The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is taking steps to improve its culture and become a “healthier” organization, DOE acting EM Assistant Secretary Mark Whitney said yesterday at the Weapons Complex Monitor Decisionmakers’ Forum in Amelia Island, Fla. EM “needs to be a healthier organization than it is right now,” Whitney said. He added, “I’d like to see us build an organization where people trust one another, where peers trust peers, where employees trust supervisors, where managers trust the employees and where ultimately people admit their mistakes and ask for help to try and overcome them. We want to be an organization where people respectfully voice their perspectives on issues, and voice their disagreements when they have them.”
Additionally, EM should become an organization where “informed decisions are made on a regular basis and where we can actually articulate the rationale for those decisions,” Whitney said. He added: “We need to be an organization where we hold each other accountable, where workers will help each other stay on top of issues, where first line supervisors will provide honest and helpful feedback to one another, where the leadership in our department and our contractors both in headquarters and in the field will challenge each other but also help each other make sure we are doing the things like consistently applying policies across the entire complex.”