Ask the Question: Building a Team
Building a Team and Fostering a Culture
Ask the Question: Building a Team
Ask the Question: Building a Team
Transcript of video:
When starting a new initiative, it’s important to involve valuable people and the right people. Every new initiative needs a cheerleader or someone to blaze the way forward and recruit others to participate. Initiatives are rarely successful or sustainable when they are designed and implemented by one person, so you don’t want to do this alone!
Identifying Service members, Veterans and their family members in your organization, practice, or business will result in better service and treatment outcomes for those individuals. To successfully implement a new policy or practice to identify this population, the Ask the Question Toolkit developed in New Hampshire recommends the following steps to build a team and foster a culture. It is publicly available on the NH State Department of Military Affairs and Veterans Services website for any interested party inside or outside New Hampshire.
Step #1 is to identify and bolster stakeholders.
While senior-level management ultimately has the responsibility for the culture of an organization, there are other interested and viable stakeholders throughout every level of the organization who should be actively engaged and can help ensure success.
Obtain commitment from executive leadership in the beginning as their support will be valuable as the initiate is implemented.
Engage Veteran employees and/or clients/patients/customers in the process as well when it’s possible and appropriate.
Engage non-Veteran employees from organizational areas you identify as important to the initiative. This might be clinical, administrative or IT positions depending on your vision and what needs to be implemented.
Look for people who will have a passion for the initiative. Not all employees have served in the military, but many will have family members or friends who have done so and they may value the mission of Asking the Question.
A multi-disciplinary team will bring diversity and passion to your own internal Ask the Question campaign.
The Ask the Question Toolkit provides detailed recommendations on how to reach out to others in your organization and how to describe the purpose of Ask the Question.
The second step recommended in building a team and fostering a culture is to educate leadership, employees and staff through internal strategies and external training opportunities about the importance of, and reason for, identifying Service members, Veterans and their family members. The employees of your organization need to understand the purpose, intent and desired outcomes of a new policy or practice in order to put forth the effort required for it become a new routine.
There are a variety of strategies recommended in the Ask the Question Toolkit to help your organization change its culture around identifying Service members, Veterans and their families. One suggestion is for Human Resources staff to develop a way to identify who has previously served when onboarding new employees. If you are going to begin identifying SMVF clients, then you can begin to show employees how much you value this by also identifying the Service members and Veterans you have employed. Consider encouraging those who choose to self-identify as having served to display their military affiliation on a name badge, lapel, lanyard or door nameplate. This type of strategy demonstrates a commitment and will begin to foster a culture of appreciation for military service. Refer to the Ask the Question Toolkit for additional strategies.
Formalize your organization’s commitment to this culture change by providing all employees with the opportunity to gain knowledge about military culture through training opportunities. There are a variety of training resources available including in-person trainings, online training, training that offers CEUs and those that do not, training with a cost and free trainings. In NH, you can get more information about military culture trainings available by contacting the NH Division for Community Based Military Programs at the Dept of Military Affairs and Veterans Services, but if you are in a different state, I’d encourage you to call the Department of Military Affairs in your own state to ask about available training resources. One high-quality training resource available nationally that I recommend is PsychArmor. PsychArmor specializes in military culture educational products for healthcare providers, Veterans, employers, military family members and more. PsychArmor creates and build custom learning pathways tailored to meet your organization’s needs and also has more than 250 free courses currently available to individual learners online. In New Hampshire, we have a customized Military Culture Online Training Portal free to providers that was created by PsychArmor. You can find more information about this at our Dept of Military Affairs & Veterans Website or access it with the QR code you see here.
A third step to building a team and fostering a culture is to educate those you are serving about the initiative or new policy or practice. Culture change requires consistency and consistent messaging to all stakeholders including the individuals you serve as patients, clients or customers. For the initiative to be successful, the what and why of your message and efforts must be confidently and consistently delivered.
Create a 30-second overview of the initiative or an “elevator pitch” that can be shared with internal colleagues and external customers or stakeholders. The listener to your “elevator pitch” needs to walk away understanding the importance of the initiative as it pertains to their role in or related to your organization. Tools are available in NH’s Ask the Question Toolkit to help you ensure consistent messaging.
These steps should help get you started with building a team and fostering a culture so that the initiative can be sustainable and successful. The Ask the Question Toolkit has a bunch of information, tools and resources that can provide more support for your initiative. Please check it out by visiting our website or using the QR code shown!