By William Duggan

I did not take my job as a communications operator for the math. However, having consulted with Fortune 100 companies for a number of years before becoming a telecommunicator, I know that staffing a communications center doesn’t take a rocket scientist. The first time it will require time, energy and effort, but from then on, it will require only fine tuning. It is a relatively simple four-step process that applies to every size center.

During my productivity management seminars for municipal supervisors through managers, we cover the five basic management disciplines of match-up, assignment, follow-up, reporting and management action.

Staffing is the most critical component of the first discipline, match-up, which ensures that you have what you need, where you need it, when you need it, to meet the objectives of the organization.

You have to determine the workload to make decisions about staffing. Ask yourself, “What tasks must be performed to meet the objectives of the organization?” In the case of a comm center, two basic tasks must be accomplished: dispatching and call handling (I refuse to use the term calltaker because this fails to recognize the number of calls public safety telecommunicators must make). The first is generally considered to be static and the second variable.

Dispatch staffing is a factor of how many channels your center operates. This dictates how many people you need. The number of channels you operate depends on the dispatcher-to-officer ratio that your department determines meets officer safety standards. So if you operate on four radio channels, you need a “raw” staffing of four dispatchers 24/7 (plus relief, which will be covered later).

It is defining the variable workload that makes people sweat just thinking about it. Relax. Like I said, if this is your first rodeo it will take time, energy and effort, but after that it will require only adjustments and fine tuning. It’s like putting a puzzle together— first you gather the pieces; then you put it together.

Step 1: How many calls do your people handle? That is, how many calls do they take and make?

You need to measure this hourly, by day of week and monthly, and you need to do so for at least two years. OK, that’s the hard part. The more automated your call handling is, the easier it should be to gather this data. If your call-handling systems do not provide you this data, then you’ll need to resort to the time-honored consulting tradition of observation.

Observation is having someone, usually from the training department, sit and observe a number of call handlers and record how long they spend taking and making calls. You will need to do this a number of times with more than one telecommunicator on different days of the week and on different shifts to get a fair and objective sampling. The result should be an average acceptable call time (from ring to ready for the next call).

Step 2: Determine performance objectives. What is an acceptable level of service to our citizens, and how will we measure it?

The primary objective for an emergency call center is APCO’s standard that 90% of 9-1-1 calls should be answered within 10 seconds. Simply put, if you are not meeting this objective, you are understaffed and may be putting the lives of your citizens in danger. However, there will, of course, be certain times when you cannot meet this goal, such as during a severe storm. The goal is to meet this objective over the course of a month.

Next, you have to establish other measures of acceptable levels of service. One measure is targeted calls per hour (C/H). Based on the size of your jurisdiction, the kinds of calls you are taking (all 9-1-1 and non-emergency calls, fire only, EMD only, etc.), departmental policies and procedures, and the kind of equipment/systems you work with, how many calls per hour is a reasonable target for the average fully trained telecommunicator?

Once you have these quantitative service level targets, you will also have to develop qualitative measures of service. These measures involve monitoring your telecommunicators to ensure they are performing according to policy and procedure. Readers of this publication are familiar with stories of telecommunicators who are not following policies and procedures and how detrimental they can be to your department. Monitoring not only helps you ensure that proper service levels are being met but can also minimize your liabilities and provide you the basis and means of discussing performance with each telecommunicator.

Important note: Every time you change policies and procedures, you will have to revisit these performance objectives to determine what effect they have, if any. For example, the department changes policy requiring telecommunicators to stay on the phone with all “Hot,” or Priority 1, calls until officers are on scene. Clearly this change will have an impact on call times, possibly requiring a modification of the objectives.

Step 3: Quantify other factors affecting staffing. The factors fall into three categories: time away from the phones, such as absenteeism, breaks, vacations, training, briefings, etc.; planned procedure changes; and outside influences, such as seasonal variations, and state or federal law changes.

Time away from phones can be determined by using the private industry standard of 0.7 (meaning that you need 1.7 people to cover each full-time position in a 24/7 operation), or by setting limits, such as only “X” people per day will be permitted to take vacation, or fixing break times and how many people can be on break at the same time, etc. You can also use historical absenteeism to determine how many holes will need to be filled. Some of this may be set by municipal policy or union contracts.

Planned major procedure changes can also affect staffing needs. One example is if your agency is planning on implementing Automated Secure Alarm Protocol (ASAP), in which all calls from alarm companies will be entered electronically instead of via a phone call. How much will that reduce call volumes, and what hours of the day will be most affected?

The last factor you need to address is outside influences. The influences can include seasonal variations if you are in an area that experiences major variations in population during different times of the year, or major changes in local, state or federal regulations. One example of outside influence was seen when the state of Arizona enacted SB 1070, which deals with illegal immigrants. After SB 1070 was enacted, a significant number of people left the state or feared calling law enforcement, both of which affected call volumes. If your jurisdiction changes the closing times for the bars, what impact will that have on call volumes during the night shift?

Another example could be when a metropolitan area’s phonebooks listed the non-emergency phone number only on page 1 of the primary city in the area. When the books were changed to list all the non-emergency phone numbers for every jurisdiction on page 1, the calls to the major city dropped.

Step 4: Determine optimum staffing. Because of the variable nature of call handling by hour of the day and day of the week, you will never achieve perfect staffing. You can’t afford to staff to your peak volumes, nor would you want to. This means there will be times when things are very busy, and there will be some hours when you will not meet the primary objective of 90% of 9-1-1 calls answered within 10 seconds. But you can staff so that over the course of a month you can meet this objective.

I am a visual person, so I recommend starting with graphs of the workload, the calls per hour (C/H). Plot your calls per hour for each day of the week because there are normally at least some variations from day to day. Use all the data for each day of the month (all the Mondays, all the Tuesdays, etc.). You will want to do this for each month of the year to see if there are any significant variations during the course of a year.

With this information, based on performance objectives, determine “raw” staffing (how many people you would need on the phones to meet the performance objectives for each of the 24 hours). For this graph I have used the targeted C/H of 20 per telecommunicator.

Next, adjust upward for other factors by adding in numbers to fill in for the vacations, absenteeism, breaks, training, etc. This will tell you how many people you need each of the 24 hours a day to meet the objectives of your organization. Of course you will have to do this for each day of the week, as there is normally at least some variation from day to day.

Now you have all the pieces of the puzzle. Once you put the pieces together, you will be able to see what the optimum staffing is to meet the workload. Is it 5/8s, 4/10s, 3/12s+, a combination of these, a combination of full- and part-time employees? Again, you may be somewhat constrained by collective bargaining agreements, municipal policy or regulation, but now you have the hard data to take to your city council to either get the staffing necessary to meet the objectives set or to modify the objectives—these are the only choices.

Important note: Performance against objectives needs to be measured on an ongoing, regular basis on bureau, shift and telecommunicator levels with an eye to determining if the objectives are realistic. If realistic objectives are not being met at any level, then you need to determine why they aren’t and address the cause.

From this point on, regular monitoring of call volumes, seniority levels (affecting time off) and outside factors will tell you what, if any, changes you will need to make to your staffing.

About the Author
William (Bill) Duggan is a communications operator and APCO member and he is CISM, ICS and NIMS certified.