What’s New with Employee Engagement at
VA?
The NCOD Employee Engagement Newsletter is published monthly
and covers key developments, issues, and events in employee engagement at VA.
In this Edition:
- Together We Moved Forward – 2019 VA ALL Employee Survey (AES) Results
- Looking For More on Employee Engagement?
- Connect with Us
Together We Moved Forward – 2019 VA ALL Employee Survey (AES) Results
The All Employee Survey results for all of VA organizations are now available. So, are we any better off today than last year? We all work to improve our lives, both personally and professionally. It helps us go in the right direction when we take a look and reflect on where we are now, compared to where we’ve been in the past.
If we think of the AES results as the message from the large community of VA employees, we should be encouraged by what we see. More people participated than ever before, with over 256,000 making their voice heard. This news article is about what we hear when we listen to VA employee community speak as a whole. It can be hard to see the big picture when focusing on our daily tasks. So, it seems valuable to take a minute today and look at our all-VA results. If you’d rather skip to your own results, download your AES Dashboard here: https://dvagov.sharepoint.com/sites/AESDashboard.
The VA AES was administered just a couple of months ago. The results give us a snapshot of employee experience in 2019 and how it compares to last year. And, looking at this journey we took gives us hints of what we could be doing next, down the workgroup level, to improve our workplace experience.
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So, what did we all say about VA this year—are we in a better place than in 2018? It seems the answer is, Yes. A graph below shows that VA has been slowly trending in the right direction on Best Places to Work scores, not only within the last year but for several years now.
Also, looking at how we are doing compared to other large federal organizations, we find VA roughly in the middle among the other feds on Best Places to Work (BPTW) results. (Data from 2018 for DHS, DoD and NASA are provided for comparison. They are from 2018, the most recent available now. The VA results are from 2019.). The official BPTW results for VA, along with comparisons to other federal agencies, will come from a third-party organization called Partnership for Public Service, later this year. These results will be very similar to what’s below, because they will come from the same data. Find out more about how VA compares to other feds here:
https://bestplacestowork.org/rankings/overall/large
Looking deeper into the data, we see many of the AES scores improved from last year. The table below shows results for key areas for VA sub-agencies. Green means improvement from 2018. BPTW is Best Places to Work, EEI is Employee Engagement Index (it’s the measure used for tracking the 20-20-20 improvement initiative across the federal government). On both measures, both this year and last year, VA scored better than the newest-available results for other very large federal agencies (year 2018), and also better than government-wide year 2018 results.
 VA AES asked respondents to select their top three priorities for action planning—that is, the areas they would most like to focus upon over the next year. When you look at results at this level, you can see patterns in what VA employees see as most important to work on within their workgroups. While every workgroup’s experience is unique and may be somewhat different, Communication is the big priority across VA; growth and accountability are closely behind it.
 More specific results for VA sites, all the way down to the workgroup level, are available now in your AES Dashboard. To see what your workgroup said, download your AES Dashboard here: https://dvagov.sharepoint.com/sites/AESDashboard.
Of note, sometimes employees want to work on specific priorities because they feel improvements are needed, and sometimes this priority is a strength that employees want to maintain. Your AES Dashboard (3 - All Priorities tab under Your Results) shows how employees within your organization feel about the priorities they select—is this an improvement priority for them (e.g. “item score” is low), or a strength they want to maintain (e.g. high “item score”).
Once you get your dashboard, take time to talk with your team and decide how you can work together to improve your workplace and your work experience.
What’s new in this year’s AES Dashboards?
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Easier navigation: We simplified the navigation of the AES Dashboards.
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Improved tools: Tools for senior leaders, managers, supervisors, and employees are now easier to find and use.
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Best Practices: We spoke to your colleagues in the field who made the most improvement in the various specific AES Priorities. They told us what they did to become successful; we are sharing this with you.
What’s Next?
Please see your own results, share them widely in your organization, and let’s use them to inform the actual practices and ways of doing business at our workplaces!
As we continue to work on this together, we help make VA a place where Veterans choose to receive care, and employees choose to work.
Looking for more information on employee
engagement?
Helpful Resources:
Archived Newsletters
National Center for Organization Development (NCOD)
National Center for Organization Development (NCOD Intranet)
VA Workforce Surveys Portal
NCOD Pulse Page
Contact VA Employee Engagement at engagement@va.gov
Contact NCOD at vhancod@va.gov
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