Staff Scheduling and Department Coordination for Government

Transcription

1 Staff Scheduling and Department Coordination for Government

2 Introduction Staff coordination and scheduling can be a challenge for any organization. Managing an on-call or shift rotation is often done manually, on whiteboards and in spreadsheets, a cumbersome task that can eat up valuable time. In addition, these manual processes can lead to inefficiently utilized resources, as special skills and certifications are not easily discernable. Disruptive events, especially those that create additional staffing strain, require the organization to run seamlessly, even more so than on a normal or uneventful day. Meeting adequate and efficient staffing levels is typically the first obstacle that is faced for any event. A critical communication system can help you coordinate staffing requests, by giving you the ability to reach a large audience almost immediately. Using a critical communication system effectively for staffing requires more than just blasting out mass messages. Following best practices can ensure that you follow applicable policies, laws, and regulations, minimize confusion and aggravation for your staff, and.make certain that you have the skill sets on hand that you need. With the right system, you can enact these best practices, and drive organizational accountability, tracking the results of each event and defining improvement in needed areas. Staffing Challenges: Call Trees and Manual Processes Proper staffing is essential for a department or agency to run effectively. Typically, administrative resources manage staffing demands through spreadsheets, call trees, printed calendars, and chains assigning shifts and schedules based on a staff member s job function, seniority, last shift worked, and many other criteria. This process, on its own, is time-consuming and potentially error-prone. Add to this the obstacles of daily operations, for example, a staff member calls out sick without warning. An organization with manual staffing and scheduling processes may need to then find a call list, ensure that the employees being called fit the specific job needs for the opening, and begin the time-consuming process of trying to reach a replacement. Additionally, what if that call out happens outside of normal business hours, when administrative staff is long gone? Other staff members would have to make the staffing calls, reducing their ability to perform their regular duties. For example, in a police department, if dispatch center employees are needed to handle staffing requests, it reduces the resources available to answer emergency 911 calls.

3 Managing On-Demand Organizations and Staffing For on-demand organizations, such as an emergency operation center (EOC), there is an additional staffing and scheduling challenge they can have no need for staff at one moment and then suddenly, in an emergency, have immediate staffing needs. This process often starts with a key response team being called in to assess the situation; this team would begin to identify resource needs and expand the EOC staffing. These staffing requests are typically done using call trees. And if the situation in question looks like it is turning into a large, regional emergency, those call trees could include representatives from all city or all county departments: representatives from the Public Information Officer (PIO)'s office, representatives from the mayor city managers or county commissioner's office, and representatives from impacted regional services, such as water, municipal services, or utilities. In a large scale emergency, almost every office in a government organizational structure has to be contacted, and EOC representatives must rapidly communicate what response or involvement is needed. This generally means that someone must pick up the phones and get the right people on staff but who is that someone? For many organizations, this role is filled by whoever is available, including dispatch center employees. There are a few problems with this, however those employees are needed for other functions, especially during an emergency when calls from citizens are flooding in. Moreover, because the processes are manual someone needs to go through a list, verify that the right people are being called, and wait for an answer it extends the amount of time that these staff members are away from their critical duties. While EOC activation is just one example, these same staffing issues occur in other departments during disruptive events: the police departments, fire departments, health departments, municipal services, water departments, and power departments. In many cases, volunteer agencies also need to be contacted so they can begin responding. For some organizations, fluctuating staffing needs can be caused by conditions other than emergencies. For specialty departments, including The Department of Mental Health, The Department of Environmental Health, Human Services, Department of JusticeDepartment of Transportation, Department of Parks and Recreation. IT, and Department of Transportation, each have similar high volume staffing requirements, at various times, which include the same manual processes and pose the same challenges as emergency management staffing.

4 Eliminating Perceptions of Favoritism or Preferential Treatment At the highest level, one of the most distinctive issues in staffing, in any city or county agency, is union considerations and staffing preferences. In some cases, a single department can include a mix of both union employees and non-union employees. In other cases, departments are all union or all non-union. Often, union rules dictate specific employee call down procedures that have to be followed, adding to staffing complexity. These rules must be adhered to even during non-scheduled shift call outs, including emergency response that requires a rapid increase in staffing. For overtime opportunities, which involve the ability to earn above and beyond what the salary is for any particular group of union employees, there are seniority processes that must be followed. The ability to make requests to an individual or group in a specific order of seniority, providing a period of time to respond, and then call the next person or group in order is not only important it's an absolute requirement. These contact processes also need to be carefully documented to prove compliance. Consider the typical manual process for recruiting employees for overtime shifts: if there are seven people who have signed up as available for overtime shifts, an administrator makes these requests by grabbing a hard list and starting at the top. Repeatedly, when overtime shifts are available, the first one, two, or three people on the list seem to always get the shift, because out of the first three the administrator calls, there's always somebody who accepts. The people at the lower end of the list may begin to feel that favoritism is given to the three people at the top of the list. Organizations often seek to rectify that perception through some type of random system of selecting off a list or moving people up a list. But this adds additional complexity and margin for error in the staffing process. Leveraging a Critical Communication System for Staffing Leveraging a critical communication solution to automate staffing communication and scheduling offers a remedy to outdated, manual staffing processes and paper schedules. An industry leading solution should allow administrators to create multiple calendars and shifts with rotating schedules. Instead of displacing employees needed in other areas and waiting for required staff to respond to calls or s, a system can be used to automatically broadcast a notification through various contact paths based on a calendar, shift, skill set, qualification, and other criteria.

5 A critical communication system can also eliminate biased processes and perceptions of favoritism. By assigning contacts to a group within the system, sending requests to that group, and awarding shifts on a first come, first served basis, shifts are assigned in an order of response based on time of receipt and speed of response. Staffing resources can go through their employee optin page, and can make sure that their availability of overtime numbers are best suited to their response process. They are then responsible for making sure that when those device types are being contacted for overtime shifts, that they're available to respond to them. This means that those resources who are motivated to take overtime shifts have the availability to put in the devices that they can most rapidly respond to. This type of multi-modal, integrated on-call notification functionality can also be a major benefit to state and local governments during an emergency, when all resources should be focused on response and resolution of a situation, not locating and contact staff members a critical communication system makes this possible. Optimizing Contact Management: Associating Location and Attributes During any situation, organizations must take into account the characteristics of potential staff resources in order to make informed and educated decisions when it comes to staffing. Is the resource available for work? Do they have the proper skill sets needed for the shift? Have they recently gotten off a shift? In the case of emergency staffing, are they able to respond quickly? When managing staffing requests with a critical communication system, proper data management implementation would include location, skill set, and certifications associated with each staff contact record. Building these criteria into the contact record can help increase the chances of a successful event resolution, because it enables you to not only automate the verification of who is available, but also the verification that they can perform the functions needed and respond at the right time.

6 Depending on the situation, the need for rapid response can vary. Employee proximity to an event plays a large role in response time; if staff resources are affected, they can be delayed or completely unavailable. If they are available to respond, you need to know how far they are from the event to estimate their possible response time. For timesensitive situations, for example, if a fire department needs to coordinate a search and rescue team for a swift water rescue, you might need to define a radius where a response is possible within 15 minutes it wouldn t be of any help to contact someone who lives 45 minutes outside of the affected area. In addition to location-based information associated with staff members in your database, you should also group contacts by team or skill set. For the aforementioned swift water rescue, sending too broad of a request to local resources might confuse employees who aren t suited for this task and result in responses from willing but unqualified resources. With an awareness of who can perform the necessary functions, you can send highly targeted messages, and establish response quotas, automating the process of making staffing requests. Creating logical groupings of contacts has the added benefit of decreasing the time it takes to manually determine whether or not a person or group can perform a certain function, decreasing response time and improving the potential outcome of some situations. Creating Accountability within Your Organization In addition to improving outgoing staffing requests, a critical communication system can also give you the ability to audit each event. Doing so can help improve key areas and expose issues that might be a problem during future events. Moreover, when dealing with specific groups, it can help you confirm that staffing rules and guidelines were followed. On-call employees need to be ready at a moment s notice. A critical communication system can improve the speed at which notifications are sent, and the probability of those messages reaching the recipients, by cycling through contacts paths, including voice calls, SMS, and . But even when staff members receive a message, they might not respond quickly or at all. With auditing capabilities, a system can track the timeliness, frequency, and responses of employees, allowing superiors to make changes where necessary and address individual issues, improving response and staffing coverage.

7 Use of an employee opt-in page, which provides a web portal where staff can manage their profile information, helps take accountability a step further, allowing employees to enter additional contact details and designate which communication method is best for specific times of day. This helps eliminate non-response or delayed response, as well as employee upset, when shift opportunities come up for example, if an overtime opportunity is missed because the contact was called on their landline when they weren t home. At the time of day when a shift is available, one employee may want you to contact them via while another via SMS. A critical communication system can support this type of multi-modal communication, and also provides tracking, so that you can confirm that employees were contacted via their preferred method. In addition to ensuring compliance, this also puts the onus on the employee to go into the system and fill out their information to be sure they re being reached via the correct contact path. Key Recommendations For government agencies, sufficient staffing is essential for the overall success of operations this especially true during emergencies. However, staffing challenges during even daily operations present hurdles to ensuring that all openings are filled with the right personnel. Some of these challenges include: Call trees and manual processes On-demand staffing Perceptions of favoritism or preferential treatment Organizations can address these issues by following best practices, including: Leveraging a Critical Communication System for Staffing by doing this, you can eliminate the time consuming and confusing task of having someone manually go through lists looking for the right people and then trying to reach them. Optimizing Contact Management leveraging a communication system alone isn t enough; associating details with contact records, including location and skills, and allowing the grouping of contacts using these attributes, helps you ensure that the right people are reached with staffing requests. Creating Accountability within Your Organization on-call staff need to respond quickly when a notification goes out. Patterns in response rate and response by device type can be tracked identify irregularities and drive departmental improvement. A critical communication system can allow for escalation of staffing requests based off of attributes such as seniority ensuring favoritism is eliminated The main goal is to always have the right person, in the right location, with the right skills at the right time responding to a staffing request especially during an emergency.

8 About Everbridge Everbridge provides a unified critical communication suite that helps clients be better prepared, make better decisions, and respond quickly and confidently during disruptive events. When an incident happens, whether it s a natural disaster or an IT service outage, we automate communications to ensure that the right messages get to the right people at the right time. Widely recognized by analysts as the market leader, Everbridge solutions are trusted by clients in all major industries and government sectors to connect with over 50 million people around the world. THE ONLY END-TO-END PLATFORM Planning: Everbridge is easy to set up, maintain, and organize, meaning that you re always ready for a quick, coordinated response. Everbridge ensures that the right messages get to the right people - with the most advanced opt-in portal on the market, streamlined integration with internal and external data sources, and simple group and contact management. Assessment: When trouble strikes, you need rich insight, presented simply - so you can quickly assess potential impact and make an informed decision to avoid loss. Everbridge offers the only solution on the market that meets these demanding requirements, with the most advanced interactive dashboard in the industry. Response: In critical situations, ease-of-use can mean the difference between an effective response and a mistake that carries serious consequences. Everbridge is engineered to be simple to use under pressure, with a user interface that accelerates time-to-message and reduces the likelihood of errors. Delivery: Even during large-scale disruptions, Everbridge stays on. The most advanced platform in the industry ensures that you reach your contacts - every time. And with worldwide coverage and capabilities, including globally local calling infrastructure and data storage, we re ready to support you wherever your people are in the world. Visit to learn more.