The Department of Veterans Affairs has been concentrating on improving service to its veteran constituents. And its had some success. Surveys show a 24% jump in trust in VA over the past few years. One career manager who gets a lot of the credit is the VA’s deputy chief veterans experience officer. For her work, Barbara Morton is a finalist in this year’s Service to America Medals program and she spoke to the Federal Drive with Tom Temin…
Tom Temin: And since, say, 2016, the baseline of where this uptick in trust has occurred. What did you identify as the area’s most crucial to improving veterans’ perceptions of VA?
Barbara Morton: Yeah, so you know, interesting. So we started on this journey back, as you mentioned, 2016, in 2017, you know, we knew we had landed on sort of a definition of what good experience should be, right? It should be easy, it should be effective. Veterans should feel like valued customers, like they belong with VA, right? And that’s all sort of leading us to build trust. But we knew we needed to start somewhere to sort of ground those concepts into tangibles and practices and trainings and artifacts, again, to empower employees to deliver these great experiences at scale. And so we partnered early on with our siblings in the Veterans Health Administration, they of course, many of them, see veterans on a daily basis treat care for veterans and their families. And so they were incredibly willing partners, early adopters of this vision and mission back in 2017. So we really began there and helped build some tools for the Veterans Health Administration in concert with them, we co-designed programs with them, and then we’re able to sort of roll that out at scale… Read the full article here.
