How do you build knowledge and community in an agency of 400? One idea is to start a podcast that interviews staff from across our agency so that we can hear and learn from one another!

This episode is hosted by friends of COAAA (and fellow podcasters) Brett and Carol, so they can put Katie White into the “guest seat” to hear about her vision of how this podcast will work.

Hosted in Katie’s office, the goal of the Pretend I Know Nothing About podcast is to learn and share all the amazing stuff we do.

Have an idea for an episode? Want to be our next guest? Email kwhite@coaaa.org.

Copyright 2024 Central Ohio Area Agency On Aging

Hi, this is Brett Johnson from Looking Forward Our Way with my co host, Carol Ventresca.

How are you, Brett?

Pretty good. We're on location at the Central Ohio Area Agency on Aging, HQ World.

Yes, world. Absolutely. The Central Ohio World.

With Katie White, as you all know Katie White, and we're going to be starting, she is actually going to be starting what we're going to call an internal podcast for you. Those that are working with and for and around Central Ohio Area Agency on Aging. What we wanted to do is talk to Katie about the genesis of this idea. Katie, welcome to the preview episode of this podcast. We'll let the name drop here in just a little bit. Sure. Thank you. But let's start with the idea of why you wanted to create something like this.

Well, it really started from this idea of wanting to understand everything about COAAA and doing a lot of shadowing. I started writing up my experiences and sharing them in what I was calling a blog, even though it wasn't really a blog. And I got really great feedback like, Oh, I didn't know the Front Desk did these things. I didn't know about this case management, and it was really well received. So I started thinking about how to build community and knowledge in an agency of our size, which is about 400. And I thought, What if we just started our own podcast and had people from different departments sign up to come on and share about themselves and what they do?

Well, Katie, we have found, looking forward our way, that the podcast is going really well when we have you or any of the other folks from the aging community as our guests. There's lots and lots of feedback and taps into the programs. And so it seems like even though folks may think that podcasting isn't the logical way, it seems like it's really working well in our aging community services and programs.

Yeah. And we talked about my goals for this, and I thought we have a lot of people that are out and about traveling, or maybe they have a long commute. This is an easy way to pop something on when you're in the car, 15, 20 minute episode, learn about a coworker, or even attend and share about yourself. So that's the goal, really, is to just learn and share all the amazing stuff we do.

We also thought, too, you could do this as a video as well. And maybe that's down the road, possibly, but that video adds another layer of I'm going to be on camera. What do I look like? Where audio can just be as we are in your office, sit around and talk about your department, your area of expertise with you so everyone else learns with you during.

This podcast. And it's a minimal amount of devices and programming that you need. V ideo adds to that level of complexity.

The level of take over your office time. time. Yeah.

Well, at least for our beginning episodes, I wanted to be comfy. I wanted to be casual. I wanted to be fun. And so yeah, holding off on video for a bit or maybe never doing it, I think is the.

Right route. It's an option. Be prepared. That's all we're telling the listener and potential guest. Be prepared, maybe. But right now, audio is so you don't have to necessarily print or... No, but jams, really. But we did.

Change the dress code and you can wear jeans.

There you go. So you can definitely get in there. I'm wearing jeans today. There you go. So the big thing was we were sitting around trying to come up with an idea of what to call this. And organically, you came up with, when you do these sessions, you start off by asking...

Pretend I know nothing about and then X, Y, Z. Exactly. Melina, case management.

Front desk. And she dropped this while we were on the Zoom call and I'm going, That's what it's called. That's what we should do because that's exactly what the intent of this podcast is. So the podcast will be called that. And then each episode, the title will be whatever department, whatever content, whatever idea you want to learn more about. So that should be fun. And I know you've sketched out, I'm sure, two years worth of stuff.

Oh, it's limitless. So many ideas.

So let's go over that a little bit in regards to what you do with those, maybe not necessarily the specific topics in mind, but what you do want to get accomplished in an amount of time for each episode. Sure.

Well, can I push this back on you and do a little meta thing and say, pretend I know nothing about hosting a podcast. There you go. Okay. Good. Right. S o some of the things we talked about were keeping it short, having maybe a consistent couple of questions that we ask every guest. Haven't finalized those yet, but maybe how you got into aging and definitely what are some of the challenges you're facing in your role and then what are some of the successes you're facing in your role or having in your role. Trying to think.

So it's definitely not going to be scripted per se. No, not scripted. There will be some questions that you do want to ask, but it's a conversation just like we're having right now. Literally, we do not have a script in front of us.

No. So we do. It's winging it. But at the same time, we know what we wanted to get accomplished with this episode. And you'll know that, too. So I guess what I'm trying to do is allay any fears of the guest going, What do you want me to say? It's like, talk about what you know.

Exactly. Yes, it should be comfortable and something like, Okay, tell me about a day in the life of an assessor or something like that. Yeah, it's just about what you do and what you know.

I think, too, particularly when you're in a large organization, it's very easy to think, Nobody knows what I do. So this is an opportunity to get that information across, but also to recognize that chances are pretty good. You don't know what this person does in the agency and how much it will help you in your job if you have a bigger vision of everything that CO Triple A accomplishes.

Definitely.

The schedule of how we'll produce and when you get these episodes will vary on when we come in to record. I think internally you'll allow people to know when they're available, I'm assuming, and you'll have a mechanism to trigger listeners, Hey, next one's available. Next one's available. We haven't really got those details put together in regards to where, how, that thing, but we want to make it as easy as possible for you, the listener, to be able to access and listen to whenever you want. So whether it be on your smartphone or on your laptop, whatever it might be, we're going to make it as easy as possible for you to be able to plug in and listen when it's convenient.

For you.

And I think, too, Brett and I want to give a shout out to everybody at COAA. It's a phenomenal team of people. You accomplish a lot every day. And I'm excited to hear about what all you're doing as an Advisory Council member.

Yes. All right, exactly. So let's turn the table and go tell us something about what your position does. Oh, sure. Let's turn it around and go tell us what we don't know.

About you. Okay. Well, technically, my title is the Administrator of COAA. I am in my ninth month here. We're rounding out my ninth month into my 10th month. And from colleagues across the US, they basically told me, Take a whole year as a new Administrator of an area agency on aging and just learn and give yourself grace and know that you're not going to understand all the details. My approach to that, again, was doing a lot of shadowing. For me to understand the big picture of something, I have to understand each and every little piece of it. So it's a lot of learning. There are a lot of budget conversations, shocker, a lot of policy conversations, HR posting jobs, trying to recruit people. We're in an interesting time right now where the resources and the nature of case management work are changing, and we have workforce shortages both for our own internal staff and case management, different positions here, but also for staff for companies that we rely on to be able to do what we do. So it's this interesting timing, and my philosophy is to learn from people about what they do and ask them what we should be doing next and really thinking about this inclusive space where we are connected as an agency and all working towards the future of aging and disability services together.

Katie, one of the things that we've had lots of conversations on are this lack of workforce, but also encouraging young people to get into the aging space. When people hear all of the great things going on at COAA, it sounds to me like this is also a wonderful way to make sure everybody knows all the good things that you're doing here and what a great opportunity for.

A career. I hope so. Really, there are things that I know about or that I'm leading or pushing or working with the administrative team on. But there's also all of these great successes going on in each of the departments that we don't know about. So, yeah, to your point, I love this opportunity to collectively learn about our strengths and just find out and share different things we might not have known about each other.

So if a staff member is not been in your office, you've got to go over a little bit about what's on the wall. I'm just starting to realize I love this that you have questions and answers from, I'm assuming a brainstorming session. It is. And about the different aspects of how to make, ultimately, every question is how to make COAAA better.

Yes. That's all it is. It is. Yeah. I love it. There's a huge intention, and one of the episodes will be around this, thinking about who we are as an agency and what we offer folks to show up to. So we know the world is experiencing challenging times right now. Inflation and just so much going on that can be difficult. So when you get to work, how do we as COAAA ensure that we are supporting your wellbeing? And this is this is a place where you can go and feel supported and safe. And so to that effect, we've been doing a lot of listening sessions and surveys with staff. And then what you see on the walls are these big Post it notes where I posted different questions and people could come in, give their answer. And then if somebody answered in a way that you agreed with, you put a little dot on it. So that's why there's dots on a bunch of stuff. So you'll see somewhere among there is changing the dress code to jeans, which had a million dots. And therefore... One over.

There does. I don't know what it says, but that's just full of dots. So that's very popular, whatever that is. That might be Pajama Day. I don't know. I have to read that.

Yes. So really showing your input matters and showing that if you take the time and you give feedback and you share things that you want or need or you think the agency should be doing, that we're listening and we're actually making that happen. So jeans is a really easy example, but there's actually a list of about 54 action steps that we're working on. The majority of them are all about staff and staff well being and retaining and recruiting good talent. Some of them are administrative, like evaluating the cost effectiveness of some of our programs and just making sure we're running things sustainably. And then others are external facing and thinking about how do we connect our amazing staff with all of the work going on externally, whether it's transportation committees or housing committees. We need to be at those tables and thinking about how we continue to listen to our consumers or folks that we serve. So there's this staff well being focus and administrative focus and then external partners focus that we're working towards together.

So just with that, you now understand why this podcast is necessary. Exactly. It's that onion peel of lots of different things going on, lots of moving parts that the goal of this is to bring it all together episode by episode, but to understand how... I think most people get how big this organization is, but you get in your little cocoon and you only do your one thing or three things or 15 things, but there are 100,000 things going on that is good to know about.

And the collective impact is important to know, too. We might lose sight of how each of us individually in our departments and in our work as a whole, we are meeting the mission of our organization to ensure that people can navigate the aging and disability experiences successfully. So it's about learning. It's about highlighting. It's about just plain old bragging about how great we are.

Let's.

Allow that for sure. That doesn't often happen when you're part of a governmental entity.

Right. We have to take time. I'm a big podcast listener. I'm a big article reader. And because there's so many external forces creating challenging times right now that we're all living in, I want COAAA to be the greatest place it can be to work. And we've got really great things going on, and we've also got plenty of space to grow. So the administrative team is really supportive about the workplace well being, and we've been doing a lot of work and reading articles and thinking about how we make sure we're supporting staff. And so it'll be fun to get out of our little echo chamber and test out some ideas and get feedback and just de centralize the communication and the decisions so that we can move forward together.

Excellent. I'm looking forward to helping you put this together. This is going to be fun. As I told you with all the other podcasters that I work with, it's a learning curve for me, too, that I get to learn a lot about one thing very fast. So I'm looking forward to learning about the different departments and COAAA as well, too.

You are going to love meeting all of the people and hearing the incredible work we do. I mean, when we look back in 10 years and see where we've gone in aging services and disability services, this is another pinnacle point in time. I think it's so cool that we'll be able to capture the boots on the ground, what's going on in people's living rooms that are on Medicaid and that need services. So clearly I'm biased because it was basically my idea with you all to start this, but I think it's going to be great.