This Fairfax County award recognizes proven leadership, initiative, and excellence among administrative assistants through a record of consistent, reliable performance that is a positive example to others, a commitment to leadership and being willing to take on new direction with skills, technologies, unproven ideas, and/or projects that far exceed normal expectations.
Reston Community Center is delighted to announce that Nick Burt is a recipient of the 2024 Fairfax County Sharon Bulova Award for Exemplary Administrative Professionals. During his tenure at Reston Community Center, Nick has been highly valued by his coworkers within his work unit and throughout the agency due to his professionalism, initiative and dedication.
Following a recent transfer, Nick leads RCC’s Customer Relations team as the Assistant Director. He manages a diverse group of 16 employees who work in full-time and part-time capacities. He is keenly aware of the diverse community RCC serves and strives to hire support staff who reflect the community. RCC maintains two service desks that operate seven days a week, for 12-hour days. Managing this type of environment both internally and externally can be very challenging. Nick has fully embraced his new role at RCC and models excellence for the Customer Service Team. He is committed to inspiring and motivating the team to achieve organizational improvements, resulting in both highly effective and efficient operations that greatly benefit our patrons.
In addition to his Customer Relations duties. Nick has shown a deep commitment to engaging other RCC departments. Nick worked with RCC’s Finance team to streamline the refund accounting procedures. By using DocuSign, the new refund practices reduce the required work hours to process a refund from start to finish and support the county’s zero waste policy by decreasing the use of paper.
Working with agency program directors, Nick has assisted with multiple community meetings by providing Spanish translation services for community members attending, thus creating a welcoming environment. He also worked to identify specific RCC forms for translation to make it easier for communities to access the services provided by RCC. Nick has also worked with the Equity Partnerships Director to ensure that key programs are appropriately staffed by multilingual customer service staff.
Nick readily jumped in to assist the Facility Services team during the vacancy of the Facility Services Director position. During this period, he helped respond to facility inquiries, assisted with rental setups where needed, took weekend on-call shifts, and supported communication with the facility team members making sure their questions and needs were met. With his keen attention to detail and the ability to quickly assess a challenge, Nick regularly offers workable solutions within the parameters of RCC’s policies and procedures.
Staff and patrons gravitate to Nick because of his leadership and communication skills. He’s reliable, responsible, courteous, trustworthy, a good listener and always willing to help someone in need. His pleasant demeanor leaves patrons and staff with a positive experience and a feeling of belonging to their community center. Nick conveys respect for all who enter RCC. He’s a wonderful ambassador for RCC and the County.
RCC congratulates Nick on the occasion of this distinguished award. This achievement serves as a shining example of what can be achieved through perseverance and commitment to the highest standards of public service.