Employee engagement strategy leads to a culture of collaboration for USDA agency’s CFO office
Overview
The Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) with a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) agency has invested significant time and resources into improving organizational engagement, optimizing its workforce, and building a culture of collaboration.
Our Approach
RiverNorth has supported numerous separate task orders for the agency OCFO toward that goal:
1. OCFO Employee Focus Groups: RiverNorth designed and executed OCFO’s workforce engagement study, developing a wholly customized deep-dive evaluation of OCFO’s workforce challenges, needs, and opportunities. To achieve this, we customized a unique focus group and interview structure that combined data science, I/O Psychology techniques, and group facilitation to conduct 50+ hours of direct employee engagement on topics relevant to OCFO leadership and employees.
2. OCFO Employee Engagement Team (EET): RiverNorth worked with OCFO to design and implement a structure for its Employee Engagement Team (EET). Our work involved designing repeatable structures and documents for the facilitation of EET operations. Our Project Lead facilitated the individual EET meetings during the first 6 months of the EET before transitioning the responsibilities to a full-time OCFO facilitator.
3. OCFO Communication Norms: RiverNorth conducted a six-month effort to engage OCFO supervisory and non-supervisory staff to uncover existing team communication norms and facilitate a discussion on future-state OCFO-wide and team norms. This effort involved designing and executing over one dozen team sessions to synthesize desired sets of communication norms and ultimately consolidating and reporting these back to OCFO Leadership.