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 a culture of psychological safety as critical for the inaugural 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 attended weekly planning and strategy meetings and liaised with busy training managers and instructional designers, designed/maintained Master accessible RISE template and boilerplate content, and built supportive resources for guided activities and discussions across all regions. I personally developed 4 e-learnings and was team liaison for developing remaining 12 activities, providing quality assurance under tight deadlines. I further collaborated with Stand Down leads to develop surveys with performance-focused questions for various segments, then analyzed resulting actionable data using AI and briefed leadership on outcomes and potential improvements.
Result(s)
The Psychological Safety Stand Down spread awareness and supported desire for culture change across 20,000+ employees and volunteers; knowledge and ability were provided through concurrent rollouts of more formal training in Operational Leadership and the NPS Director’s initiative to develop a more Respectful, Inclusive, Safe, and Engaged workforce.
* The NPS Director recognized my efforts with a personal letter of thanks.
Project Link(s):