NUWC Division Newport employee joins NAVSEA’s Inclusion and Engagement Council

Photo By Public Affairs Office | Concepcion Vazquez, head of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport’s Information Systems Management Branch, was recently selected to serve on the Naval Sea Systems Command’s Inclusion and Engagement Council.  

NEWPORT, RI, UNITED STATES

12.11.2020

Story by Public Affairs Office 

Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport

NEWPORT, R.I. — She might be new to Naval Sea Systems Command’s two-year-old Inclusion and Engagement Council, but Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport’s Concepcion Vazquez has spent a lifetime investing in her community. Those experiences have helped her create a big to-do list for her 12-month stint on the council.

Inspired by a former branch head who helped her assimilate to life at Division Newport and mainland America, after relocating from Puerto Rico via Ohio in 2010, Vazquez wanted to make a similar impact on others. So Vazquez, head of the Information Systems Management Branch, in Division Newport’s Undersea Warfare Combat Systems Department, applied to and was nominated to the council this year, where she will help shape NAVSEA’s approach to advocacy and acceptance.

Vazquez, a resident of South Kingstown, Rhode Island, has been active across Division Newport for many years, first with the Hispanic community, as a volunteer with the Educational Outreach Program, and then she co-founded the Women in Science and Engineering Employee Resource Group (ERG). She recently was awarded the Career Communications Group Black Engineer of the Year Award as Modern-Day Technology Leader, for her commitment to shaping the future of STEM fields.

“I am the person that makes you feel accepted and part of the family, like you belong, that you’re not alone,” Vazquez said. “It all stems from my own experience growing up. I am adopted, so that feeling of belonging was very important to me. Then I started working here and I got frustrated when people told me they couldn’t understand me because of my accent. What does it have to do with my skills as a technical person? So that got me very vocal. Now I want to advocate for those who don’t have the voice or the confidence to advocate for themselves. That was a big driver for applying to the council. This is how we have true impact. Now I have a bigger voice, and I intend to use it.”

Established in 2018 by NAVSEA’s Executive Director Jim Smerchansky and former NAVSEA Commander Vice Adm. Thomas Moore to build and maintain a diverse, inclusive, and fully engaged workforce, the council is building awareness and reinforcing ongoing messages to create behavior change. Its 25 members represent diversity in education, experience, occupation, gender and culture from across the NAVSEA enterprise. Each person is anonymously selected by leadership in order to remove bias from the selection process.

The council’s four subgroups individually target diversity, inclusion, engagement and communications and strategize plans that pinpoint challenges and growth opportunities in those areas. Part of the diversity subgroup, Vazquez said she hopes to address how many people envision “diversity” as checking off the boxes. She wants to see real initiatives that will allow the workforce to use the words inclusion and engagement in daily operations. Vazquez said the verbiage that diversity must be “tolerated” is the first step, and it is one initiative the subgroup is spearheading.

“We proposed changing the name and wording, but it was just a task list, and ruins the purpose for people to know how to maintain engagement and inclusion activities through our day-to-day experiences,” she said. “So we are targeting organizational stability, because that’s what we’re trying to achieve. We want to drive action and empowerment, create accountability across NAVSEA so we can further the diversity agenda.”

In that vein, the diversity team is pursuing an initiative called NAVSEA Speaks to create communities and help build a learning organization to sustain leadership competence, and develop, instill and sustain a constructive workplace environment by creating a safe sharing space across the enterprise.

“We strive to foster long-lasting change through constantly sharing our experiences and knowledge across our enterprise,” she said, “to give NAVSEA one voice to empower change through education and knowledge sharing.”

Continuing the work of the previous council is paramount, said former member Sravanthi “Sree” Bodana, head of the Information Systems and Data Analytics Branch in Division Newport’s Undersea Warfare Platforms & Payload Integration Department. Those team efforts involved holistically incorporating inclusive mindfulness and unconscious bias awareness into supervisor training, efforts that were paused because of a presidential executive order on inclusion training in September.

“Council sub-teams were assigned a Senior Executive Service (SES) champion to facilitate movement to include this general training in the workforce through TWMS or Enterprise U,” Bodana said. “We also have developed content for stand-alone training for the general workforce and had it vetted and approved by SES champions. The executive order put a lot of those efforts on hold, but the plan is to continue working with the council for evolution and implementation across NAVSEA enterprise.”

Bodana said she also would like to harness the support of former council members and work with Vazquez and the new council to help leadership define advocacy and accountability, so that the entire enterprise can agree on a common approach. That might include forming a working group of supervisors and employees at Division Newport to gauge from their experiences what an employee advocacy program looks like, and what are the program’s roles and duties.

“ERGs don’t really have the power or tools to advocate. Ideally, an advocacy or ombudsman program should have access to leadership to make them aware of situations that need resolution and establish processes toward resolution,” Bodana said, adding that certain situations may not rise to the level of Equal Employment Opportunity Office attention, which an ombudsman program would handle.

Vazquez is eager to dig into her new but familiar advocacy role. Her team is already working on the council’s charter, is clearly defining its mission, and is summarizing what it hopes to accomplish during the next 12 months of its tenure.

“This might just be the one time I can make a true impact on my workplace, and I am so excited,” she said. “I can’t wait to have an initiative that I can start working on. I want to get it done, and I feel it’s a great opportunity to do what I want to do, which is impact change to make Division Newport and NAVSEA as a whole a better place to work. I love my job, love my people. I was born to do this. I am directly impacting the workforce.”

NUWC Division Newport is a shore command of the U.S. Navy within the Naval Sea Systems Command, which engineers, builds and supports America’s fleet of ships and combat systems. NUWC Newport provides research, development, test and evaluation, engineering and fleet support for submarines, autonomous underwater systems, undersea offensive and defensive weapons systems, and countermeasures associated with undersea warfare.

NUWC Newport is the oldest warfare center in the country, tracing its heritage to the Naval Torpedo Station established on Goat Island in Newport Harbor in 1869. Commanded by Capt. Chad Hennings, NUWC Newport maintains major detachments in West Palm Beach, Florida, and Andros Island in the Bahamas, as well as test facilities at Seneca Lake and Fisher's Island, New York, Leesburg, Florida, and Dodge Pond, Connecticut.

• Date Taken: 12.11.2020
• Date Posted: 12.11.2020 14:38
• Story ID: 384809
• Location: NEWPORT, RI, US