2013 was a year of growth for our entire Operations Staff. We started out the year with a plan we coined “Back to Basics” or B2B. The plan was addressed to our Operations Staff and its main scope was to introduce a Mentor Supervisor concept, with two main goals. The first was to improve our overall performance in order to achieve a more well rounded team that delivers a consistently high quality product and to provide professional development to all operations employees. The plan had clear objectives and outlined concepts of operations for the Mentor role and the Shift Supervisors in relation to our Assistant Supervisors, Operations staff and peer to peer. The plan also called for different schedule rotations for the Assistant Supervisors and the Mentor Supervisors.

The goal with this type of movement was to provide well-rounded training/feedback that would expose all employees to each Mentor Supervisors’ strengths. The plan also took into consideration what the group wanted to achieve; also known as our “measurables”. On time employee evaluations, quality investigations, and a path to promote-ability were among a few goals we set out to achieve. We were thoughtful enough to recognize this plan certainly had a high probability to change our groups dynamic, so we allowed for risk factors as well. To keep this plan in the forefront throughout the year, the Supervisors Group had periodic reviews at Supervisors Meetings. We also incorporated discussions at each of our quarterly training days. We asked for (and received) employees’ feedback on how the plan was being received and tweaked things along the way.

We also offered a new role, “Acting Assistant Supervisor”. We received a good deal of positive feedback and interest once Management shared their beliefs on what this role would entail. The position opened up to all trained Acting Leads and Certified Training Officer’s (CTO’s). We conducted an oral board setting for the candidates. Once chosen, the employee worked in the role of an Assistant Supervisor for a trial 6 months. We had two openings during 2013, with a total of 4 applicants. After the candidate left the position, an exit interview was done and data compiled for review.
We made Teamwork an area of focus for our entire Operations Staff. We did this by reminding our staff of our Mission Statement and that each of our jobs cannot be done independently. We solicited suggestions from employees on how we could meet our organizational goals. From those discussions, the Supervisors regrouped and created an interactive checklist for the Ops staff to complete. We then closed out our task with requiring each employee to take a quiz in DMS (an electronic document managing system). This approach is indicative CENCOM’s philosophy of participative management.

We continued to formalize our Quality Assurance processes in 2013. Our goal was to have each operations employee receive two QA’s per quarter. We met this goal. We also changed our closing disposition from any sort of discipline wording to “complete”.

In September, we shifted our cultural philosophy of employee performance and changed our approach to feedback. Instead of documenting every low level correction item with an employee, we made the conscious decision to handle the correction in the moment and not log the information into our inquiry database. We believe personal feedback for a minor error is enough to stimulate a change or negate a repeat occurrence. We implemented guidelines for our Supervisory staff to follow when deciding on whether or not feedback would be documented. The first was the error itself, then the impact, and lastly the presence of a pattern.

An employee made a suggestion that we change our emergency phone answering phrase from, “9- 1-1 what are you reporting?” to “Kitsap 9-1-1, what are you reporting?” The employee articulated the reasons behind why the request to change the phrase was important. This is a great example of how our organization welcomes suggestions and feedback, evaluates the request and puts it into action! We implemented this change in October, 2013.