FROM THE DIRECTOR OF
ACQUISITION CAREER MANAGEMENT RONA LD R. R ICH A R DSON JR .
THE ARMY ACQUISITION
WORKFORCE OF THE FUTURE A
lmost three years ago, everything changed. Our organizations sent people home to telework full time for what many thought would be a short-term situation, which has since turned into a complete revision of how we do work across the Department of Defense and the U.S. Army.
I’m the type of leader who prefers to lead by walking around. I see value in knowing when and where people are working. I gain a lot of insight from stay-behinds with my colleagues after meetings. I appreciate the head nods and smiles I would get when speak- ing to a larger group of people. I also think the era of spending five days a week in the office is behind us, and we’re moving into a new environment of hybrid workplaces and flexibility—and I’m looking forward to it.
RELATIONSHIPS ARE KEY Te relationships established among our workforce before COVID-19 hit were key to our success in those first few months of the transition to full-time telework. We didn’t have all the tools we needed—we attempted conference bridges and virtual meetings but lacked enough VPN ports—but we were all in this together, working for an orga- nization that had an established ethos with people we knew and trusted.
As time went on, people moved on and new people were brought into the organiza- tion—new people who have yet to be assigned a cubicle and have never shaken their teammates’ hands. As a leader, I was challenged to figure out how to bring them into the organization and foster those relationships.
Tat’s where Microsoft Teams came into play. Microsoft Teams was a game changer. It allowed me to check in on my people, to see them and establish that sense of commu- nity. It gave me that face-to-face capability. As Timothy James Keilty and John Z. “Jack” Burke wrote in “Chat Me On Teams,” a recent Army AL&T article, “Te chat, group chat and file-sharing functions of Microsoft Teams provide the means to keep the conversation alive in a telework environment. It is how people get real-time updates; more importantly, you keep the entire team in the conversation. It is how you poke your head into someone’s cubicle in a telework environment.”
112 Army AL&T Magazine Fall 2022
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