Onboarding Volunteer Firefighters to a Reporting System

Implementing a Fire Reporting System

There are many reasons to change to a new fire reporting system, however change takes time, energy and focus. Remembering & communicating why you are changing improves the onboarding.

Keys to Success

Some of the key factors in a successful transition to a new fire reporting system are:

• Leaders intent; determine the goal and ensure that Chief and/or the officer corp are supportive.
• Allow good time for the transition (don’t expect it overnight.)
• Respect that all changes are adopted at different rates by different people, and that is ok.
• Respect that volunteer firefighters change as their life allows, not always on the department’s timeframe.
• Accept that time will pass, and good change will be accepted in time …
• Focus on your senior officers, and bring on the membership as milestones (see below) are hit.
• Communicate clearly to your membership, and listen to their feedback. Rinse and repeat.

Keep it simple …

Ensure change comes clearly defined, clearly communicated amd thoughtfully rolled out. Keep it simple:

• Gather a group of officers / early adopters to champion the initial reports. A few not everyone.
• Don’t expect much of volunteer firefighters at first, but allow them to see the benefits first.
• Monitor that change is occurring, and roll out more (e.g. events, apparatus) in later phases, when the department is ready.
• Listen to feedback and move faster or slower as needed (e.g. extra training, or taking on more.)

Onboarding Volunteer Firefighters

• Allow time to migrate; plan a time period (e.g. a month, a quarter, a year)
• Monitor and repeatedly offer help, in group / classroom settings and/or one on one. Ensure the membership recognizes that help is genuinely available.
• Allow a transition fallback - e.g. overlap with legacy paper forms - to avoid loss in the “transition gap” and reduce stress.
• Monitor and don’t allow too much time, or the transition will not be achieved.
• Keep it firefighter simple.

Tips and Tricks

When planning for the coming year ahead, use the month of December to warm up, and work out the kinks, in order to roll out live in January. Don’t expect a smooth start in January without some hands on before. Even if you overlap with your current/old system for the month of December, or for both December and January, use the overlap period to reduce pressure on the transition.

Offer in person and virtual training to firefighters, and follow up with one on ones for those who need more. Listen to your individuals - and you know their individual strengths/challenges - and tailor to their needs.

Consider allowing some volunteer firefighters to “opt-out” of the change, focusing on the 90% of the department who will adopt it comfortable or willingly. Time allows change to come, and a good change will eventually get to 100% of the department.

Have a dedicated administrator (e.g. a paid, part-time or volunteer administrator) or create a group of volunteer firefighters who are also administrators. Try hard not to rely upon one person who might become a bottleneck in a life event. Recruit a volunteer administrator if you can.

Do not add load to the Chief, if at all possible. Responserack is for the volunteer fire department to share the reporting load across the department, and alleviate it from one person. The rewards is shared by the whole department.

Enlist retired firefighters who miss their connection to their fire department and have more time to contribute. A retired firefigher could be a volunteer administrator. Enlist and/or engage the more “technologically comfortable” (either younger, or more technically capable) to “train the trainers” and allow them to help their fellow firefighters.

Help people set Responserack bookmark on their phone, and/or roll out the Responserack mobile app.

Allow your membership to review their own numbers, review calls, and see the benefits before you expect them to enter an incident, let alone do any review or administration. Allow your firefighters to build a culture of checking in from their phone, more “consume” than “produce” until they see the real value and power of the system, and are long comfortable using it.

Start with a focused group of adopters and grow that group when things go well.

Implementation Milestones

Here are some of the key milestones for a successful onboarding…

• Capture all incidents right after the incident; time / narrative / attendance. Once this habit is developed much of the rest will follow.
• Review all incidents with a week or once a week.
• NFIRS process once a month, and export to NFIRS.
• Monthly review with your board and/or officer corp, perhaps even construct content for a monthly newsletter from information in reports. Who is coming up for an anniversary? What types and counts of calls did we have this month? How many calls have we had this year?

Some stretch milestones are:

• Enter events; meetings, trainings and other adhoc gatherings. Determine the “Trainers” group, and review event attendance.
• Enter truck checks and/or truck maintenance records. Determine the “Maintainers” group. and review maintenance.

Fully optimized and customized:

• Determine custom reports for board, stakeholders and department/district needs.
• Determine custom fields if needed.

Rollout Approaches

Slow and Steady:

• First few months, officers input / update incidents only. Allow membership to login / review.
• Next few months, early adopters (eager members, more technical members) input / update incidents.
• Finally, open up to all memberships (allow paper fallback for those .)

Note: Time frames vary by department, shorter or longer, and how the rollout is proceeding.

All In:

• Department-wide training on incident entry / update. Invite all members.
• Open up incident entry to all. Incident command completed reports.
• Review on a regular basis, and retrain if needed.

Note: Some fire departments follow this, but only invite a subset of their membership.

Trigger Points / Watch Outs …

• If incidents are NOT being completed by the “officer in command” after the incident, things can get lost & go stale.
• If incidents are NOT being processed for NFIRS on a regular basis (i.e. monthly) a backlog can occur.
• If only one person is doing the administration, and nobody can step in if “life gets in the way” for that person.

Nice to haves:

• Share posts of information from training officers, Chief and other senior officers.
• Add member “joined at” dates to get “seniority” insights, and “member anniversary” notifications.
• Check which your membership is connecting to Responserack, and if Responserack is felt to be helping them.

In summary

• Make a plan with milestones and a timeline, and monitor progress.
• Communicate intent and objectives clearly. Train as needed, and listen to feedback.
• Allow firefighters to engage at their own speed, reaping the rewards and engaging them before requiring effort.
• Monitor the transition - with fallback mechanisms - until the transition is complete.
• Reap the rewards of a culture of reporting, producing valuable data for the department/district, and with engaged volunteer firefighters.