Reply to the following posts in own words:
Caitlin Phillips
My company recently participated in a Great Place to Work survey among all of our entities. From the results, each office developed focus groups with the intention of creating an action plan targeting some of areas of development that came up in the survey results. Teams were voluntary however my VP of HR randomly placed each volunteer into said team. My particular team was very eclectic and diverse, not only in demographics but departmentally as well. It was pretty evenly matched, gender-wise, and essentially one person from each department. Participation was greater than expected and everyone had enlightening pieces of information to add. It was extremely helpful to get weigh-in from other departments that one doesn't normally interact with in order to see different perspectives on the same task at hand.
We had a 3-month deadline to create our action plans and start making strides to achieve them. Our particular team met once a month with the expectation that each person contribute at least one actionable item. The majority of our members made power point presentations that we shared as an informal forum structure with questions followed by lengthy discussions. There was never a bout of hostility or negativity among the discussions and we all successfully chose various actions plans and succeeded in carrying them out well before our deadline. It was extremely rewarding to see our hard work outside of our normal job duties, be thoughtfully recognized.
• Michone Todd
I was recently apart of a team that was responsible for determining if the United States Marine Corps were maintaining their Personal Identifiable Information(PII) in compliance with applicable laws and regulations. Our team included employees in upper management and junior level employees with different GS levels, knowledge, education, and skills. Also the demographics of the team included African American, Caucasian, and Italian individuals ranging from ages 27-39. The knowledge and skills each person brought to the team was the Audit Director who helped oversee the project and worked closely with the Marine Corps to ensure that we received all requested documentation to conduct the audit. The project manager and team leader worked closely with the auditors to execute the audit and conduct interviews, analysis, and field visits. This helped the team to determine if the United States Marine Corps were properly disposing, safeguarding, and trained on how to handle PII. However, our team was selected by the Audit Director based upon our skills and experience with the audit area of PII.
The type of technology used for team meetings and communications were mainly e-mails and calendar invites sent via outlook. The team also used Microsoft word to create meeting agendas, and PowerPoint slides to show the progress of the audit. With effective communication and the various types of skills sets we were able to conduct a successful audit. Our team was able to determine that while the Marine Corps were aware of how to handle PII there were some areas that required improvement. However, based on our results we were able to provide recommendations on how to resolve those minor issues.
• Adrieen Baker
I recently returned from an assignment where a group of us (about 30 people) were tasked to support diving operations. Our team included people with different ranks and jobs, different backgrounds and knowledge skills. We were not performing our usual duties but had to learn how to support the divers the best so we had to get efficient in those duties very quickly and learn from each other. We were divided into groups of 5 and each group had a small boat. The boat needed to be escorting the divers and react quickly in case of an emergency. Some team members were more experienced than others. The senior members held trainings for those who needed it, and everybody helped each other out. Our team leader was a Chief who was overall in charge of the evolution. The team members were selected based on their ranks, qualifications and some personal factors. Team meetings were held every day and the technology used was a power point presentation, or sometimes we communicated via text messages. On the boats we had different kinds of radios and cell phones to communicate with each other as well as other non-verbal signals such as flares, smoke. The dive evolution was successful, and the training was completed in a timely manner.