Employee engagement isn’t just about who’s a “good worker” and who isn’t — it’s about building successful teams. Last week, I discussed why regular feedback is critical to being a successful comm center. Feedback conversations are an opportunity for employees to gain insight for course correction. They’re also a good way to build rapport and…
When done right, coaching can help your employees improve, and it can make you a better leader too. In a 2018 Harvard Business Review article, Julia Milner and Trenton Milner shared research that came as a shock to many managers and supervisors: Most people in a leadership role don’t actually know what it means to…
Good feedback provides course correction, establishes trust and emphasizes employees’ strengths before weaknesses. Too often, telecommunicators take call after call and work shift after shift without receiving one key piece of support: supportive feedback. In comm centers across the country, these employees do their part by working hard and saving lives, but they don’t receive…
If you’re struggling to get the right people in the seats (and keep them there), your hiring process could be to blame. More and more directors are bemoaning the fact they can’t seem to get the right people in the seats. Low staffing and high turnover drag down even formerly successful centers, and leadership teams…
By Jeffrey Vilk, Guest Writer “9-1-1, where is your emergency?” It seems like such a simple phrase now — a phrase that’s almost taken for granted. You dial those three numbers and expect the same response when calling. However, it has taken decades to get to this point. Emergency dispatching has gone from simply a…
Accountability is the key to changing your center’s weaknesses into its strengths. In the 1960s, behavioral psychologist John Stacey Adams made an interesting statement about fairness in the workplace. He theorized that when employees perceive inequity, they will seek to reduce it in one of two main ways: by directly altering inputs (what the employee…
