but it's a lot better to not have issues arise in the first place and what that Workforce is doing is helping our leaders who whose role it is to set the tone is to set that climate and culture do do so in an effective evidence-based manner then there's also thinking about well how can we how can we add resources on the response side I'm also hiring 2 000 Personnel on the response side um there's a lot that's being done to improve the military Justice process but also in ensuring that resources for mental health and wellness are available for civilians we have the Don C app program ensuring that people are aware of access to resources like VA Vet centers VHA certainly everything that that Tricare provides but also something that we have to really be key in thinking about and we've been talking about this for the last few minutes already is technology is great but technology also means that everyone is accessible all the time and may feel like they need to be accessible all the time and so something that we we need to think about is also setting some boundaries and respecting those boundaries to to have a healthy Workforce because just because someone is available all the time doesn't mean that that is necessarily the best thing for your whole Workforce John same question to you yeah it's many we're working on some several similar initiatives in Air Force um I would say we have over 32 different activities providing wellness and resilience services and Air Force and one of our challenges is having an integrated delivery of those services so a family or an employee Works into a particular office you know they might disclose a variety of issues which not all are within that office's Mission so we're working hard to create a situation where referrals can happen across activities easily sort of a soft handoff so somebody doesn't have to restart a process again and we are using a a Enterprise grade system to help us with the project management associated with wellness and resilience programs we also offer a family Readiness training a wellness and Readiness training to families with a strong emphasis on building a sense of belonging and Trust in an attempt to decrease depression and the risk of suicide and then the other thing that we're doing is is we're trying to create almost um an easy method of analyzing the health of the wellness and resilience Workforce itself so by pulling data from Manpower systems Personnel systems looking at recruit fill data looking at training certification data and being able to provide senior leaders a simple index score one to ten ten being low risk one being high risk of how certain populations within the wellness and resilience Community are doing and so a couple of weeks ago a report on the suicide prevention and response independent review commission came out and the department is now charged with implementing um either fully or to in the spirit of 127 recommendations related to Suicide Prevention and many of the recommendations are related to factors that many many of us who've served in the military or with the military have come to accept as factors of everyday life such as crumbling barracks pay delays frequent moves and what the report is saying is these add to instability and do not promote well-being and it doesn't need to be this way and how are we going to identify if we're being successful it's very difficult to measure a negative but you can measure trust and you can measure connectedness and we know that those are protective factors against suicide and also against other against anxiety against depression and promote everyone's well-being so there is a positive that we can measure and that is a way that we'll identify how we're being successful agreed so before we wrap up I want to give you a chance to just you know for two minutes just kind of say what would what didn't I ask you that you wish I had so we'll start with you John I'd say you know what we need what we need from Congress what we need from DOD uh so I'd say additional resources to have the ability to ex to expand our programs to get out the services to more families more employees and then I've I talked to our resiliency office in Air Force I said hey there I'm going to be asked this question what do we need they basically say to me is that we have to communicate to our senior leaders hiring managers supervisors to get out there that people need time federal employees military members need the time to take advantage of these services to perform that self-care that's all crucial I mean many of them are aware of the services available but they just don't take the time to take advantage of them I have a about a quarter of my team vacant right now and we're currently going through the hiring process we are in a competition for talent just like everyone else and something that where I'm looking for good ideas and think about how we can implement it within the federal Workforce and I mentioned that we're hiring 2000 response 400 prevention personnel and that is just Navy and Marine Corps making sure that we're getting the right people that the right that people are even ringing the doorbell and then that we're also able to get the right people in the door onboarded and get them on quickly I mean we don't want someone waiting six months just to be able to have an email account once they've already agreed to to come and work for us so great ideas that I can action and that I can action quickly so that was follow up to his question do you have another one you want to ask or we get no that is that is that is the same thing same thing well thank you both for your time this has been really enlightening I really appreciate coming and join us today thank you thank you [Applause]