NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

By: Jim Hodges

An initiative to get us talking with each other and -- more important -- to make those conversations more meaningful was presented to the Center Leadership Council on Monday.

Entitled the "Center Internal Communications Initiative (CICI)," the plan is a direct result of feedback from several sources, including Federal Human Capital surveys, the Safety Culture survey, the June Line/Project Manager Workshop, @LaRC poll and a series of focus groups involving NASA FIRST representatives from Langley.

"I told them 'let's don't invent anything,' " said Lelia Vann, head of the Science Directorate and lead of the CICI committee. "We don't need to. We've got plenty of input."

The committee was comprised of civil servants and contractors. It began work on July 7, and its makeup has changed along the way, leading into a September 29 meeting in which a vote was held to formulate a priority of problems areas and identify suggestions for dealing with them.

The Center Internal Communications Initiative committee has voted on the priority of problem areas supplied by various surveys. Credit: NASA/Sean Smith

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Broadly, those areas involved attitude and respect, message delivery, horizontal communications across organizations and vertical communications at the center.

Subcommittees broke down those broad areas, identified root causes for more closely defined problems, then suggested remedies.

The No. 1 communications problem identified by the committee was "@LaRC," which was conceived as the cornerstone of internal communication, but which "is no longer effective at providing users with easy access to information and up to date news on events/activities occurring on center," the group said.

It cited a "content sprawl," out of date information and dated technology in "@LaRC" architecture and suggested a redesign.

The No. 2 problem identified by the committee was that center communications from the top of the directorates becomes filtered by the time it gets to the line employee, "resulting in us not all being on the same page and leaving folks with a feeling of being out of the loop."

No. 3 was "employees are not held accountable for poor performance," and No. 4 was "employees are not getting enough face time with leaders and feel they are not getting the whole story."

Among several suggestions for improvement in some of the areas were more training for supervisors, pushing supervisors to manage by leaving their offices and "walking around" the areas they lead and having both supervisors and project managers schedule specific "open door sessions" for their employees.

The initiative is just one of several that the CLC is considering during the fall, and some of the CICI recommendations dovetail with the suggestions of other initiatives.

In the coming weeks, some of those recommendations will be consolidated.

Also, the CICI committee will push "just do it" recommendations in a few areas beginning next month.

Once the communications initiative is adopted, a rollout is planned that will involve meetings to communicate expectations to supervisors and to more completely inform employees of those expectations.

"In the end, it's all about people," Vann said. "We want people to know that we know that their work means something."


 
NASA Langley Research Center
Managing Editor: Jim Hodges
Executive Editor and Responsible NASA Official: H. Keith Henry
Editor and Curator: Denise Lineberry