good morning again if you're just joining us I'm Ann Armstrong and I'm vice president of strategic alliances at gov exec and I'm excited to introduce our next panel uh on the topic of employees as customers an agency's ability to execute on its Mission comes down to the people supporting that mission the workforce without a backbone of human capital was a passion drive and Innovative Force to translate new ideas to reality any overhaul in Customer Service delivery frequently Falls flat joining me today this panel of experts will make the case for a holistic approach to customer experience starting with the employee and share their roadmap for success in treating employees as customers I am pleased to announce Nikki French customer service branch manager for the Transportation Security Administration Ron Vickery area vice president customer and Industry workflows government health and higher education at servicenow and pan Van Meter principal Siam specialist with OCTA so thank you guys for being here today we have a lot to cover so we're going to Jump Right In but to start I'm going to let each of you have an opportunity to shed a little bit more on your role and what you do and how you deal with employee experience so Nikki why don't you start sure so good morning everybody my name is Nikki French with Transportation Security Administration I'm sure if anyone has ever traveled which I'm sure you have you have experienced TSA so I have a unique role I am responsible for the customer experience across TSA I also run our TSA contact center and to me employees are front and center two-thirds of TSA is the Frontline Workforce and we are absolutely nothing without them so everybody outside of the the Frontline Workforce is there to support them and I really feel like they are my number one customer uh the public is also a huge customer right but if we're not treating our employees well then what are we doing you know I can't expect them to have a good or put forth a good experience for the customers without them receiving the treatment that they should be getting so that's uh that's me right um also good morning Ron Vickery I was sitting here thinking kind of reflecting back I'm six years with service now and but a career before that and just a real passion around customer experience and we were talking earlier the the kind of this ingraining of employees as part of that customer experiences obviously foundational I came on at a really good time because customers were trying to figure out what more they could do with our platform and it exploded into this customer experience and employee experience spaces and we've taken that a step further and what I've been able to be involved in is the forming of taking that towards industry so how do we tailor those Solutions towards industry and so that's really exciting because you're really empowering employees to deliver better experience that makes them less frustrated and uh and and everything that Nikki shared so so excited to be here and Pam good morning um Pam Van Meter I am a principal Siam specialist with OCTA so what that means Siam is um customer consumer citizen identity and access management um and the Siam specialist we are from a cyan perspective when you come up from The Siam world we are maniacally focused on the customer experience because it has a huge impact on business right so whether that's whatever the business drivers are for improving that customer experience it can be Revenue it can be conversion rates uptake but we know at a very deep level that if that customer experience is poor it's going to impact the business in negative ways so the ability to be able to see through that lens versus a traditional Workforce Solution where we put up all kinds of friction in front of workers and we don't care because they got to get through it to do their job you know flipping that a little bit and thinking well if we gave the workers a better experience and streamlined it and made it easier for them to do their job how would that then impact how they support those customers so that's really where the Siam Lens comes in well and that leads right into my next question which was exactly that which was how does improving the employee experience translate or move to improving the customer experience I I assume it's happy workers help happy customers but why don't you start sure yeah I mean I think that's the great it's the foundation right I mean that's that's the thought um we have the unique challenge hopefully it's not a challenge for much longer but uh you know TSA has to balance security and customer experience right and so we're different from a lot of other organizations um because we we have a security Mission you know if you're trying to just get a passport or you're trying to go you know book a campsite on recreation.gov there's no security aspect there uh so we're we have a a bit of a challenge because our officers in the front lines um have to enforce rules and sometimes that can come across as uh a little maybe a little more militant than we would like but it's really important and so we try to to make sure that the officers are professional and polite so we spend a lot of time just kind of level setting what customer service means in the context of TSA and security um we tend to get some pushback when we just say customer service because they think well you know we have to do security um but it's really just kind of retraining and getting the culture shift that it is those two things are one um and if you provide a better service then security compliance you know should go up so that's kind of where we are with making sure that you know the front line also understands that they are a customer so we use the term customer TSA in the broadest sense so that they can see the employees our customers yeah so they can see themselves as part of that mission um and and understand that we do care about them and everything that we're doing is to make sure that their job is easier you guys want to weigh in on that yeah well culturally I think you you mentioned they have to be able to deliver great experiences but and and not only and be empowered to do that and so I I think one of these is like one of the things I realized when moving from commercial Market into public sector or Healthcare you really the people who are providing service are doing it with a mission in mind you know they they're coming trying to help citizens help patients what have you and so uh the the importance of empowering those individuals to deliver against that is is hugely important and we and I think one of the things that we forget about is if if we make our employees frustrated meaning they can't deliver that service it's not only are they are are they not going to be able to deliver that that outcome but also the retention is drops so you've got people who turn over because they're frustrated they don't have the tools and resources to deliver so I I we experience it all the time Pam yeah and to just pull on that thread a little bit with you know so OMB released uh memo 2315 about a month ago well we're in June now right so April um and what that is maintaining is that agencies work to improve their efficiency operational efficiency and a big part of that is supporting a Workforce that has flexible options right so that we can retain and attract Talent just like you said and happy workers means that we're going to have happy customers and so how do we do that you know offering flexible options but allowing employees to easily access the tools they need to support the agency Mission and that's really what the bottom line is right because if they're blocked all over the place with friction and they're not able to get the tools they need regardless of where they're working so we want the top talent and we want to retain them we want to make it nice for them to work you know and so that they can actually feel invested in the agency mission so tracking these metrics and then improving and constantly tuning tuning and getting better and better is really going to help improve the overall efficiency of the agency yeah and just one quick note on the employee retention in morale for TSA that's you know we're constantly short staffed and you feel that at the checkpoint and the officers feel that there's you know constantly mandatory overtime and if you know if you've been working for 12 hours you know it may be a little challenging when you've taken the 100th bottle of cold water from someone's carry-on bag after you've just said do you have any water in there and they're like no I don't and then you pull out an ice cold Aquafina yeah so um but to that end you know TSA has worked our administrator picoski has worked very hard um and we have TSA pay Equity that is uh official on July 2nd um and what does that mean for anyone who's not in TSA you probably don't care about this I care about it very deeply it means especially for the Frontline Workforce we're going to be starting to get paid uh commiserate with the rest of our government Partners so across the board the Frontline officers are going to be getting about a 30 percent raise yeah yeah so that tells you um how far behind we are so we're hoping um that this raise and you know getting paid what they should have been getting paid for you know the last 20 years since TSA stood up will really help with the with the you know morale and certainly the retention so um again it goes into effect in July but we've been messaging it ever since Congress passed that in the budget for the last several months so yeah it's great right and I would say when you travel just thank the thank the TSA officers because their job is hard well we've sort of answered part of my next question but I want to make sure uh sure that we touch on all of it which is the biggest challenges right now affecting the workforce and you certain you know pay is one long hours one uh you know anybody who goes online uh is familiar with how difficult airline passengers can be and so even before they get on the plane they can be uh difficult but are there broader than just TSA are there any other Trends uh that you see in government that are affecting uh the employee situation who wants to jump in I can go yeah okay um yeah so I think that what From octa's perspective what I see when I talk to customers um you know uh shortage and talent a shortage in you know resources in general across the board and then a lot of technical debt um you know sort of outdated Solutions and you know a lot of what I run into too is sort of just homegrown identity and access Management Solutions and sort of piecemeal things all over the place which just make it challenging to be able to provide this seamless experience for those employees I think that's the biggest challenge so then the trend that we're seeing is focusing on this human-centered design and being able to then really prioritize Again The Human Experience whether it's a worker or you know an external facing citizen you know and making sure that that experience is as seamless and easy as possible and everyone will then be able to focus on that mission and what they need to do and if you take that and balance it against the expectations of everyone everyone consuming government services both whether their employees or externally they're expecting you know those amazing experiences they get as a consumer and there's and we're putting employees in a really tough situation if we're not empowering them to deliver against that expectation so I think that across the board is a big Trend Rising expectations of the way service should be received and making sure that we've empowered these employees to deliver that level of service uh so the needs of the employees are changing as as we've been discussing the their expectations are going up that the customer's expectations for the employees are going up as well um how how is the leadership uh in agencies dealing with these changing expectations all of which can be solved with lots more money but that doesn't seem to be based on recent events on the hill doesn't seem to be happening right away anybody want to jump in on expectation uh inflation yeah I mean we had to take a little bit of a regulatory approach to that um during covid with the math mandates on planes and whatnot um passengers were were quite unruly there for a time and we had to issue several statements press releases there were some checkpoint signs that if you assault a TSA officer you will face a civil penalty um and and that was because there was such an uptick in that type of outrageous behavior and the employees were feeling like you know no one's backing me up no one cares if passengers are screaming at me we did have many tsos that were assaulted and so that's why we had to kind of take a a different approach to be like yeah we do have your back to the front line Workforce and just to try to set those expectations like you if you're going to come through the checkpoint you cannot hit our employees I mean that should be obvious right but like you can't be you can't be yelling at them like we're going to call law enforcement um and you know that's a that's an unfortunate step that we had to take but it has gotten better so um I was on a with customers from Department of Commerce and interior and the USDA two-thirds of the discussion was around how does leadership change culture in an organization to get to that those great customer experiences and two-thirds of that discussion was linked to the employees how do you do that and so and I heard some amazing things one of the individuals they wanted their organization to understand the culture of the customer and so they actually did a cutout of a consumer a citizen and had them attend every meeting and sit in the meeting and I know that's how you know seems outlandish but you're really trying to get if you if you heard Barbara Morton's keynote today really talking about how to talk about how to how to change the conversation to look at things culturally and build that culture of trust it's it's about Lee it's about developing that consistent view across your organization and so I think that's what I see a lot in leadership is really trying to change how organizations are thinking about delivering a service Barbara mentioned thinking about the veteran and what would a veteran think about this service so we're seeing that across the board through Leader by leaders across federal government well and I think some people don't realize that agencies have different cultures and they can be quite different and they may they may change over time but it it can sometimes be harder to change because you uh the leadership comes and goes but the core stays and so you need to uh to have an approach that makes it in their interest to change also right so how do you think the what kind of impressions are you getting from the employees about how well this uh this focus on employee experience is working I mean you gave us a little bit of response but do you want to say anything more about yeah I mean to me it's it's really important that we get out there and actually talk to the employees um so we just wrapped a passenger experience survey and then um you know that'll give us a lot of insights on passengers and I think that those results are going to be um again really serve as a morale booster for the front line and next up is going to be getting back out and talking to the tsos talking to the front line we do a lot of work with customer service managers which uh there's about 200 of them across TSA so you know those are another one of our big customers so we were reaching out to them how can we better serve you they're the ones that are typically responsible for training their airport staff on customer experience work so uh you know it's really important we also work a lot with empowering you know we've talked about empowering the employees we do that through training we have a course called cxd mystified and that's a way to equip the front line with the tools that they need so we collect feedback from that training as well which is overwhelmingly positive we have it done in like a really fun mythbuster kind of way so it keeps it light no one wants to sit through a boring PowerPoint training so we made it interactive but you know we collect feedback along the way in any way that we can um yeah the um that OMB uh m2315 that I mentioned actually um so TSA is a hisp agency high impact agency right so they have to track um you know their customer facing you know um metrics as far as the satisfaction that goes along with it but that memo actually calls out for them you know to also track the internal like you know provide surveys on the internal employees to get a feel for how they're doing for their efficiency and operational procedure so they can then you know continue to iterate and improve tracking these metrics based on the employee feedback in order to also then meet these goals for these you know external facing services that they're providing and they are mandated to prioritize the citizen-facing services and track those metrics very closely so it's a direct correlation really between the two yeah and you're taking the quantitative portion and combining with the qualitative to your point how do you how do you gauge people's opinion on their ability to provide service Etc and that's you've got to get that directly from the employees you can look at the data and activate around the data but both are hugely important yeah and that's why the Third our employee Viewpoint survey is so important too that that is always sent out to all the federal Offices you know we use that data I know sometimes people think like ah does my opinion really matter should I even bother taking the fems and you should because it's really important we use that data and we've also done um cxex overlap so we took the employee engagement index and we took our contact center data and paired them together to see like okay if there's a good if the employee data is good you know how did that impact the complaint Trends so it's it's really awesome and it's great to kind of just take the data that you have and use what you got so in the febs for for federal employees is you know the number one survey that you use well and I think when you look at this best agency store for you find that when the employees feel part of the mission and they believe in the mission that their satisfaction goes up and they stay longer because they want to be involved in continuing to deliver that mission so uh you know it's it's easier if you're NASA I think sometimes then it might be if you're collecting taxes but uh still it's a mission that is necessary and um we we have to have the tax money in order to deliver on all of our other uh important missions but uh how how do you make sure you suggested one way are there other ways that you can make sure that the employees know that they're valued and that they're uh that they are having a good customer employee customer experience are there other things you can do I mean I think tracking those surveys and then actually helping giving them feedback that you're actually paying attention to what they're telling you so actually doing something with the survey yeah so feeling like here I'm saying something and it's not going into this void like someone is actually listening to me and making changes like so my voice has an impact and value and then my you know focus on the mission and my investment in that is even more impactful right so you know if I know that I'm moving the needle and I'm making a difference and I'm enabled to do that in a way that moves this agency Mission forward that's a lot of value right and so we're being heard we're adding value you know all of that is going to increase that external phasing the way we run those that's a great point the way we run those surveys is what's your input um do you do you um do you believe we're going to make change as a result of your input did we make change as a result of your input following all the way through to you know did this take effect and and continuing to iterate around that so that's the way we believe surveys should be run um one of the issues that comes up periodically is uh the remote Workforce Now obviously you can't have a TSA remote I can't check your bag from my home uh with a computer with a zoom lens or something but how what kind of results or effect is bringing everybody back or the messages that I've been hearing from a lot of government people is that they've learned that they can work remotely and that they would like the freedom to continue to do that at least part time and I'm I'm curious what kind of reactions you all have to whether how important is that as part of the employee experience I mean what our my team I have a lot of remote workers and it's actually been great so I actually have natika with me here today she is on detail with me from the Detroit airport which wouldn't have been possible if I had never if if TSA had not gone to a more remote Workforce um and so it's great it's it's given I've had four people in detail with me from airports across the country so it's it's a great experience and then you know when we need something on the ground she's at Detroit she can go talk to her fellow security director she can go directly engage with the workforce so you know we have a high I guess that's you know a hybrid she works from home for me but then can hop over to the airport which is fantastic and we actually do have some remote capabilities that we're testing out where say the Detroit airport is has no one coming through right but Las Vegas is packed we have the ability in some and those are not the actual airports but there is the technology available that the Detroit airport may be able to screen bags that are coming through in Las Vegas so um the the technology is connected so again those are not the actual airports but it is a pilot that we're running so I was with a customer last week and I was meeting with representatives from their I.T Organization three individuals and they worked in this particular case for uh you know in a campus environment as I talked to him I said so I've been there and what was this like and none of them had ever visited the campus they were all operating remotely which made me wonder you know I think for a sense of purpose it helps to visit you know and be a part of that culture so I think we've gone from the the expectation that will be people will go in we're seeing the purposeful need for going to the office so is there you kind of described it Nikki is there a reason to go in and meet and there are valid reasons to do that it's just not necessarily every day I'm automatically going to show up and so that hybrid ability gives people to go in for the reason to go in for purposeful you know activities yeah I think it's critical and can you hear me oh my sorry um yeah it's Chris and OMB knows that right right and they they have a mandated that agencies you know as long as we can support the mission however that is right like to Nikki's Point not every role can support any hybrid or remote work but as much as possible it's critical for them to be able to retain and track Talent critical um because it's just that's the way most of us work the and live these days and it just makes the employees happier again if they can do their role you know from home or apart like and I think going in for purpose you know for a purpose and I'm going to go see people as valuable as well so having that option is important um we've talked a little bit about data and how important data is but are there employee experience uh benchmarks I mean when you uh obviously if you if one part goes way out of bounds uh you're going to try to respond uh are there are there certain things that you should be looking for as you're looking through your responses uh from the employees about what's working and what's not we look at on the qualitative side we look at um steps of process and you know it in other words is is the process as as Services being delivered by the employee is it meeting expectations going from step to step to step so that's that we're we're looking at how how is that working and then of course how are we optimizing a Workforce to address the needs out there so the Ebbs and flows of demand for that so that's kind of on the qualitative side the ability to optimize those pieces of what we're doing so I think we try to we we're constantly looking for how can we make every step of the process more efficient um to you know an effective but also to um align the right resources the right people to that and so our every customer kind of wants to do that they're looking for that level of optimization without without negatively impacting their ability to deliver service we have about five minutes left and we can clearly fill that time but I wanted to give you all a chance to ask questions if there is anybody who has a question something we haven't covered that you would like to address yes were any of your agencies affected by with coconut I spoke about working from home well what about real estate did you lose any buildings that give up space a TSA had just built a brand new building in Springfield Virginia so we moved out of our Pentagon City location and then moved in to our new one um so yeah we've done a lot of Shifting and we've actually just welcomed the DHS management office to our new headquarters building so um again that was a it's kind of nice though now we have a whole two floors of DHS employees where pre-covered that never would have happened so it's it's given other agencies the opportunity to consolidate their buildings any other questions hey um I was curious um how do you think about EX in terms of the Upstream effects that sort of lead to sometimes some negative employee experiences um yeah TSA like what the policies that surround like I don't want to take my shoes off like why are we um why you know what influence do you have on the Upstream effects like uh who we're hiring how where how we're training them what the sort of tools are they have available to them and like how policies are crafted so they are enforceable by agents right things of that nature how do you sort of like work Upstream as much as you can so that the folks who are on the front line and doing that work are getting they feel supported that they are the great crafts people that we tell them that they are yeah it's it takes a lot of collaboration um between my office which I'm in the office of civil rights so we there's a lot of policies that impact employee civil rights for sure and then we also partner very closely with the office of training and development and the office of human Capital so we we try to just cast a wide net and make sure that we're always talking so that when there are policy changes uh because you're right if TSA has a policy change that impacts the public it's going to impact them as well so we try to just always include the employees and always think like how will this change impact the field and just to to extend that you're exactly right it starts from the very beginning of onboarding and bringing an employee on and so what that experience is like and frankly if you have amazing experiences there you become a draw for individuals you get you know obviously people want to work for organizations that do that but then being able to create that consist consistent flow between onboarding that individual taking them right into the job they have in the service they deliver so being able to do that starting from the onboarding is is what we're seeing is a valuable uh capability hi my name is Brandi Wimberly and I'm really interested around the evaluation of the impact of the changes or the programs you're making and so you talked about the employee engagement index could you say a little bit more about the whether it's the metrics that you used I know we've talked about febs but are there certain things that you're cross-referencing labeling and X in order for us to maybe know what to do when we come back yeah so we so unfortunately the employee engagement index uh portion of the Feb survey has changed over the last couple of years so when we did our first um cxex comparison that score has now now those scores have changed so we have to redo our analysis um but we'll still be looking at those those scores and compare them to our complaint data um but it's going to take a little bit more work but it's it's are you with the government yeah so um sometimes you have to go straight to OPM to see if you can get your AEI data um I tried to get it from TSA and it was more difficult so I just went direct to the source so that's something that you may want to consider um but yeah we can we can certainly talk after and I can see if I can help you out okay well I think with that um we will call this uh uh into the panel but I want to thank you all very much for being here and I thank the audience and uh in a I'll be turning uh this microphone over in a couple of minutes to my colleague George Jackson uh and he will take the stage in this room uh for the next session diversity equity and inclusion as a pillar of Service delivery but over in the other room will be CX as one piece of the I.T modernization puzzle so you can either stay here or join us next door and thank you again panelists that it was wonderful I love the conversation