Challenge
At the National Park Service, risk management leadership identified a need to spark cultural and behavioral change around key safety issues for the workforce of full-time employees, seasonals and volunteers (20,000+). They identified building behaviors around open discussion of suicide prevention as critical for a 2024 Safety Stand Down and asked the Visitor and Resource Protection (VRP) training team to help them design/lead and evaluate training as part of this change management effort.
My Role
As Senior Instructional Designer with VRP, I represented the training and evaluation perspective for the Stand Down team (including risk management, safety, and wellness leadership) to understand the challenge, manage scope, and communicate expectations/requests for the training function.
Action(s)
I guided training discussions at weekly planning and strategy meetings and liaised with busy training managers and instructional designers, re-designed a Master accessible RISE template and boilerplate content, and built supportive resources for activities across all regions. I presented data from prior Stand Downs and led Stand Down leads through an exercise to develop surveys with performance-focused questions for various segments.
Result(s)
The Suicide Prevention Stand Down provided awareness of critical prevention techniques and contacts and supported workers with the desire to learn more (gain knowledge and ability) with key resources. The effort supported HR programs to develop a more Respectful, Inclusive, Safe, and Engaged workforce and drove increased engagement in more formal prevention programs and support services across the NPS.
*The NPS Associate Director acknowledged my efforts with a formal memorandum.