Steve Johnston's initiative and customer service earn him Facilities Services Employee of the Year
Steven Johnston’s enthusiasm and ability to find solutions has earned him Facilities Services Employee of the year honors at Virginia Tech.
Johnston is an enterprise systems training and development coordinator and his job is to find ways to make tasks more efficient using technology.
He works with units within Facilities Services to determine needs, identify processes, and then develop a solution using HokieServ, the maintenance management computer system for the university.
Most recently, Johnston developed the HokieServ Lease Module, which turned an effort that used to take almost two weeks of manual work into a process than now takes less than a day. He digitized all leases, helped Real Estate Management streamline their process, and trained staff how to use the technology.
“Steve was nominated by his coworkers for showing extraordinary initiative and going far beyond his job description to develop new processes,” said Chris Kiwus, associate vice president and chief facilities officer. “Steve has great pride in his work and in the Facilities Services mission. He serves the university with great enthusiasm each and every day.”
Johnston also helped implement a way for employees to track work, costs, and time using mobile devices. He oversaw a team of students to write user guides and deploy more than 80 iPads throughout Facilities. The new mobile tools save each worker at least 30 minutes each day.
His nominator wrote, “Steve is known as the "go-to" guy for anything related to HokieServ. He is an outstanding employee and serves as an excellent role model for his work ethic and his desire to help people do their jobs well. Virginia Tech and Facilities [Services] are extremely fortunate to have Steve as a key member of our team.”
Johnston began his career at Virginia Tech in 2003 as a fire protection technician. Later he moved into facilities preventative maintenance and joined facilities enterprise systems in March 2013.
The Facilities Services Employee of the Year is selected from those nominated for employee of the month during the past year. A committee of department employees reviews each nomination to choose the yearly winner.
Any member of the university community can nominate a Facilities Services employee of the month by filling out a form on the Facilities website.
Dedicated to its motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), Virginia Tech takes a hands-on, engaging approach to education, preparing scholars to be leaders in their fields and communities. As the commonwealth’s most comprehensive university and its leading research institution, Virginia Tech offers 240 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to more than 31,000 students and manages a research portfolio of $513 million. The university fulfills its land-grant mission of transforming knowledge to practice through technological leadership and by fueling economic growth and job creation locally, regionally, and across Virginia.
