Now that much of the Federal government workforce has eight months of pandemic-driven telework under its belt, government officials are examining how that experience has changed the future landscape of providing service to citizens, and how to incorporate lessons learned for what may be the longer haul of remote work.
“Because we were already comfortable teleworking, we were also comfortable with the status quo,” said Nina Bianchi, Chief of People and Culture with the IT Modernization Centers of Excellence, who works both with the General Services Administration (GSA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“The challenge within the challenge lies in the gift of thinking about collaboration, the experience of work, and how we can be more intentional with how we connect and serve one another, and truly looking at the experience of work with a fine-tooth comb in the same way that we’re starting to do customer experience (CX),” she said at today’s ACT-IAC CX Summit virtual event.
Bianchi suggested that more personalized communications and services can help people stay engaged without overwhelming them. “Blanket, generic long-form emails aren’t the way to go,” she said. “We need to find new ways of reaching out to folks … with more intention [in] the employee experience from recruitment to retirement.”
Also speaking for GSA, Acting Chief Architect Chuck Hardy said another challenge is figuring out the things the agency should have been doing all along, and then making them permanent.
“As we look forward, the challenge is to keep people away from that overly triaging effect that becomes the term ‘permanent temporary building,’ if you will,” Hardy said. He added that agencies should be “developing solutions and driving solutions in the industry,” and said “the challenge is trying to navigate through those things that we thought we should have always been doing” in order to make new standards.
