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Carrie Hoff

January 2010 - The Public Manager

Strategic Procurement Training in San Diego

Carrie Van Deale offers some strategies for using questions to promote a productive discussion in your next meeting.

Run Interference For

Carrie Van Daele offers some strategies for responding to different performance appraisal situation.

What Is Your Response?

Carrie Van Daele offers some strategies for dealing with difficult employees—while you continue to work with them.

You Do Not Fire a Difficult Person

Employee engagement is one of the most talked about issues in government today. Amid falling engagement levels across government, and a presidential mandate to improve them, managers and agency leaders are taking a hard look at what works and what doesn’t when it comes to boosting morale. The Social Security Administration (SSA) may have a few answers to that question. The agency’s talent development policies have made it one of the few in government that can boast the highest levels of employee engagement—all while continuing to serve the nearly 59 million Americans who depend on more than $863 billion in Social Security benefits. At the helm of that effort, SSA Commissioner Carolyn Colvin has prioritized training and leadership development to keep engagement levels high despite increasing workloads, decreasing resources, and high attrition. In an exclusive interview with ATD’s The Public Manager, Colvin identified three major factors that have contributed to SSA’s success when it comes to cultivating a culture of engagement. First, training is a top priority for the agency, said Colvin, noting that giving an employee the tools they need to feel confident in their ability to do their job is one important first step towards creating engagement. “Even in this austere budget environment, SSA emphasizes training and development. It’s a natural tendency to cut training when you have budget challenges, but I think that’s the absolute last thing that should be cut,” said Colvin. Second, SSA closely monitors engagement surveys and follows up with departmental action plans designed to identify and address factors that could hurt engagement. “When we get the results of the federal engagement survey, we break it down into its various categories, and each agency component is required to develop a plan of action to raise those engagement scores,” she said. Colvin added that an important follow-up step SSA takes is to actively communicate what the agency is doing as often as possible. And the third way SSA addresses engagement is to take a close look at how, and where, its employees work. With employees in offices around the country, addressing talent needs by moving competent managers and other workers with specialized skills may not be a viable option. Instead, said Colvin, one way to promote growth and prevent attrition may be to make the workplace itself more flexible. “SSA is really implementing telework, and we’ve had a lot of good experience with that strategy. I hope it can give our workforce some flexibility,” Colvin said. Read the full interview with Social Security Commissioner Carolyn Colvin in the debut digital issue of The Public Manager in September. Not a TPM subscriber? Sign up here to receive TPM, the only journal of its kind—an opportunity for public managers and executives to write and share ideas about critical public management issues.

Answering the Engagement Question: Three Basic Steps from SSA

ATD's Government Workforce: Learning Innovations is a training activity in accordance with 5 U.S.C., chapter 41.

OPM Approves ATD's Government Workforce Conference

Richard H. Thaler, a behavioral economist, and Cass R. Sunstein, a legal scholar, explained that despite our best intentions, we do not always make the best choices. We tend to rely on habits or biases or take the easy path. Nudges can push us in a certain direction or remind us of things we have forgotten to do.Instructional designers can apply elements of nudge theory to increase engagement in learning activities. The way that you curate the learning environment, notify and remind your audience about learning opportunities, and motivate them to stay engaged can influence what and how they learn. Getting Started First, conduct a training needs analysis. In addition to outlining the curriculum itself, consider what is necessary or timely versus what you will need to remind people about over time. Nudges can be very useful when you want to engage learners before or after a formal training session.Next, consider your target audience. Who is more likely to respond to different types of nudges, and how many nudges will it take to engage them? You can look at analytics for overall engagement trends. Find out what people are interested in, how they like to engage, and what drives their choices. Keep in mind that nudges promote, but do not guarantee, certain types of behavior, so do not expect a 100 percent response rate. Instead, set goals to motivate more people than you would have otherwise. Gamifying Your ApproachGamification, or applying game-based elements to learning activities, can improve the effectiveness of your nudges. Points, badges, leaderboards, and rewards provide additional incentives to engage. Here are some of the ways gamification can help: 1. Make it easy to participate. When you're trying to nudge people toward training, you can “cut through the noise” by lowering the barriers to entry. Present your content in a fun, user-friendly way and make it easy for players to play. For example, use a gamification platform like Arcades™ to curate and create a fun space for playing learning games. Then send notifications whenever new games are added and set up single sign-on (SSO) to make it easier for players to log in. 2. Set social norms. People often make decisions based on what they see other people doing. So, nudge learners by showing them how other people engage with your learning games. For example, leaderboards drive competition, but they also show how many other people are participating. Recurring events like weekly, monthly, or “Beat the Boss” challenges nudge people to engage regularly in your training program. 3. Remind people to learn. Whether people are busy, distracted, or procrastinating, they will forget things. Games offer rich analytics that will help you track engagement and set up well-timed nudges. For example, if you see that people are more likely to play learning games on Friday afternoon, send out a nudge on Friday at lunchtime. To make nudges more effective, keep the messages short, 70 words or less, send them at reasonable intervals, and only send them to the people who will directly benefit from the training event. 4. Support goalsetting. Gamification nudges people to set goals and incentivizes goal-related behavior. For example, you can award badges for playing a certain number of games or extra points to players who complete the training within a specific period. 5. Keep it simple. Learners are less likely to respond to nudges when their training is complex, monotonous, or difficult to navigate. But well-designed games grab attention and provide a fun and engaging learning experience. Not only are short games more likely to drive engagement, they also force you to reduce complexity and focus on what content or skills are most important. The next time you construct a learning experience, consider when and how to give people a nudge. Then use gamification to support a culture of fun and continuous learning that can improve engagement and performance. Interested in learning how to create innovative, interactive e-learning content? ATD’s Articulate Storyline Certificate will show you how to use this powerful tool.

How to Leverage Nudge Theory and Gamification to Motivate Your Learners to Train

Between the daily borage of controversial headlines around misappropriated spending, workforce reorganization, and federal pay cuts, we often miss hearing the good news about innovation and progress occurring within the government workforce. Well, the 2012 Next Generation of Government Summit in Washington D.C., which brought together more than 600 Generation X and Y public sector workers, didn’t miss a beat sharing information about how many federal workers are taking steps to move government work forward. The summit was chock full of sessions on everything government employees are doing right. It’s time to share these stories.For two days, attendees learned how their peers were driving change, creating innovation, and leveraging social media tools to improve government.Carmen Medina, former CIA Director of Intelligence and author of the series “Corporate Rebel,” gave attendees a “pep talk” about how to be a “good” corporate rebel. “Optimism is the greatest act of rebellion,” she told the audience. “Nobody likes a pessimistic change agent.” Medina gave the young government leaders several key tips to drive change: start small, don’t avoid conflict, and when opportunity opens up, run through the hole as quickly as possible.Todd Park, the chief technology officer of the United States, discussed lessons learned about “innovation in government.” To create innovation in government, public sector employees must “embrace we-gov (open innovation)” and remember “that most of the smartest people in the world work for someone else.” Park is part of the recently announced series of Open Data Initiatives in energy, health care, public safety, and education to spark new private-sector consumer-facing and business-oriented tools, products, and services—such as mobile apps and websites—all while rigorously protecting personal, proprietary, and national security information.During the keynote on “How to Drive Big Change in Government,” Lena Trudeau—associate commissioner  in the Office of Strategic Innovations for the General Services Administration—challenged the audience to take a risk. “With crisis comes opportunity,” says Trudeau. “Sometimes you need to show the risk inherent with maintaining the status quo.”In other exciting news, I’d like to introduce you to Paula Ketter, the new Editor of The Public Manager, ASTD’s journal dedicated to supporting government managers. While Paula is new to the role of Editor for the The Public Manager, she is certainly no-newbie. Paula is the Editor of ASTD periodicals, and has overseen the publication of ASTD’s flagship monthly magazine T+D (Training + Development) for five years. She has also served as the Managing Editor of The Public Manager for three years. Paula is a veteran journalist with more than 30 years of experience writing and editing for newspapers and magazines. Carrie BlustinDirector, Government SectorPublisher, The Public Manager

Government Newsletter: August 2012

Spring 2015 - The Public Manager

Top of mind for the federal government is uncovering best practices for training and retaining federal employees. Patty Gaul offers insight from several sessions at the Association for Talent Development’s 2014 Government Workforce: Learning Innovati

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