Daryl Thomson

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Daryl Thomson: This conversation started as a result of attending the last onboarding conference that happened in Atlanta back in January. As a delegate to that conference it was fascinating to sit and hear the onboarding experiences coming from what I heard as largely corporate, international and American companies. As a member of the Public Sector; I work for a Provincial Government, much of the information that I heard was relevant, some of it was transferable, but I thought there is good stuff going on in the Public Sector as well, stories that could add richness to the dialogue around onboarding and orientation.

I do not believe that corporations have the corner or have the market on how to do onboarding, and so I shared with Blake some of my thoughts around this and she said “Well, let us try to bring some of this back to the conversation that is going to be going on in San Jose.” So here we are.

I am honored to be here with my colleagues, talking about this, and to be able to represent a sector of life, really, organizational institutional life, that does not get a lot of conversation, I do not find, unless you happen to be working in that particular sector.

So it is good we have a cross-section of people here. The way the panel from what I understand is going to happen is we will each take 10 minutes or so to talk about our experiences, and then open the floor to questions. I think it is fair that questions can be directed to us or questions can be shared with people in here, because there is probably lots of good experiences and learnings that we can have from each other, so that is the preamble.

In preparing for this, I thought I am coming to Silicon Valley, so let us go to Yahoo! Answers, because we all know everything true is on the Internet. I wanted to start with kind of the question of “Why is it that the Public Sector is often perhaps not seen when it comes to promoting best practice?” So I did a quick look on Yahoo! Answers and the question that I zeroed in on was, Public Sector versus Private Sector. So somebody posted this question. Are Public Sector jobs more desirable than Private Sector jobs? If so, why?

Lots of responses. The responses were telling. Working in a civil service job for government and related entities usually offers a better pension, less quotas, ample of vacation and sick leave, steady work, not reflective of company sales, and chances for promotions and education within the organization.

One problem is that there are deadbeats galore in civil service, and those that have no concept of the real world. Interesting!

Somebody else said, “I agree with everyone about deadbeats in Public Sector and how much easier jobs are. I can cut the mustard in the Private Sector and busted my butt and gotten nothing in return. I am a new mom who needs stability, retirement, and all the cushy vacation time, my second interview is tomorrow.”

Public Sector jobs are the worst, like it goes on and on and on. But I guess I am here to say that I am a proud member of the Public Service. I have dedicated my entire career to working on behalf of the people of British Columbia, and I believe that there is much that we contribute to society, and also from an organizational perspective, the work that we have done around Orientation and Onboarding hit some of the high notes that we have heard already today, and I would like to share that with you.

Just to give you a sense of where I come from: Canada. The big picture: British Columbia, Canada's most Western province. It is a big province, about 95 million hectares; only 30 countries in the world are bigger than British Columbia. We are bigger than France and Germany put together. We have a population of 4 million people, which is the third largest in Canada.

The BC Public Service, which is the nonpolitical side of the government. So I do not work for an elected official, I work for the Public Service that institutes programs and keeps the province running, that side of government. We have 30,000 employees, which makes us the largest corporate employer in the province. In 2007, we were named one of British Columbia's top 40 employers, which is the first time that a Public Service in BC has ever made a top 40 list.

The decisions and the policies in the programs that we implement and institute touches over 4 million people everyday. We have a tremendous reach in terms of the impact that we make in the lives of citizens. I wanted to share this with you. This is part of a new employee Web site piece that we have created and it is, I feel like I am doing Karaoke, and it is one of our senior executes, so a crash course and understanding government in my world anyway.

There is the premier who is the senior elected official in the province, Governor, kind of American equivalent. Then reporting to him directly is the Deputy Minister to the Premier and she is responsible for everything that happens in Public Service and beneath her then all the different departments fall out. So Department of Social Work, Department to Transportation and Highways and all these sorts of things and each one of these people is headed up by a Deputy Minister, so kind of Vice President, if you will, and she is the President and these are all Vice President level, so the Senior Officials.

And, what we have done is part of our orientation online piece is created a series of videos with senior leaders, with Deputy Ministers talking to new employees on topics of relevance to them and I picked James Gorman because he was my Deputy Minister and also because his perspective on working for the Public Service I thought was really helpful.

Announcer: It has been said that a wise person makes more opportunities than they find.

James Gorman: Well, I came into Government in 1995 and I answered a job posting that was looking for somebody who had a Masters Degree in Political Science plus construction experience and I have been working as a Gorman Group for many years before that. That was a signore assign (ph) for me but this was important that had a huge breadth of opportunities.

Announcer: James Gorman has worked in the BC Pubic Service for 13 years. During that time, he has worked in many different jobs in a variety of Government Organizations including the Public Service Agency, Ministry of Children and Family Development, Ministry of Advanced Education, Partnerships BC and Treasury Board. Today, he is the Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Education and these are his reflections on career development in the BC Public Service.

James Gorman: I think the great thing about the Public Service is that you can have a career within a career and so well I view that as one Public Service Career within the Provincial Government, the part that I have liked is the ability to every two or three years to try a different area of Government and learn a new line of business and new ways of doing things.

I think that careers moves and I am talking from me personally, career moves have been knowing in a broad direction where it is that I wish to go in terms of points on a campus. I know that I wish to go either North, South, East or West, but in my particular case, I have never had a road map, that sort of detailed path about well it is going to be this step and then this step and then that step and then that step.

The thing that I have found in the Public Service is that there is no end to fascinating challenges and fascinating public policy issues and big issues, big stuff that you can see impact the lives of four and a half million people in British Columbia or impact the way things are being done in this country. I am attracted to things that have impact and things that I can stand back form at the end of the day and see how it is different. Perhaps, it is the old bit of construction in me where at the end of the day you want to be able to stand back from the sake and can say, “Look, what we did today.”

The beauty about the BC Public Service is you can get that variety within the umbrella and under the umbrella of a singe employer and so we can offer you that variety. You do not have to feel like you are coming in and doing this one particular job for 25 years. That is not what we are asking from you. What we are asking from you is come and contribute, we will keep it interesting. We will give you a kind of variety and how far you want to go in the organization is entirely up to you.

Darryl Thomson: So that is one example of the kind of piece that we are putting on our Web materials to promote. Messaging to new employees around the kind of opportunities that we offer them and I also thought it was just kind of a good introduction to who I work for, who are my employer is and sort of the mindset that were coming to onboarding with.

Quickly, our orientation story started about a year ago where, two years ago sorry, wherein I was handed an orientation mandate to create a program for the 30,000 Public Servants that we have across the province and up until then we had a Web site that had a lot of information on it. I will be frank, it was not the best Web site design; it was not the most engaging content.

But the focus of the Public Service is moving, in my context anyway, is moving more towards an employee brand, we have taken on an employee branding initiative and the Mandate was we need to find a sense of pride, we need to reaffirm culture. We need to engage our new employees with the sense of who we are, again rather than just inundate them with forums and information and that kind of thing, so let us typically be un-government and try to engage people in a different way.

So we set out, did a lot of conversation across governments, across the Public Services, talked to a lot of corporations, few of the States and across Canada to find out what was making them tick and what they hearing and what they were experiencing in their programs and we came up with three priorities.

The first one was to really promote a strong Public Service Culture. What typically happens, I think in Government, is you are hired into a department, Department of Children and Family Development, Department of Veteran Affairs, Department of what have you, and that is the identity that you carry. We wanted to broaden that and say, “No actually, you are hired into the Public Service,” and then you might work for a different department, but your employer is the Public Service and we offered these great range of programs as a breadth of programming, these career opportunities.

We have a culture, we have a responsibility to the public. We are independent of the elected official, but we support the elected officials. The programs and policies we put in place to make the province work—make the province—happen that sort of thing. So we wanted to talk about responsibilities and expectations. We wanted to talk about ourselves as a green employer.

We have passed Legislation in British Columbia that and I think, yes that we are going to reduce Greenhouse gases by a third by 2020 and the Public Service itself is going to become carbon neutral by 2010. So we have as an employer, ambitious environmental objectives. We want to talk about that, because that hits some notes for the next generation of employees coming in what we are doing around the environment and what we are doing to be sustainable.

We are a bit unique in our employment world in terms of the terminology we use, some of the programs we have, things like Treasury Board, some of the budget cycles that we go through, some of the roles we have, although they have parallels in the Privet Sector, the terminology is a little bit different. We have Vice Presidents, we have Deputy Ministers, we have this person called the Deputy Attorney General who is the Senior Legal Official in the province.

We have something called Cabinet that we are responsible to, so the world of government is structured a bit differently that if you are coming in from outside, it might be a little bit new and we wanted to make sure that all employees coming in had to good basic understanding of that, so not even Government 101, we kind of wanted to go back to government Social Studies 11 or Social Studies 12 to give people the common understanding of what these different structures were, so that they had context and one of the things we found in our engagement surveys is that one of the key pieces to keep people engaged throughout their careers to give them the context about the work that they do and why the work they do, how it contributes to the processes that they are involved with.

And finally we wanted to design a program that balanced consistency with flexibility, recognizing different learning styles, recognizing the need for face to face versus online. We talked about going entirely online because our geographic distance, but it is hard to communicate culture online entirely. So with those three quick priorities, we came up with a couple of solutions and I want to focus in on one.

One is called Welcome to the Public Service, kind of a no-brainier name and it is one day where new employees from around the province, regardless of level, whether you are co-op student, whether you are a new Assistant Deputy Minister, whether you are any director or whatever you fit in the organization, you are e-mailed a personal invitation to come to Welcome to the Public Service Session and the day is structured around conversation.

No talk about forums, no talk about benefits, no talk about the traditional orientation stuff. The conversations that happen focus on story telling. So how did you come to be in the chair that you are in today? What is your role? How do you contribute? We hear from other employees who come and share their experiences inside Government. We spend sometime exploring Government the big picture, how the work that we do connects to the work of elected officials.

We spend sometime talking about the Public Service itself—what kind of career opportunities, what kind of learning opportunities. We have a partnership with International Development Organization, so we get leave to go volunteer internationally and we pick up the benefits while you are gone and hold the job for you so you can be gone for two years and come back this sort of thing.

After lunch, we move to an extended conversation around roles and responsibilities as I am sure you can imagine Government workers have a need to be accountable to be transparent and so we spend a lot of time talking, doing case studies. Case studies typically focused on the gray areas, about situations you will encounter as a Public Servant Employee. Things like somebody offers you a gift at a conference, can you take it? Something like your best friend is a consultant who calls looking for some information on a project that you know some information about; what can you share, what cannot you share, so all these kinds of gray world. We spend some time talking about that.

I do not know if I mentioned—the whole day is facilitated by two Deputy Ministers. So James and a colleague or two other deputies from two different departments, they carve an entire day out of their time and come and facilitate the day. We meet with them, we provide them facilitation guides, we do not give them scripts because they are not actors, they are bureaucrats and we coach them through the day and then how the conversation unfolds and where they take the conversation is entirely up to them, but for new employees to have exposure and access to two senior level officials for an entire day, for them sends a message.

At the end of the day, all of the new employees file out of the room like this that they are in and they are greeted by their buddy and their buddy is another member of the Public Service who has come to the ceremony or come to wherever it is we are having the session and they are partnered up. It is not a formal mentoring relationship, but it is a point of contact that a new employee has with an existing Public Service employee and they get a chance to talk about career, about Public Service to ask questions.

They mix and mingle for about half an hour. It is not from their own department. It is not even necessarily from their own city, but it is trying to break down now that silo to wall of departments and of geography. So new employees and their buddies then funnel into a very formal Oath of Employment Ceremony that is headed up by the Deputy Attorney General which probably is more impressive than it sounds, but here again he is the senior legal official in the entire province. He stands about 6'4” and comes in his legal robs and he swears everybody in, giving them their Oath of Employment and their Oath of Office, which we have to do as a matter of employment and in that Oath of Employment Ceremony, they talk about their responsibilities of being a Public Service Employee.

The ceremony is very formal. They get to walk up on stage, shake their hand, get their picture take, get a personalized oath ceremony. It is kind of like High School Graduation meets Government, but the feedback we have had from new employees is that it is a very meaningful process. It is immense learning that they have had during the day and they feel that it was the high point of their orientation experience so far. So in 120 minutes that is what we have done in the BC Public Service so far around the Orientation.

[Video Presentation - 00:18:28 - 00:20:40]

Steve Angelillo: The reason I wanted to show the video is, I always start this processing day with that video, so I try and get their attention the minute they will walk in the door, and what we are going to talk about in a few minutes is how we have changed our whole Onboarding and Orientation process at Kennedy Space Center. I want to tell you a little bit about my background so that you know where I was coming from when I took on this challenge and I worked for United Airlines for 19 years and did their new employee orientation at several stations throughout the system and the seven years ago I went to work for the Federal Government and did Onboarding or Orientation really for Homeland Security and two years ago started with NASA. So last year I was given the challenge of taking their Orientation program to an Onboarding program and try and partnering with other groups and other organizations within Kennedy Space Center and come up with a program.

So here is the journey that we made and what we have come up with. We had two-and-a-half days of lecture and tours as what the original orientation program had so what we did—we had a lot more to it. The first thing that we did was we came up with a graphic that kind of represented what we were doing and kind of gave us a brand because every one of the organizations that I had worked with really did not know what Onboarding was so we were trying to educate the work force, we were trying to get everybody to understand and support what we were trying to do.

There were several Onboarding components that we needed to incorporate into this umbrella and one was an in-processing, which was managed by HR Operations, which is the different organization than the one that I worked with. So, first we thought that we were going to have HR Operations handed that off to the HR Development and Recognition Office, but they were very reluctant to give up those responsibilities and felt that their experience in that area, that they thought that they needed to stay in that area.

So we partnered with them and what they do is when people arrive at Kennedy, we do an in-processing day and we touch forums as an introduction to NASA. They get their badge, they get their parking identification, they get a video welcome from the Center Director and we are do an introduction to the KSC Onboarding tools and resources which I am going to talk about in just a few minutes and then they have ethics training, so that is the first day.

We do not do an orientation on the first day. We are Government agency so we do not really bring on people, we bring on people every two weeks and the orientation program that we put together almost very detailed and it involved the lot of the Directors across the Center so we could not do in every two weeks, we do it once a quarter.

So the three-day orientation that we put together, we wanted to format that kept people interested and they did not get bored throughout the day so the format that we are using is half the day is presentations from Directors or organizational representatives. They visit different organizations throughout Kennedy Space Center and they get to talk with other employees in other organizations so that they get a feeling that they are part of this larger team.

As mentioned earlier, we do this quarterly, and we have to be really careful about the time that we do it. There is no set time. Quarterly we have to do that around the launches and we have it at the Kennedy Space Center Complex, which is a historical area, I do not know if any of you have been there, but it has a lot of historical data about Kennedy Space Center, so we thought that would be the best place to have our new employee orientation.

We have a historical perspective by Mars Rising narrator. He did a lot of work on the Mars Rising video that is on Discovery Channel. He happened to be at Kennedy Space Center, he works there. So I asked him if he would come, do the historical piece of it and he does a wonderful job. He spends about 45 minutes or an hour talking about NASA and the organization that you are about to become a part of, so I think it was real important to include that in that orientation and then the Directors or the Deputy Directors come and they talk about the organizations, they talk about the missions that they have completed, the missions that are certainly in front of us and the ones that we need to accomplish.

We have some interactive activities that we do. We have a Bingo that we play during the first day to get everybody acquainted with everybody else. We encourage the new employees to ask questions and the presentations we have available on our Web site, which is part of the tools we will talk about in just a few minutes.

At the end of the orientation, we always invite new employees to think about including new organization if their organization does not do a presentation or if they are not part of the tours that we do, we ask them to go back to their perspective organizations and if they think that their organization would be beneficial for new people or new employees to see that organization to please contact me and we have had several people respond to that request, so we have added several additional parts to our tours.

We have a follow up to the program. We have electronic surveys that go out each time that we complete an orientation, so that we solicit any suggestions or comments to better the process or better the presentation or the tours that we do. We want to try and make it as beneficial to new employees as we can. It also gives those new employees a voice.

We are in development of a six-month follow-up program that we will be implementing the first quarter of FY-09 and it is going to be information from focus groups and comments that we have gotten from the new employees. It is about communication, it is about working in a team environment. We have a lot of engineers: 75 percent of our employees at Kennedy are engineers, so we want to make sure that know how to operate and can get their word across in a team environment.

And we also want them to understand that when they are making a statement that it has to be professionally sound statement and that they has to have the statistical data to back that up and we want to make sure that they are making that adjustment to the NASA culture. I think someone mentioned earlier that they had a lot of acronyms in their business and I believe it was Kathy from Merck. We have a 157-page document of acronyms just for Kennedy Space Center.

We are also developing a 12-month follow-up, which will be available in the third quarter of FY-09. It is going to talk about career development and career pathing. We have a mentor program already and we are going to ask the mentors participate in this one-day program also, and it is going to talk about individual development plans and how to develop those leadership programs that we currently have available and rotational assignments and opportunities within Kennedy and NASA.

As I had mentioned earlier, we use that graphic on just about everything that we do. We print a program of all the three-day events and that graphic is on the front, the one that you saw in the beginning. We also have bookmarks that we have printed up and I think I might have enough to pass out in the room, pass those out and it has a thank you on it, for thanking the new employees for about joining the Kennedy Space Center Team.

We have posters that are throughout the facility that we have used that same graphic and we also have an invitation now that goes into the welcome packets for the new employees to attend this orientation. So some of the tools that we have created were the Welcome to Employees that in-processing day, we were originally not involved in that at all. It was nothing more than two hours of filling out forms.

So we asked for permission to attend and speak for an hour and the organization that we are working with and partnered with certainly thought it was a great idea also, so we had the Center Director make a video welcome, so he can be there every two weeks to welcome everyone. He does attend the three-day events every quarter, but he did do a video for us, so it is very relaxed and it welcomes everyone to Kennedy Space Center.

We have a references and resources links on new employee Web site that we have built. We have safety and health information. We have electronic copies of the presentations. That was one comment that we got every time that we sent out an electronic survey, nobody want to take notes. They want to make sure that they could sit there and absorb as much as possible, so we have electronic copies of the presentation available on the Web site and we also make it fun.

We tell everybody to bring their cameras and they take pictures and we post them on the Web site so there is an area for the pictures and then of course we have a calendar of Onboarding Events and that is it. That is how we have expanded our program so far. We are not quite finished.

We have our blog that is coming up. It will be available the end of June. They are working on it right now so I am exited. It will be the first time that we have had a blog at Kennedy Space Center. We do not know how it is going to go, but Brian had shared some insight with me a blog they started so I am feeling a little bit better now so thank you and I am glad you are here today.

Laurie Harkness: I think I want to begin by saying everyday when I go into work, I know why I am a Public Servant. There is a sign there that says, “The price of [Inaudible] is visible here.” I work for the US Department of Veterans Affairs and I work with soldiers that carry the wounds of our countries being what it is. I am probably the only non-HR person here. I am a Mental Health Ph. D. is that I have been asked to talk to you about Onboarding Returning Soldiers.

I am curious, how many of you are soldiers or who have served in the military? Thank you. Well, that is great. Does anybody have Afghanistan or Iraq soldiers presently in their employment in their companies? Alright, OK. Is anybody interested in because let me tell you they will make some of the most committed, dedicated productive employees you will ever have.

What I thought I would talk is just a little bit and you may want to add if you want to what I am going to start with is that what happens when somebody does go to war, particularly wars like our president conflicts and then some of the unique issues they are going to be struggling with when they come home. I am not an HR specialist nor an Onboarding specialist, but these are the issues and concerns that you need to have in mind if you are going to help them move on to successful and meaningful employment.

So war changes people. Is often for the soldiers coming home, it is the coming home to peace that is more difficult than going to war itself, is the soldiers will talk about war ages them, what used to be fun or funny is no longer fun or funny, is that relationships have changed, roles have changed. They no longer relate to families and friends the same. If they are going back into the work environment, there are very different employee coming home, is that many of them are going to be struggling with issues like depression or sleep difficulties. Some of them are going to be struggling with issues like guilt or concern because they are going to have left back in Iraq or Afghanistan, fellow soldiers that they still worry about being in harms way.

Many of them are going to be struggling with emotions that have been shattered and need to figure out how to put them together and find the meaning and purpose in their lives to move on in a productive way. No matter whether you are in the active duty, the Guard or Reserve, is some the issues are the same, is that each soldier's experience is going to be unique and it is going to be different, is in when they come home is that process is going to be difficult.

Those of you that already have employment family members, be sensitive to their needs. Many of these soldiers are not only being deployed once, but they are being deployed twice and the loved ones left it home need a lot of support, particularly if they are finding themselves as single parent so that you may find that they need extra days off. You may find that they need a buddy or somebody to talk to. They may need babysitting services, is what is important is to ask them what they are going to need.

So the present soldiers range in age from high school kids to grand parents. One of the things we know 20% of the present force are women and a large number of those women are serving in military or in combat roles, number one; and number two, a large number of them are coming home struggling with military sexual trauma and harassment issues and we are going to need to be sensitive to picking up those issues within them.

So that our older soldiers and does anybody have an idea when I say our older soldiers, but what age do you think I am saying: 27 years old; our older soldier coming home are more likely to have some job skills that are more likely to have a sense of their talents, their skills, their abilities, their strengths, also their limitations and they are more likely to go back to their pre-military jobs. So if they were computer programmer before they are likely to go back into that business. They may need special accommodations, which I will get to in a minute.

Our younger soldiers are going to be people for whom the military was their first real job. Before they were in the military, they had typical high school jobs like retail or fast foods. They saw the military as a stepping stone. They saw it as a place that they were going to be able to get these tools and the skills to become productive employees, but in the military for this group, they have learned several very important things. They have learned about power and hierarchy. They have learned how to take orders. They have learned the importance of mission and culture. They have learned the power of working together as a team for a better outcome.

So that when you think of employing them, is that they are going to come with a skill set that to me in some ways is as valuable as the other skills. We can teach them the skills, but if they do not have those abilities that process is going to be much more difficult. So, let us talk about some of the needs, accommodations they may need. I treated a young soldier who has been in both Iraq and Afghanistan, he has two Master's Degrees. He is the second in a command of not a HR Department, but a department on a similar level in a large healthcare setting.

He is very good at his job. He gets lot of accolades and he cannot wait to leave this job. Every weekend his session he talks to me about activating his resume and getting out. The reason: his office is in the basement where there are no windows. If you have been in war, you need a place where you can see what is going on around you and things like lighting and egress has become very important.

So here is a company that has a great employee that is going to lose him, because of space, environmental needs. Ask your new soldiers or your returning soldiers what needs? Do you need a more comfortable space to work? They will tell you what they need. I have another man that works as a computer program operator and he is in an off space with open cubical and he is on the busy corridor and he is finding himself very easily distracted and he is finding himself startled. So we worked with his therapist who helped him go to his supervisor and ask, “Is there another place that you could put me? And he explained why and now he is on a much less busy hectic area and is a productive employee of this company.

So like I say, soldiers are going to come with the knowledge of how to function as productive team members. Clearly defining, as everybody has talked over the last day-and-a-half, your organization's missions, goals and values are going to be very important. They also need to know how, what they are doing fits in with the overall mission and values of the organization. So that one of the first things I do when people come and I have had now 17 return soldiers working on my staff, is during the orientation stage, and by the way if you work for the government or if you work in Public Service, we all know that the first day your computers and your telephone and your beepers are not there.

The reality is that it takes weeks and weeks at least in my organization and the most important thing I do is tell people realistically what they can expect and then to learn how their role fits in the overall structure of the organization, is they spend their first couple of weeks going around to other programs that interface with their respective programs and learn how they are connected and how they are going to support each other and how the skills that they are going to be learning and developing are going to be connected to the overall mission of our organization and if you have not guessed, mine is community-based mental health and is that the people that are doing the housing are as important as people that are delivering the services.

Safety: creating a safe environment where people can ask questions is going to be extremely important to the long-term success of this individual. In fact, I would say that safe environment is the key, everything else is secondary to that. Assigning Mentors and mentees and buddies; if you have other people that are veterans who have served in the military, they do not necessarily have to been in Iraq or Afghanistan that will help with the safety issue and that will help that person feel more comfortable speaking up with some of their needs.

If you do not know what someone, for example, if you are interviewing a soldier do not assume you know something about them. A soldier, if you have met one soldier, you have met one soldier's experience. It is very, very important to ask them what was the typical day like? Tell me what your experience was like? You are going to find some people have mental health issues.

If you see that, if you notice inconsistencies in their behavior, if you notice inconsistencies in their productivity, ask them directly, for some of them that is going to be exactly the statement or the response that is going to help them get to the services and supports they need, not only to feel better about themselves as individuals, but to be better and more productive employees for you.

You are going to notice some of them are not looking in your eyes. It is not because they are being disrespectful. It is because maybe it is the shame that they may have felt over something they did or it maybe the hyper vigilance. They are always sort of looking to see what is going on around them. You can support them by saying something like “Are you comfortable?” You do not have to address in that case directly the behavior.

I am going to close with saying one of my veterans when I told him I was coming here said this for me to tell you all, be flexible around time boundaries. I have a soldier who needs to see me at lunch time. He comes in early and he leaves late, so we can take an hour and 45 minutes to come see me during the day, that you will get more money back by giving him that space than by telling him, I am sorry we are 9 to 5 organization.
[NOTE: This audio dictation abruptly ends at this point.]