HOW TO RUIN A DISPATCHER
Despite the recent favorable television exposure for emergency dispatchers and telecommunicators, in many jurisdictions dispatchers still get slightly more managerial attention than the furniture—and, in some cases, slightly less! To make sure that you are doing the best you can for your dispatchers, who represent the public’s first line of defense and often your lifeline, here is a compilation of communications management nono’s. This is by no means a comprehensive collection of errors, but it’s a good place to start.
MANAGEMENT NO-NO’S
Have a counterproductive attitude. “They’re only dispatchers” is a great way to devalue the contribution of your emergency communications staff. The implication here is that because dispatchers don’t perform firefighting duties, they are in some way less significant to the department. The fact is that firefighting is a team endeavor, and dispatchers, building inspectors, code enforcement officers, high-rise floor marshals, and school teachers all contribute to the cause. Now you may say, “That’s crazy! Of course 1 value the work our dispatchers do!” But ask yourself what comes to mind when the city council or the mayor says you must cut your budget. If you automatically think of cutting back on dispatchers’ raises, the equipment budget, or communications center improvements, then perhaps you occasionally regard your communications people as second-class citizens in your department.
In actuality, it is in your best budgetary interest to be good to your communications people. They are almost always the first contact that members of the (taxpaying) public have with your department. Often, when calls that do not result in any apparatus response are processed (some studies have suggested that there are 17 such calls for each actual response), your dispatcher is the only contact. Since first impressions count, and sole impressions count even more, it makes good sense to examine your attitude toward dispatchers. True, in most cases, they do not put out the fire, but that is not what they are supposed to do. And you never know where somebody a dispatcher has treated professionally is going to turn up —at a budget hearing, for instance. Naturally, a person who has been treated poorly by a dispatcher is even more likely to show up —sometimes on national TV, as anybody who watches network news will attest. It is hard to forget your response the first time you hear a tape on which a dispatcher tells a distraught caller, “Stop yelling in my ear!”
Don ‘t train dispatchers. Relying on “OJT,” or on-the-job training, is a great way to ruin dispatchers. The major problem with this “sink-orswim” philosophy is that everybody sinks—the dispatcher who is faced with events for which he/she has not been prepared, the caller who presents the events to the untrained dispatcher, the chief who faces liability for failure to train, and the taxpayers who will foot the bill for the eventual settlement (which, you can bet your next budget, will be a bigger bill than any training costs).
A supervising fire alarm dispatcher in a mid size city recently told me his concerns about lack of training. His city decided to expand the scope of the fire communications people to include ambulance dispatching. Incredibly, no additional training was provided to go with the additional duties. (Unfortunately, this was consistent, since no original training was provided to go with the original duties.) In any case, this supervisor was calling me because he knew of my work with dispatcher stress.
He described a situation where seasoned dispatchers “started to come apart” at work. Men and women who used to like their jobs now were reluctant to answer ringing emergency lines because they feared having to deal with something for which they were unprepared. One of his dispatchers even told him it reminded him of the apprehension he felt during his first year on the job 1 5 years ago. Not knowing what was going to be on the other end of the phone and whether or not he could handle it was easier to take when he was 23 years old and single than now, when he is 38 years old with family responsibilities. Besides, he felt the people he served deserved better than he could give.
His department had put its dispatchers in a very difficult position. Ironically, it was because the dispatchers were good at what they did and had a positive attitude toward the delivery of quality service that they were so distressed. Had they been uncaring or cynical, they simply would have taken the EMS calls “as best they could” and not have been adversely affected.
Check with your department’s legal counsel. You’ll hear about standards of care and the duty to train. You’ll hear about things that will cause you to reevaluate your training stance. And remember, orientation is just that. Training is an ongoing endeavor that reflects the dynamic nature of the society we protect.
Pay your dispatchers as little as you can get by with. There is not one good thing that comes from saving a few bucks in salaries. With less than competitive salaries, you do not attract as many quality personnel as you would like. You are not going to keep as many of the quality personnel you do attract.
I loved my job as a fire alarm dispatcher, but I don’t do it anymore. I got married, had kids, and had a choice: work several jobs for as far into the future as I could see, or go to school and learn to do something else. Like many of the talented people with whom I worked, I opted for the latter.
You are going to ensure that a good number of your people will be tired a good deal of the time, as they will have to work two jobs and/or much overtime to make ends meet. And tired people make mistakes. You will ensure a high rate of turnover and a low overall level of competence and confidence that come with experience. In most cases, if your senior dispatchers have fewer than 10 years on the job, something’s not right. New people on the job will not have mentors adequate to the task.
Nobody likes to talk about this, but it’s a reality nonetheless: The combination of failing to attract quality people and providing less than adequate pay provides fertile ground for corruption and dishonesty. In most cases, this is evident in “little” things such as abuse of leave policies and theft of office supplies. But it also grows more subtly into a corruption of the spirit where “It’s not my job” replaces “Can do” as the prevailing work ethic. This is hardly what you are thinking about when considering salary levels, but “penny-wise and pound-foolish” is a saying that could apply here if you don’t think about these things.
Disregard your dispatchers’ lives oidside the department. This is illustrated in many ways, such as when a dispatcher starts showing up looking like hell and you don’t ask what’s going on. After all, what dispatchers do on their own time is up to them, right? This is where an employee assistance program (EAP) can be a real help; it can decrease overall sick leave and increase overall efficiency.
Do you have arbitrary leave policies, where vacations are not approved until the last minute or are disapproved at the last minute after they had been approved earlier? You can argue that it’s for the “good of the service,” but in the long run you have greatly harmed “the service” and greatly disrupted the lives of the dispatchers and their families, contributing grist for the resentment mill.
Do you fail to hire enough help to offset attrition? By relying on ordered overtime, you cut back on the considerable costs associated with benefits packages, but you also could “ride a good horse to death.”
Keep dispatchers out of any decision-making process that involves their work. I know of one department that redesigned a communications center with all sorts of new buzzers and bells, doo-dads, and gim-gaws. They had the best input they could get from electrical engineers, data processing people, and chief officers (some of whom worked in the center 15 or 20 years ago). They did not, however, bother to ask the people who were working there day after day. Consequently, it surprised everybody but the line dispatchers when one of the new doo-dads —a nice electric map with colored lights to show the status of various units— could not be seen from most of the dispatchers’ new work stations. The message that these dispatchers got loud and clear was that their opinion was not valued. It goes without saying that management credibility was severely damaged in the process, thus making management’s job unnecessarily harder—when all they had to do was ask!
There are many ways to ruin a good dispatcher. These are just a few of them. I would be interested in hearing from dispatchers about some of the others so that in the future you can minimize the number of “ruined” dispatchers in your department. After all, you need these people.
