Government leaders are constantly on the lookout for innovations that could be brought to bear on their most difficult challenges. Separating the truly useful new approaches from the mere buzzwords can be hard to navigate.
When evaluating what the market has to offer, leaders should focus on one question above all else: how does this help me solve the problems confronting my organization?
Government and private sector organizations alike face a daunting challenge when considering how to adapt to long-term hybrid work environments in the post-pandemic world. A hybrid environment, with a mix of remote and in-person work arrangements, introduces ambiguity and complexity, and presents opportunities to organizations. The key to a compelling, effective, and sustainable approach to hybrid work is to avoid the temptation for one-size-fits-all solutions and to instead focus on tailoring an approach that puts your workforce in a position to succeed at meeting your unique organizational mission.
Government agencies and policymakers increasingly recognize supporting innovation as essential to achieving their missions. Still, many leaders struggle to promote innovation. Some may even give up and see it as unrealistic for their organizations. However, promoting innovation is very realistic and is achievable.
To promote innovation across the government and achieve mission results, we need to start with a clear understanding of what innovation actually involves and of specific problem-solving techniques we can use to innovate effectively.
As the workplace continues to change dramatically and work shifts more into a new hybrid environment, connecting with colleagues and building new relationships remains important, but is now more challenging than ever. While meetings have moved to virtual platforms like Teams and Zoom and some work has moved to smart phones, we have found that there is not a technology substitute for the watercooler or the hallway conversation.
Each year, Arc Aspicio brings our strategy to life with a theme – a single word that helps our company focus on our vision. This year, our theme is #Connect. Relationships are more important than ever to achieve organization and mission goals. To make this theme come alive, we are innovating to find new ways to connect internally and externally.
With government agencies becoming increasingly complex, they often require a large staff of government employees and sometimes contractors to achieve their goals. While focusing on the daily tasks, it can be easy to lose touch with the agency’s overarching mission. The mission of an agency defines priority objectives, short-term and long-term goals, and the precise context of the operation.
Developing a mission mindset is critical to keeping an organization’s mission in focus, as it is the foundation for understanding your office and agency’s goals. A mission mindset drives delivery from mission statement to task completion, which allows the individual to understand how their direct assignments contribute to realizing the mission.
In the past several years, Design Thinking has become a prominent technique to solve complex challenges in Government. Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to problem solving where empathy is a key principle, and where we strive to understand stakeholders’ goals, ambitions, motivations, needs, desires, and frustrations. It provides a structured, yet iterative and flexible process to create alternatives, and identify and then implement new ways of working to achieve mission goals.
Collecting and analyzing Customer Data is an essential element of Customer Experience. However, using Customer Data to tailor and improve a Customer’s experience is a tricky scenario to get just right. Using too much data, or too personal of data, can make a customer uncomfortable and turned off. Suggesting a related product or service or offering help, in an authentic way, can make for a delighted customer.
In some ways, consultants have always operated in a hybrid world – working at their client sites throughout the week and then coming together with their colleagues in the office or on the phone. Since the pandemic, this has gotten even more complicated with multiple online platforms for day-to-day work, workshops, and conferences.
Thriving in this new hybrid model does not just happen – it requires clear leadership direction, investment in a collaborative culture, new soft skills in relationship building, and a workforce that desires to reach out and connect to tackle new projects and challenges.
Many government agencies are adapting their responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), in particular, had to adapt to vetting passengers through checkpoints in a safe, effective way. Fast, practical innovation alongside the necessity for the creation of long-term solutions was critical for the agency as passenger volume increased steadily.
TSA faced a critical problem: ensuring the safety of airline passengers and Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) while prioritizing safety and security. The TSA Innovation Task Force issued a call for white papers on Innovation Demonstrations for Enterprise Advancement, focusing on solutions for safe-distance screening and reducing the spread of infectious diseases.
Agencies are staying at the forefront of supporting their workforces by enhancing their focus on professional responsibility – the discipline of proactively reducing misconduct and harassment throughout the workforce. Focusing on addressing and even preventing misconduct and harassment – as a standalone office reporting to an agency head or as a critical function within an existing independent office – is important to the workforce and helps agencies carry out their mission more effectively. It helps agencies earn and maintain a reputation of integrity and trust from the public.
While some days, it seems impossible to focus on any threats other than the vulnerabilities and accompanying hardship of the current COVID-19 pandemic, it is critical that senior Government leaders take a more strategic and long-term view of all potential threats over the next four to ten years. These are threats that we can only imagine, beyond today’s reach and capabilities, but nonetheless plausible from those who intend to do us harm or from potential threats that natural or man-made catastrophes can cause. Once senior leaders are aware of the threats, they must prioritize them and make choices about where to invest in preparation and prevention.
A great customer experience (CX) depends on efficient, compelling processes. Process improvement sounds simple enough – just identify a few bottlenecks or weak points, reroute processes, teach the new processes to your employees, and congratulate yourself on a job well done. Right?
Process improvement rarely goes this smoothly and they can be particularly difficult for the Federal Government because the size and complexities of the programs leads to processes that become firmly ingrained in day-to-day work and culture. To get it right, the Government must recognize their weak spots and develop a plan that integrates process improvement with their strategy and with organization change management techniques.
Citizens and customers of the government are demanding increased access to more efficient services. Covid-19 has also raised the bar on the need to provide accurate and informative data – in visualizations – to citizens who are becoming savvier about data accuracy and usefulness. Strategic communications are an essential part of raising the bar on customer experience (CX).
