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3 Ways to Use Snowstorms to Improve Your Agency

What a crazy winter we’ve had!

For many of you, today is another snow day with school closings, winter alerts, and road closures. And it’s March!

So how do you leverage snowstorms to improve your agency? Is there a silver lining in midst of all this snow?

Here are my 3 ways to use snowstorms to improve your agency:

1) Increase Your Citizen Engagement – one beauty of snowstorms is you will have a ton of citizens visiting your agency website trying to find the latest on road closures, snow removals, school closings, and official government information on the storm.

Don’t let this time go wasted – ask citizens to sign up for email updates on snow alerts and cross-promote other information that you find valuable.

You can solve their interest now in snow and have a direct way to engage citizens on other issues.

2) Practice Telework – Every snow day is a great way to practice teleworking and make sure you have your systems in place. Do people know how to communicate what they are working on? Are there communication systems (email, phone, instant messaging, internal collaboration) where people engage? Do they know how to use them? See some more suggestions from Pat’s recent post: 7 Keys to Unscheduled Telework Success.

3) Increase Your Employee Engagement – Just like #1, the same thinking would apply for U.S. Office of Personnel Management (or any HR division of an agency where people are looking to you on whether the office is going to be closed). Use this time when everyone is wondering if government is going to be shutdown to build direct relationships with employees, so you can message them on everything from benefits to getting feedback.


More GovLoop on Citizen Engagement:


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photo credit: David Kracht via photopin cc

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Terrence (Terry) Hill

Great points! I often hear from managers who say that they don’t have time to worry about communication and engagement. These snow days are great times to engage with your employees and your customers. I think that it is great that the first day of Telework Week is a snow day. Don’t waste this respite! Lean in and engage with your employees and customers.