• Public agencies continue to face challenges hiring and retaining new employees.
• They should embrace a holistic approach to wellness, including mental health resources and supportive spaces.
• Data integration and AI reduce time-consuming work, improving productivity and employee satisfaction.
• Public safety leaders set the tone for innovation, curiosity, and team culture.

Public agencies have long struggled with recruiting and retaining employees, leaving fewer staff members in emergency communications centers and other public safety operations. As a result, today’s emergency operations leaders must tackle complex problems: modernizing their departments, interrupting the burnout cycle, and building up the next generation of leaders.

While there isn’t one simple solution, it’s possible to change an agency’s culture through effort, empathy, and innovation. To explore this idea, we asked forward-thinking emergency operations leaders at the first EOC of the Future Conference, hosted by Peregrine and the University of Virginia Center for Public Safety and Justice. Throughout the event, leaders from emergency management, public safety, and the private sector provided practical advice and creative solutions.

Keep reading to discover how you can create long-lasting change in your organization.

Employee wellness and retention

Communication centers faced an average staffing shortage of around 25% between 2019 and 2022, according to the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch. Though centers’ staffing levels have improved somewhat in recent years, the shortage has had lasting effects, contributing to burnout, fatigue, and high turnover among personnel. That’s a cycle Tipi Brookins, chief of staff at the Washington, D.C., Office of Unified Communications (OUC), experienced firsthand.

“For so long, they were beat up because we just couldn't get the staff,” Brookins said. “We couldn't hire. No one wanted to come to 911, it didn't matter how much we made.”

Trapped in this negative burnout cycle, Brookins saw an increase in absenteeism and “presenteeism,” when employees showed up but did the bare minimum. For her hardest workers, the added burden made an already-stressful career even more taxing — and that exhaustion can’t be fixed overnight.

Today, nearly 70% of 911 operators report pre-shift stress, according to the NENA: The 9-1-1 Association. And when employees are mentally and emotionally drained, they’re less likely to stay. On average, agencies face a 22% training failure rate, NENA reports.

“For us, we were trying to solve a people problem,” Brookins said. “How do we keep them engaged? How do we give them a tool to help them with the overload of work?”

Ultimately, it took about two years for the OUC to get to a comfortable staffing level. Brookins then began looking for holistic solutions, not a quick fix, to support her employees’ mental well-being, productivity, and career development.

“Now we need to think about how we're going to keep them, how we're going to make them happy,” Brookins said. “Because if that's not in the equation, whatever you're thinking about doing with technology, it might be a waste.”

Mental health resources

Brookins brought on a wellness coordinator, who’s onsite every day to do soft check-ins and one-on-one meetings with employees.

“We started the wellness program because we had to come up with a big way to take care of our employee needs,” Brookins said. “Because if you don't take care of your employees, it's unfortunate. The effect will show, you know, [in their] mental health.”

Physical wellness spaces

If you have the resources, consider designing your space to match the energy you want. For D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency Chief Jeremy Bersin, that meant designing an emergency operations center (EOC) with ample sunlight, green spaces, convertible couches, showers, a gym, and two reservable wellness rooms. All of these elements help employees handle high-stress situations.

“We really wanted to focus on wellness and providing that support for our staff whenever, whatever possible,” Bersin said.

Physical spaces can also be the catalyst for a culture shift, said Dave Fontneau, CIO of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. When designing the agency’s real-time operations center, he wanted to encourage collaboration and creativity.

“Just from everything we did, these were very deliberate designs — the way we designed the furniture, the colors, the ceiling, the floors — to create that environment, to help change the culture,” Fontneau said. “We call it a Silicon Valley inspired design, or that tech startup.”

But instead of making all decisions from the top down, agency leaders got feedback from their teams when designing shared spaces.

“It gives them that ownership,” Fontneau said. “It gives them that ability to say, ‘Hey, this is our space. You know, the leadership here trust us, they value us,’ and they really feel like this is their home.”

Time-saving technology

Emergency operations technology isn’t just about improving productivity; it alleviates employees’ overwhelm and contributes to positive changes in the workplace, said Scott MacDonald, CEO and co-founder of GovWorx.

“When it comes to things about their working conditions, their careers, their personal growth and development, believe it or not, technology can help,” MacDonald said.

For emergency operations, that could mean investing in advanced solutions, like data integration platforms and artificial intelligence (AI), to reduce time-consuming, menial work. At the OUC, Brookins’ employees spent hours manually creating and sending incident reports to the D.C. City Council. AI can automatically classify and tag that information without human intervention, providing more time for workers to engage in complex, meaningful tasks.

“Using data-driven AI insights to improve morale, productivity and performance ... now we have a more positive employee,” Brookins said. “They're more engaged, they're more interested. It just totally changes the performance, an enhanced employee experience.”

And while AI shouldn’t be used to answer emergency calls, it can listen, log, and analyze those calls to provide more valuable feedback, MacDonald said. Realistically, emergency operations leaders can only monitor 2% to 3% of calls. That means most workers only get feedback when something goes wrong, which contributes to stress and distrust. But AI programs can automatically listen to every call, providing useful data to:

• Flag employees with repeated exposure to trauma
• Highlight employees with positive interactions on a call
• Identify skills gaps among individuals and teams
• Analyze where training resources would be best spent

“Those centers that have adopted this model actually start to see higher retention rates as a result of implementing this type of feedback,” MacDonald said.

Creating a culture of curiosity and innovation

While technology has clear benefits for employee well-being and job satisfaction, leaders need to implement new solutions carefully. Overwhelmed employees might feel resistant to doing things differently, or they may just be too fatigued to learn a new tool. It’s up to managers to set the tone.

“How do we create that culture of continual innovation? It starts with leadership, right? You’ve got to lead from the front. You’ve got to provide the vision. You’ve got to provide them with that trust,” Fontneau said. “If you don’t have the right people and the leadership to lead them, you're going to fail.”

Start small

For Brookins, building trust was key. She identified the OUC’s problems, spent over six months researching solutions, then launched a small pilot program. With a phased rollout, she was able to incorporate feedback and gain buy-in from her team.

“The goal for AI and what we were looking for inspired a culture of excellence, establishing a clear vision, regular communication as we move forward with AI, [and] fostering an environment of trust,” Brookins said.

When leaders cultivate that engaged, open-minded workplace, they’re able to invest in the talent they already have, rather than spending thousands of dollars to rehire and retrain new workers. In an interview with Peregrine, former Arizona CIO Morgan Reed said overhauling staff in the midst of a technology transition is usually unnecessary — plus, “nobody has the budget or the time to do that anyway.”

“If you work with the employees you have in government, a lot of them do want to learn and improve,” Reed said. “They just haven’t been given the chance.”

Reed recommends giving your team plenty of time before launching a new solution. Provide multiple ways for employees to upskill, such as vendor sessions, online classes, and peer groups. With enough prep, employees will feel empowered rather than intimidated.

Leading with empathy and inclusion

Changing the culture of any organization is no small task. EOC managers already have a lot on their plates: modernizing their agencies, planning and preparing strategic responses, and jumping into action when emergencies strike. Soft skills can get lost amid the day-to-day pressures, but strong leaders set the tone for their entire operation.

To start driving a cultural shift, emergency operations leaders should be versatile, adaptable, and — most importantly — excellent communicators.

“Communication is key. Without communication, we're done. We're dead in the water,” Fontneau said at the EOC of the Future Conference. “When you're starting out and you're trying to change culture, you cannot over-communicate.”

It’s also important to act as a leader, not just a manager. Leaders are empathetic, curious, and eager to invest in their teams. They cultivate the next generation of leaders by encouraging their employees to explore new ideas.

“Teaching our people to fail fast, giving them the opportunity and the comfort to be able to go out and not be afraid, that's how we learn,” Fontneau said. “But we have to lead them. We have to give them vision.”

Set up your agency for success

As public safety agencies recover from years of understaffing, it’s critical to invest in innovative solutions that increase employee satisfaction and retention. To create long-lasting change, leaders must take a holistic approach incorporating a culture shift, thoughtful wellness resources, and time-saving tech solutions.

Innovative data integration solutions like Peregrine allow public safety agencies to apply their data toward their futures. By ingesting and analyzing staffing and workload data, Peregrine can help agencies design more efficient shift models and prevent employee burnout. By automating advanced analytics and reporting, Peregrine takes care of time-consuming, repetitive tasks so personnel have more time to focus on the most important aspects of their jobs.

To learn how Peregrine can help your agency turn messy data into more effective operations, download our white paper, "The State of Data in Emergency Management."