The RE Group Executive is very pleased to announce the winners of this year’s RE Group Commendation, recognizing their sustained and impactful efforts towards the common interests of RE members.
This year’s winners are Ms. Patricia Moorhead, Dr. Patrick Dooley, and Ms. Josee van den Hoogen, three Defence Scientists from Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC). Their analysis of the Public Service Employee Survey (PSES) data over the last six years—and the creation of tools for others to do their own analysis—has benefited their fellow members and improved working conditions for everyone who works at Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), including over 500 RE members and many more PIPSC members.
Their work touches directly on many of the areas for which the RE Group Commendation was created, for example:
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Working conditions for government researchers. The nominees have analyzed multiple years of PSES data, each time providing multiple briefings to DRDC’s senior management team as a whole, as well as to individual research centres. Their approach has included carefully comparing organizations within DRDC and with the rest of the public service. This has allowed management to implement targeted responses to DRDC centres with relatively low ratings and draw inspiration from those that were most positive on others. For the 2020 analysis, this approach was extended to a comparison specifically to two other large research organizations in the federal government. The datasets were open to all members of their centre to participate in the first-ever ‘hackathon,’ a highly successful event that has since become an annual tradition created and run by the team.
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Evidence-based decision-making. The team has curated data and created multiple new visualizations that provide a much more detailed evidence base for management and PIPSC to focus on the most pressing issues affecting the organization at both macro and micro levels.
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Science and research communication. The PSES tables available on canada.ca are not particularly user-friendly and do not allow direct comparisons between organizations. The nominees have done incredible work to bring the data into a common format and then build meaningful visualizations from it. For instance, the “OUTER” method highlights where a given director-level organization has more extreme results (below the 10th or above the 90th percentile) than every other director-level organization in the public service. This allows a discussion to focus less on the absolute value of responses and instead on where an organization is an outlier. The web application they developed includes compact representations of sentiment distribution and percentiles as histograms or heatmaps.
We encourage all members to look for a call for nominations in the coming months and consider deserving nominees.
Congratulations again to the team!
The RE Group Awards committee
(Eric Hortop, Matthew MacLeod, Chris Perry, Xiaolan Wang)
(Ms. Patricia Moorehead receiving her award from Dr. Andrew Billyard at the RE Group AGM)
(Photo provided by Ms. Josée van den Hoogen)