Warning, this article is full of mumbo-jumbo about self care. You probably should pass on this article (it's not like you've read the others). Our lives in service based industries, especially where responding to disasters large or small, bring us into contact with individuals, families and communities in various stages of trauma. While we understand that stress can tax our ability to maintain empathy or others and the strain of emergency response to water or fire related disasters at all hours of the day can cause us to be on edge, we may be neglecting the reality of the overall toll of this exposure. Laura van Dernoot Lipsky is pioneering a methodology outlined in her book Trauma Stewardship which provides An everyday guide to caring for self while caring for others. If you are still reading, maybe you have witnessed the impact of secondary trauma in yourself and/or your response teams. In one profile outlined in the text, Cheri Maples who is the outgoing assistant attorney general for Wisconsin, discusses the revelation in her profession that there was high turnover in probation personnel which wasn’t as much related to training in the skills of the profession but rather a lack of training in personal care abilities. As she notes, “I realized we were losing people emotionally because of secondary trauma (p.138).” This has certainly been true with our teams, we know how to teach and master the skills of our professions but we don't always know how to master caring for ourselves so that we can operate at our full capacity in serving others. The value of being awake, present and aware can be taken for granted or even dismissed as being something for the gurus who deal in mythology but not in the real world. Yet the opposite isn’t seen as dangerous as it is often the status quo across multiple professions, I.E. being numb, detached and disconnected from the cumulative impact of professional stress exposure. As noted in the book, the basis of trauma stewardship is applying many of those same principles that professionals share with their clients and utilizing those methods to care for themselves. In many ways trauma stewardship is simply walking what you’re talking, or living what you preach to others. We seem better equipped to see and respond to the needs of others without taking into account the impact of that distress on our lives as well as those on our team. Cheri notes that there are three key things to taking care of yourself, first understanding the cycle for what it is, second is having friends outside of your profession and third is developing a daily practice of care (p.141). By understanding these principles we can establish methods to lead by example and enable our teams to care for each other. There is a cycle, whether you can see it or not, where we are tempted to turn ourselves off to what we are experiencing in order to cope with our daily tasks. It’s easily missed as standard operating procedures but this coping mechanism should be a red flag to ourselves and those that care about us that there needs to be a change in how we approach our profession. Key to caring for yourself so that you can operate within your strengths is realizing that you need to do so. Whether you are a professional caring for others in trauma or someone who is helping others in various stages of need, take the same principles that you would share with those you are serving and make sure that you are applying those concepts in your own life. Walk your talk. If our social circle is only composed of those who also work with us, there can be a negative reinforcement of the us-versus-them mentality that can prohibit you from seeking additional perspectives. While our friends in our field know the day to day stresses and unique challenges that we face, all parties need additional influences that can help them see things in new ways and perhaps can detect unhealthy behaviors that those in our industry would overlook as normative. Helpful insights can come from good peer discussions or they can also come from seeking mentor relationships. As we have noted previously, “Professional athletes have coaches and trainers even though they are at the very height of their professional skills, earning, and influence. Seeking the assistance of someone who can assist you to tug, carry, or chart your way through the murky waters of personal development can be a very positive and fulfilling addition to your professional adventure (Isaacson, 2017).” Developing a daily practice of care is something Lipsky goes into greater detail sharing the five directives which include inquiry, focus, balance and community. Tools such as breathing, exercising, utilizing music or sounds, rest and other positive habits are important to helping you maximize your capacity to operate within your values. If we find ourselves in a position of leadership it is important for us to be aware of these issues so that we can lead by example and facilitate practices within our teams that help identify, respond and equip our team members to remain healthy. Whether we lead many or simply lead ourselves, failure to recognize these obstacles and the tools available to positively respond to them we are cutting ourselves short of our full ability. References: Lipsky, L. v. D., & Burk, C. (2009). Trauma stewardship: An everyday guide to caring for self while caring for others. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Isaacson, J. (September 5, 2017) How to identify the right mentor. The Daily Positive. Retrieved from https://www.thedailypositive.com/identify-right-mentor/#sthash.N759aPeB.dpuf
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Originally published as Peeling Back the Five Layers of in a Restoration Business June 22, 2016 in Restoration & Remediation Magazine (R&R) By Jon Isaacson How many times a day does the phone ring and it's a customer calling wondering when your organization is going to get the work done, when the crew is going to arrive or what the schedule is? Is it more often than it should be? Who holds the responsibility in the organization to communicate these details to your customers? Before we start to point fingers, let's follow the sequence of information. Organization Layer 1 Our customer called the office because they have not been communicated with, the last person at the job was an employee who was there over 48 hours ago. We ask, why didn't that employee tell the customer what the next sequence of work was going to be? At the conclusion of our investigation into Layer 1, we are ready for a heated discussion with our lead technician assigned to the project. We say our organization values our customers, but we are not demonstrating this with clear and consistent communication. Organization Layer 2 We track down the responsible employee who was last at our under-informed customer's home and it turns out that employee didn't communicate scheduling details with the customer because that employee was not provided with sufficient information to intelligently pass along to our customer. While we were prepared to discipline this employee as the source of miscommunication, we discover that there are additional parties involved with this malady - there are more layers to investigate. In addition to this discovery, our employee brings to our attention that they regularly don't know what they are doing for the day when they show up for work. As an organization we would say we value our customers, we also would say that we value our employees, we may even have these values posted on our walls, and yet we are not communicating with clarity or consistency to either party. Organization Layer 3 As a manager, the frustration is turning is now bordering on anger. We march forward to discuss these disturbing findings from the previous two layers with our employee's supervisor. Rather than uncovering the head of the snake, we reveal that our production supervisor hasn't been clearly or consistently communicating scheduling or work details because they haven't been receiving them from their supervisor (in most restoration companies we are now at the estimator level/layer of the org chart). Our production team hasn't been communicating in the manner we would expect with customers or employees because they are flying by the seat of their pants with the work being handed down to them. We are uncovering that our issues are as much with systems as they are with persons. Organization Layer 4 Each layer has revealed an additional layer, managers who are willing to investigate may now be fearful of encountering additional worm holes within the system. Not us, we continue our investigation and gather the estimators into the conference room for the final tongue lashings. As a related side note, everyone serving in the 24/7 emergency response industry knows that work comes in at all times, in all sizes and has no mercy with regards to holidays or special occasions, yet just because we service emergencies does not mean that we shouldn't have as clear a process that we can develop. Our management team unravels the layers of investigation stemming from the call received by our confused customer, the estimators relate their challenges in working with how the work flow is initiated. Work flow with relationship to how assignments are handed out, especially when our organization is serving the needs of clients who are all in various degrees of distress, is essential to setting our teams up for success. We are faced with a reality that our response process may be broken or at least damaged and needs some TLC in order for our team as a whole to be successful. If we value our customers and we value our employees, we need a system that communicates with clarity and consistency. Organization Layer 5 The investigation goes full circle and we have determined that there are issues related to a lack clarity and consistency in the work flow process which is affecting us at every level. In order to fix this, we will need to address the system from top to bottom and will need every layer of our organization to be invested in the restoration of our process. Communication is our organization showing our customers that we value them. Clarity and consistency is our organization showing our employees that we value them. Scheduling is the result of a commitment to preparation for success and a successful scheduling system enables everyone on our team to communicate with clarity as well as consistency. Our efforts to create a system of clear and consistent communication from start (receiving a request for service) to completion (creating a happy customer) will require intentional efforts as a workable schedule will not create itself. The reason we spent all these words (all this time) just to establish the problem, is that while scheduling should be the foundation for any service organization, the commitment to clarity and consistency is rather uncommon. Often we get so wrapped up in the emergency nature of our business, that we forget to build around our values. When a customer calls with a valid complaint, this is an opportunity for some honest organizational evaluation as well as a wake up call for action. What Must We Do? Property restoration as an industry requires multiple aspects of technical knowledge in our fields of multiple service offerings as well as communication of multiple work details across multiple data entry points to keep multiple parties involved with a given loss updated on work progress. Clarity At The Point Of Work Intake Do we have a consistent process for gathering as much information as we can when a call for service comes in? Regardless of who answers the phone, we should have a clear and consistent process for acquiring the details necessary to set our teams up for success. When we answer the phone, we communicate to our customers that we care by getting the details right and we communicate to our service employees that we care by providing them with the details they need to start a project off with good information. Clarity At The Point of Work Initiation The reality In emergency response to disasters, work comes in at all hours of the day as pipes break, fires occur or a host of other scenarios play out for homes and businesses in our area. Because of these contingencies, our schedules can never be fixed to the point that they cannot change at a moments notice. As such we always have to build into our schedules a certain amount of flexibility. Our production managers have to be aware that they cannot send all of our resources to the furthest reaches of our service territory and still be able to reallocate personnel to respond in the middle of the day to a customer that is in need of emergency services. We have to be honest with our customers about what we can and cannot do as we have to fulfill our prior commitments while evaluating our abilities to service new ones. Being busy is a good problem for any organization, this usually means we are growing, but being chaotic is unhealthy and will lead to failure. Clarity Within The Organization Establishing a visible joint schedule for our organization is an essential means of assisting all of our teams to prepare for the day ahead while enabling us to update our customers with our strategy for keeping their project moving forward (read our previous article about visible schedules HERE). Our people deserve to know, as best as management is able to communicate, what their assignment will be for the following 24 hour period so that they can mentally prepare and ready their teams to respond to our customers needs. Our customers deserve to have consistent communication of job progress and to know when strangers are going to be in their home. Find the medium that works for your team, but make the schedule accessible and visible by all in the organization as this creates great accountability through transparency. When the concerned customer calls to ask about their job, the person answering the phone should be able to say, "Let me pull up the schedule. Yes, I can see we are scheduled to be at your home between 11am and 12pm today, would you like me to get ahold of the technician who will be responding or the project manager assigned to your loss?" Clarity Within Your Work Communication For our team, we inherited a system of carbon copies for printed work orders (or field scopes). Carbon copies served a purpose at some point in time...a point in time right around when the dinosaurs became extinct. We were able to adapt our hand printed work orders (penmanship is a barrier to clarity) into a Microsoft Excel format so that they could be typed - allowing us to ensure they were readable and savable which allows us to track and reference these forms. The first order of the work order is that in order to be effective the work order must be legible, must have sufficient details and must be executable by the team members assigned to the tasks. Notes on a piece of paper are useless unless those composing the document have been intentional to be clear with those who will be touching the project. As our system for work orders evolved we wanted our system to be easier to input and more readily shareable by our entire organization. We needed a medium that would allow team leaders to communicate effectively with team members the details of work scopes and resource allocation. We looked into mobile and desktop applications as well as cloud based systems, most of the ones that were the most appealing were also fairly expensive. We experimented with free versions of popular systems but found many of them to be a time consuming venture that did not have the return that we needed, especially with our shorter term projects. Our schedule needed to show management where our fleet would be assigned, which personnel would be responding to an assignment and what production tools would accompany that crew to complete their tasks. We found that some of the best resource were those that we were already utilizing (see a fun video we made introducing our simple systems HERE). Google calendar is an effective means of creating a shared calendar that could be viewed by anyone in the organization at any time with features such as assigning a color to individuals to enhance the ease of visual review. (We gladly borrowed this aspect from a local plumbing company who showed us their production system). Through the shared calendar, each technician had an email that would show up in their email as well as their calendar with details such as the job address (which assists with OSHA compliance), the job number, contact information for the customer and a detailed scope of work written out for each day in the body of the calendar notes. Team members that wanted printed copies for their folders could have those in their hands and those that were savvy with their mobile devices always had records for reference. Each organization is unique, for us the values we are building around are: 1. Our schedule should be visible - anyone in our organization should be able to see where our resources are assigned at any given time (to the best of our ability) 2. We want to show our customers that we value them by being clear with our communication 3. We want to show our team members that we value them by being clear and consistent with our scheduling Clarity and consistency in communication requires the commitment of everyone in the organization, top to bottom - from the point of receiving a call for service to the completion of a project. We have to be intentional about improving our systems as the systems (good or bad) do not create themselves. Our systems may never be perfect, but we will reap what we sow. If the phone rings more often than it should with confused or upset customers, follow the layers to yourself and get to work on fixing the problems with the system. Through my work over the past 15 or more years in property restoration, I have appreciated the good work that our friends at Restoration & Remediation Magazine (R&R) do. Through their monthly publication, blog posts and collaboration with industry professionals R&R and their parent company BNP Media produces resources that help bolster the efforts of the restoration community. We recently saw a post from Restoration & Remediation Editor in Chief Michelle Blevins regarding a conference that the BNP Media group will be producing in October of 2018, Preparing to Respond, so we wanted to follow up to learn more about this endeavor. Our thanks to Michelle for taking the time to share with us. Jon Isaacson (IZ Vents): How long has the R&R team been discussing the concept of an annual conference and what was the catalyst for deciding to take this adventure on? Michelle Blevins (BNP Media): We have actually be talking about this for a couple years now! However, with so many other conferences and events in the restoration industry, we wanted to be sure we were doing something different and something needed, not just trying to add another event to everyone’s already very busy schedules. Everyone’s time is so valuable! R&R is part of BNP Media, a publishing company based in Troy, Michigan; we have an incredible events staff here that has been putting together top-notch, high quality events for decades. Once we honed in on the focus of the conference, we knew the event planning and marketing team would have our back, and they sure have! We are still a full year out from the event, and are confident it will be a success – and valuable to everyone involved. What is the target audience for the Preparing to Respond conference? This is a great question! I want to be sure people understand this is NOT about storm chasing, at all. Disasters, big and small, hit close to home more often than they hit far away. I could tell countless stories of restoration companies caught up in disasters at home - like a restoration company in the Carolinas that ended up being at the center of Hurricane Matthew’s devastation, or hit by a tornado outbreak – like Hattiesburg, Mississippi, or the wildfires happening right now in California. The list goes on and on. Some communities are hit with major spring flooding almost every year! At some point, nearly every restoration company will need to know how to “scale up” to respond to a disaster of some magnitude. This conference will teach them how. Who are the initial collaborators that are assisting you with putting this together? As I said in the first answer, BNP Media has a fabulous events department. So on top of myself, our National Sales Manager Darlene Balzano, and Publisher Randy Green, we have a whole events staff working on the day-to-day details of this event to make sure it goes off without a hitch! For those interested in coming what are a few key things you believe they will come away with that will make the trip a worthwhile investment? I believe they will come away with three key things:
Obviously our nation and our industry has been hit with a heavy storm season this year and you all have been doing a great job of trying to capture the stories and efforts from our property restoration community. Are there a few positive stories that stick out to you from the most recent hurricane response? Oh my gosh, when I saw the photos of water rescues from Blake Moak at ServiceMaster by Century in Houston, Texas, all I could think is: that is why this industry ROCKS. Isn’t this an industry full of people with servants hearts? When the water was too high after Hurricane Harvey hit to start the drying out process, Blake and his team used trucks and boats to rescue people stranded in their homes. I know other companies did the same. I’m really looking forward to hearing more success stories from Irma and Harvey once things settle down a bit more. In fact, I hope to have a panel of contractors at Preparing to Respond who are willing to share their successes – and failures – doing CAT work. Read more from R&R regarding positive stories from catastrophe response - Lessons From Hurricane Matthew Are there a few cautionary tales that stick out to you as well? From these recent storms, no. But in just the 2.5 years I’ve been in the industry, I’ve heard several stories from people who have lost everything doing CAT work, or who have thought they were going to lose it all. These are also stories we hope to share at Preparing to Respond to help prepare other contractors for the realities of catastrophe work – like just how long it can take to get paid. There are ways to safeguard yourself and your company, and still do catastrophe work! Read more from BNP Media regarding Cautionary Tales from catastrophe response - The Big Gamble What are some of the newer resources from R&R that people may not be aware of. Jon – you ask the BEST questions! First, we currently have a landing page dedicated to information related to responding to Harvey, Irma, and Maria (HERE). Secondly, we have a super awesome new microsite, if you will, dedicated to odor removal HERE. Seriously, that page has anything and everything you could ever need to know about removing odors of any kind! Read more from Michelle and the team at Restoration & Remediation magazine through the website links in the interview above, follow them on Twitter @RnRMag or LinkedIn. You can also read our prior interview with Michelle for the LFMC facilities management networking group HERE.
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AuthorThoughts on personal and professional development. Jon Isaacson, The Intentional Restorer, is a contractor, author, and host of The DYOJO Podcast. The goal of The DYOJO is to help growth-minded restoration professionals shorten their DANG learning curve for personal and professional development. You can watch The DYOJO Podcast on YouTube on Thursdays or listen on your favorite podcast platform.
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