Data gathering may seem like a quiet pursuit, but Airis McCottry Gill speaks of it with great passion.
As the former Executive Director for Employee Experience and Organizational Management at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Veterans Experience Office, she believes that both qualitative data (what people think and feel) and quantitative data (what you can measure and count) offer insight into EX. Her team at the VA combined two-dimensional numbers with heartfelt narratives to help the agency tangibly improve its employees’ lives and to encourage healthier, more productive constituent engagement.
EX Surveys
When the VA measures worker experiences, “for the qualitative data, we follow the human-centered design approach,” explained Gill, who served the VA until October 2023. “We get out there and talk to folks. We use individual interviews [and] small focus groups.”
But, she acknowledged with a smile, the VA also is quite fond of surveys that generate quantitative data.
In fact, her team created a quarterly “employee signals” survey called “ESignals” that is based on the VA’s successful VSignals program, which gathers customer experience (CX) feedback from veterans and other VA system users. The goal of VSignals is to improve service delivery.
ESignals, on the other hand, asks mostly about three employee-specific concerns, allowing the VA “to get a sense of where people are on their [employee] journey,” Gill said.
Like VSignals, ESignals measures trust, but it also asks about the ease with which people feel they can do their jobs, how effective they feel that the VA is at empowering them and responding to their concerns, and emotion, such as employees’ sense of belonging, recognition and purpose in the VA workplace.
Because the department collects both EX and CX data in similar ways, “we’re starting to now overlay the two to see if we can make a data connection between EX and CX data,” Gill said. “Are there positive correlations, negative correlations? We know it anecdotally, we know it in our heart, but now we’re trying to show [it] with the data.”
Identity Insights
Working with the VA’s Office of Resolution Management, Diversity & Inclusion, Gill’s team conducted two Identity Insights studies, which revealed pain points that VA employees attributed to one or more of their identities. The office began by examining eight historically underrepresented communities, she said, and then explored generational and religious differences, among other factors.
“There were stories that made you want to pass the tissue box, stories that completely just made your heart swell with pride and all things in between,” Gill said. From that qualitative information, her team created hard data that included bar charts, percentages and a heat map showing response overlays.
The surveys revealed some interesting data points. For instance, Gen Zers ranked their age as a top-five pain point, whereas age was much less of a challenge for baby boomers and millennials.
The data “doesn’t give us answers, but it does give us breadcrumbs to follow, so we know where we might need to pay attention and in what way, and what questions … we need to start asking,” Gill said.
Because individuals consume data in different ways, people who prefer hard data can focus on the various visual representations that Gill’s team develops, while those who are drawn to more qualitative information can read the narratives that support the statistics.
Example for Other Agencies
Soon after the VA began its EX initiatives, their potential to help sibling agencies became apparent, Gill noted. “It really is wonderful because when you think about it, it shouldn’t matter where you are in federal government,” she said. “There should be … certain experiences that feel consistently positive.”
Gill’s team established a governmentwide EX community of practice, in which 14 federal agencies participate. It developed a central repository of resources that departments can use and tweak as appropriate to suit their needs.
“We have a strategic plan, we have goals five to seven years out, we have that very macro level of what we want to work towards, but at the foundation of all of it are the feelings of our people,” she said. “They are the ones who are driving this direction.”
“We’re not doing this as a means to an end, but truly because we know that investing in [employees] is the right thing to do,” Gill added.
This article appeared in our guide, “Tools and Tactics for Employee Engagement.” For more insights on bringing out the best in your employees, download the guide:
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