Veterans Affairs Employee Survey Shows Improving Morale

According to the Partnership for Public Service, the Department of Veterans Affairs has become one of the top ten large agencies to work in the federal government. VA moved from the 17th spot on the list to number 6. The list isn’t the only measure of improvement at the department. Results from VA’s internal survey found that employee morale was very high this year. Daniel Sitterly, assistant secretary of human resources & administration at VA, partially credits this increase to the arrival of Secretary Robert Wilkie in 2018.

“I will tell you that Secretary Wilkie has established an environment where everybody feels important in our organization,” said Sitterly. “We don’t just measure our customer satisfaction through our employee engagement. We measure it in a lot of different ways other than surveys. We’ve had a lot of great things happening in the Veterans Administration in the last several months, everything from the opportunity for employee engagement at the local levels. We take an opportunity who don’t score this the 80th percentile at the top and give them special leadership training and we have a strategy for employee engagement.” Dee Ramsel, executive director of the National Center for Organization Development at the Veterans Health Administration, told Government Matters that the survey informs what employee engagement initiatives they roll out across the organization.

“We have a VA-wide employee engagement council. We work hard to make sure that initiatives spread across the organization. You have people moving back and forth in jobs and working together, and we all want to be one voice working together with the veterans,” Ramsel said. “For the most part they’re pretty similar, I would say in VHA, you might take a special look at physician burnout, on the survey data, that’s the current topic. But for the most part, we try to integrate as much as possible.”

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More Detailed Survey Means VA Can Improve Employee Engagement, Customer Service All at Once

The Department of Veterans Affairs has long had a hunch that if its employees were engaged at work, its veteran customers would be satisfied too.

Now, the department said it has the tools to best measure employee engagement down to the lowest level — and target specific resources and expertise to help individual supervisors, managers and medical centers make improvements.

VA’s hypothesis was validated recently by the Partnership for Public Service and the Boston Consulting Group, which examined data from nearly 150 VA medical centers over three years. They found medical centers with stronger employee engagement had higher patient satisfaction, lower turnover among VA nurses and better call center performance.

The results aren’t so surprising to VA’s own National Center for Organization Development (NCOD), which acts as a consulting arm to the department’s health, benefits and cemetery administrations. The NCOD administers VA’s all-employee survey and conducts research on how employee engagement translates to better outcomes for the department’s customers.

“Every year the strongest correlation is always between employee engagement and customer satisfaction,” said Dee Ramsel, director of VA’s National Center for Organization Development, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “They can look at patient satisfaction data in VHA and it will match up with employee engagement scores at each facility. They can look at cemetery satisfaction scores and it will match up with employee engagement data.”

The Partnership highlighted two VA medical centers where this correlation has been particularly evident. Employee engagement at the VA St. Louis Health System rose nearly 3% between 2016 and 2018. Its Strategic Analytics for Improvement and Learning (SAIL) rating rose from two to four stars over the

VA’s medical center in Altoona, Pennsylvania, also saw similar boosts in engagement and patient satisfaction. Engagement at the Altoona medical center rose more than 16% over the past two years, according to the Partnership.

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