Program Development
Organizational Assessment and Strategic Planning
Every organization offers its products and services in a defined community or marketplace. How do you ensure that yours is built to survive and thrive? How do you effectively set direction, create an effective, equitable, and inclusive structure and culture to support it, and manage the performance and capacity you need to both execute and innovate? Almost every organization faced the unknown due to Covid-19. Many will need to totally revamp what they do and how they do it. Some may refer to this as Post Traumatic Growth and revamping with this in mind can be a tremendous opportunity for all organizations. Our team is uniquely qualified to work with clients to ensure compliance with this critical and timely standard.
We will work with your leadership team and staff to develop a strategic plan based on where you want to be in the future. We will facilitate improvement efforts that link organizational strategy, readiness for learning and change, workforce climate and culture, management and supervisory effectiveness, and unit-level performance. We also will ensure that you and your organization continue to thrive independently by embedding methods and tools within your organization.
Staff and Educational Development
Your most valuable asset is a high-performing, committed employee. Recruiting, onboarding, training and then retaining your workforce is crucial for any successful organization. Additionally, many organizations have regulatory requirements for competencies and required certifications.
Our experienced team will help you with these processes by providing educational needs assessments and performance assessments against benchmarks, evaluation of orientation programs, and development and maintenance of educational programs and plans for staff that meets regulatory and employee needs.
And to ensure your staff development programs translate into the desired performance, we will help you advance strategies to reinforce formal development efforts, including coaching, group problem-solving, experiential learning and continuous improvement.
Provide Executive and Leadership Coaching
Organizations continuously face ambiguity, human resources challenges, and the rapid pace of a changing world. A strong leader will navigate these challenges well — but even strong leaders need individual attention from time to time to stay on top of their game.
Our executive coaches will provide the coaching and advisory support leaders need to balance out their learning. Issues of trust, partnership, power, stress, communication, and adaptability both challenge and provide opportunities to grow. We will ensure those opportunities take root and become an organizational strength.
Public Safety Staffing Studies
Providing the necessary personnel to adequately staff fire and EMS units is a critical part of the emergency response system. The personnel must be equipped, adequately trained and strategically located within the community, and be able to respond with an appropriate force in an acceptable time period. This should be based on a community risk assessment and a standard of cover.
Our experienced team will evaluate your community risk profile, assess your current staffing levels, and compare your levels to similar jurisdictions. We will develop a plan that can serve as a roadmap to ensure an appropriate staff level to deliver the service your citizens want and demand.
Public Safety Recruitment and Retention Plans
The number of people applying for all public safety positions – both career and volunteer - appears to be on a downward trend. The volunteer system particularly faces difficulty in recruiting, training, and retaining personnel for extended periods of time.
Our team has experience at local and state levels to assist public safety leaders in developing a realistic and workable plan to recruit, train and retain career and volunteer public safety members. We will look at your specific challenges and develop strategies to enhance your public safety delivery system.
Transitioning Fire and EMS Departments
Across the country, fire/EMS departments have often relied on volunteers to provide emergency response for their communities. Today’s society has often made it tough for public safety organizations to provide 24/7 service with volunteers. With this change, many localities have developed systems that integrate career personnel with volunteers.
We will work with your governing bodies to develop a plan that will ease this transition and provide a roadmap that volunteer and career personnel know, understand, and buy into.
Station Location Studies
Every fire and EMS department operates from a station or a designated location. Frequently, the location of these stations was determined many years ago and based on factors no longer relevant. These locations allowed for quick response to a designated response area in the past, but over time, communities grow and expand. What used to be a key business district no longer has a high demand for fire and EMS services. What used to be a large vacant field has become an expanded residential area. And what used to be a location decision based on need has often become politically motivated without regard to current or projected incident demands or response times.
We work with partner companies to produce a station location study that evaluates your response data, growth plans, community demographics, roadway systems, risk assessments, and desired response time goals. That data is then put into a GIS program to determine the optimum location for fire stations throughout the community. Whether you seek locations for future fire stations, want to consolidate stations, or need to build new stations due to growth or to reduce response times, our station location study will give you data to support your decision-making process.