Page 21 - FCW, November/December 2019

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Employee experience is a very big part of what we think about when it comes to customer experience. The two are inextricably linked.
agency and teach cross-functional teams how to solve a problem and design a solution with the end customer in mind. We teach them problem framing, stakeholder mapping and working iteratively in a way that puts the person at the end of the process at the core of the design.
Then on top of all that, we’ve started building customer-centric performance measures into our organizational quarterly performance reviews, our Senior Executive Service performance plans,
our decision criteria and our Investment Review Board processes.
When the senior leadership team
is reviewing investments, we ask that
the executive business cases include a function that addresses what the program does to the customer experience. We’ve found that these efforts encourage and empower our employees. We all know that employees come to civil service because they care, so by saying customers are at the heart of what we do and showing how an employee’s work directly aligns with it, we’re able to get people excited about the transformation.
The data we collect through the
Voice of the Customer program helps
us know how we are doing. Are we
being successful? Are we moving the needle? That qualitative/quantitative
data helps align what we’re doing with
the operational side of the house and shows that customer experience results
in operational efficiencies. In government, we’re not traditionally interested in driving revenue, but we are interested
in saving costs and making the most of taxpayer dollars. So we align that data
to the change, which ends up being as natural and organic as possible.
What role does the employee experience play in those efforts? When we started as an office, the bulk
of our work was focused on customers, but there were some small pieces of
our portfolio focused on the employee experience. We started to balance that out a little more, knowing that our employees are often at the front lines of interacting with our customers. Our employees are also customers of our internal mission support services. Every GSA employee
is a customer of IT and HR, and people
are customers of my office, and so we’ve worked across the organization to fine-tune that experience for our employees.
My team facilitates an annual satisfaction survey that allows employees to provide feedback on their experiences with these mission-support functions. The mission support offices use that data for action planning, and we’re
held accountable for those plans. They’re included in our KPIs and our organizational quarterly performance reviews as a success metric.
We didn’t start off on Day One doing this. We’ve learned and iterated the approach, and we regularly ask employees how we might make our operations better. What’s getting in the way? Where should we optimize or automate our efforts? The goal is to further involve them in this cross-functional approach that focuses on the employees while we’re focused on the customers.
What can other agencies learn from GSA’s approach?
Through our work supporting the President’s Management Agenda and its cross-agency priority goal for customer
experience, we’re seeing the customer experience discipline take root across
the federal government. We’re seeing
a lot of positive momentum and some commonalities of things that agencies should be working on if they’re not already. For example, at GSA, having a C suite- level organization focused on customer experience has helped us connect across the organization, create a more holistic view of our customers and identify opportunities to drive transformation.
However, we don’t want to give the impression of owning the entire customer experience because that’s not the case. Everyone in the agency owns the customer experience. But as the central group,
we’re able to use data to help inform, prioritize and measure our improvement. My organization’s centralized survey management effort has resulted in
cost savings and increased agencywide compliance on things like the Paperwork Reduction Act and Section 508. We’ve also improved data analysis and measurement across the entire organization.
Throughout all this, we’ve learned to be transparent about what we’re doing. It’s easy to take the data and run with it, but continuing to tell your customers and your employees what you’re doing with feedback is essential.
Lastly, I cannot stress enough how important it is to take a human-centered approach to the work that you’re doing. Be humble, too. We want to make progress by trying things, getting 80% of the way there, showing people and getting feedback on how we’re doing. We don’t want to spend too much time and effort upfront without any feedback to know if we’re headed in the right direction.
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