6 Continuous Culture Integration

Culture integration is a strategic process that requires operationalizing progress and measuring impact to ensure success and continuous improvement. By leveraging existing infrastructure, such as the Equity Ecosystem and Employee Resource Groups, NSF strategically uses its resources and strengthens governance. The Implementation Plan incorporates accountability and tracks progress across all leadership levels, from informal leaders to senior agency leaders.

Figure 3: Strategic approach to continuous culture integration

Equity Ecosystem (EE)

The NSF’s Equity Ecosystem (EE) is an organizing concept aimed at increasing equity and promoting inclusivity across internal and external relationships, partnerships, and STEM participation. By integrating these areas, the EE fosters a culture of equity and continuous improvement, ensuring interconnected and effective efforts in broadening participation. The CDIO will develop and integrate business rules and practices that align with the EE, coordinating activities within CDIO frameworks. This alignment will enhance the EE’s work, incorporate cultural components, and create a more cohesive approach.

Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)

Staff are linking their work lives to their purpose and values.^[1] Increasingly, individuals want to be integrated into the decision-making process and involved in creating and implementing solutions. The opportunity for NSF is clear: positioning ERGs as sources of ideas and engines for change. When managed well and appropriately supported, ERGs become powerful enablers of an organization’s—and its staff’s—success.

ERGs are potent catalysts for advancing NSF’s culture. Under the auspices of the CDIO, the ERGs contribute to further integration efforts in several ways including, but not limited to:

• Co-planning Special Emphasis Program (SEP) observances to cultivate culture through raising awareness of the contributions, challenges, and achievements of diverse communities;
• Providing leadership development opportunities to current and future leaders at NSF;
• Nominating a dedicated Executive Sponsor to support advocacy for ERG goals, initiatives, and members at the highest levels; and
• Offering a diverse, valuable, and necessary perspective when serving in the capacity of Management Advisory Groups.

ERGs are critical in creating a culture of inclusion and a workplace that supports the diversity of identities, backgrounds, thoughts, and perspectives. NSF ERGs create an inclusive environment that adapts and elevates initiatives based on evolving needs to advance the culture forward. ERGs encourage staff to actively support and advocate for their group’s needs and create networks within NSF. Through resource sharing, ERGs exchange materials, best practices, and success stories, nurturing a culture of learning and growth while acting as change agents at all levels of the agency.

Implementation Plan

Accompanying this culture strategy is an Implementation Plan (see Appendix A). This plan ensures that internal and external culture efforts are actionable, aligned with four core lines of effort—policy, operations, talent management, and culture—and integrated into a cultural intelligence framework.

Leveraging cultural intelligence has become more important as workplaces and spaces become increasingly diverse. A cultural intelligence approach—working in harmony with the four core lines of effort—ensures that members of the NSF community effectively communicate and collaborate when cultural differences are present. Synchronizing DEIA initiatives, recommendations, directives, and priorities to the four core lines of effort and cultural intelligence framework provides an additional ability to develop organizational effectiveness measures.

The Implementation Plan is a living document with built-in accountability mechanisms that evolve according to the agency’s needs. Initiatives are added based on a wide range of inputs at the agency level, such as the Culture Forward Maturity Model, Denison Organizational Culture Survey (DOCS) results, Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), Management Directive 715 (MD-715), and the Underrepresentation Tool, among others. Progress will be reassessed each year to ensure the validity and alignment of internal and external activities most likely to achieve the most significant impact.