By Samantha Hawkins
Recently I was in a career coaching meeting with a group of fellow telecommunicators where the instructor advised that we should start formulating our “leadership mission statement” if we aspired to move up in our agency. The instructor encouraged us to begin thinking about what we wished to accomplish as formal leaders and what we would uniquely bring to the table as far as our values, ideals and philosophies are concerned.
In pondering this over several days, I finally settled on my leadership vision, “to train, develop and mentor the next generation of people-focused 9-1-1 telecommunicators. I want to be directly influential in producing 9-1-1 professionals who value heart and humanity at the core of all that they do and emphasize compassion in their job.”
In my opinion, a compassionate telecommunicator is a solid foundation for an effective one. And the sooner we can each rediscover what makes us all the same deep down, the sooner we can grasp that we aren’t really that different from our callers. They have ambitions and goals just like we do. They have dreams and passions and people who depend on them. If they have to call 9-1-1 for an emergency, they aren’t calling our center to be judged. They are calling to have another human being relate to them and feel compassion for them during any situation.
Public safety telecommunicator is a complex job. At base, we are data entry gurus. We get the information we need, we distribute it as accurately and efficiently as possible to the responders who need it, and we document everything. But of course, our job description carries a great deal more weight than that. We are expert problem solvers with a knack for knowing the right thing to say in any given situation. We are emotionally intelligent because we can strategically wrangle with the most difficult, uncooperative or hysterical callers to get pertinent information in an emergency. We are tactically proficient at incident command — we can coordinate the response of multiple law enforcement departments, specialized units and other public safety entities for critical events. We are master negotiators with our 9-1-1 callers and adept at quelling arguments. It’s second nature to us, and some days it can all get very mechanical and automatic. Some days it can feel like we’re well-oiled factory robots stationed at an assembly line, maneuvering our callers’ problems with proficient ease. Our emotions move to the backburner and only the caller’s needs matter.
The truth of it is, though, that we are not robots or machines. We are humans underneath the headset — real flesh-and-blood people affecting others with our words. These aren’t cans or boxes on an assembly line we are handling; these are people’s lives, their loved ones, their neighborhoods and their homes. At the end of the day, it’s not our data entry skills; hours of specialized, protocol-based training; or our certifications that makes us excellent telecommunicators. When you remove all of that to truly consider what makes us incredible over the phone, over the radio or to our coworkers, it comes down to how in touch we are with our human side. It is qualities like empathy, compassion, kindness and integrity that make us excellent at our job. When I began my career in dispatch nearly seven years ago, I went into it knowing absolutely nothing about the job. I was a blank slate for my trainers to impress the mission and values of our center onto. I was carefully molded through my classroom experiences and standardized coursework to know what I needed to bring to the job. I was enrolled in all of the required certification programs and given all the necessary tools and resources to succeed in this line of work. Yet, the one thing that I had to learn for myself is that beneath the highly technical aspects of this field, is the human side of it. There’s the part about “taking the call personal enough to care about the outcome,” or the “checking our ego at the time clock to keep from crying some days,” or the “barely managing to hold ourselves together while we’re trying to hold together a parent that just lost their child.”
In June 2021, I was privileged to present my session, “10 Things Your 9-1-1 Caller Wishes You Understood,” before a live virtual audience as part of Ricardo Martinez’s Dare to Be Great 3 conference. My session was born out of a time when I noticed my coworkers were feeling the emotional exasperation and frustration from the brunt of an exhausting year. Due to the national staffing crisis and the pandemic in general, I felt that a lot of employees had forgotten why they do this job in the first place and had become complacent in the way they treated their callers. I needed to remind myself and my fellow team members that kindness and compassion really should stay at the heart of all that we do in this profession. As emergency telecommunicators and public servants to the communities we serve, our greatest strength is our communication skills. How we talk to people matters. I wanted to demonstrate how we can be more proactive listeners, and provide new telecommunicators with a strategic guide and current telecommunicators with a refresher on what our callers need from us when they dial 9-1-1 for help. The main point that I highlighted in the presentation was that it’s all about treating others as you’d wish for them to treat you, your parents, grandparents, children, friends or neighbors. That is the humanity behind this job.
At some point in our career, we all have expressed the sentiment that we chose to do this job because we wanted to help people. We aren’t better than them because we’re on this end of the phone line or because we wear the uniform that we do. Our job skills afford us the special technical training to know what to do in emergency situations, but our callers don’t have that training. And if it’s their first time ever dialing us for help then they don’t know what to expect either. They need us to help them through the questions we need answered, reassure them, give them medical instructions or just be the calm to their crazy.
This job is about making connections with strangers, maybe even in some of the lowest moments of their lives. It’s about meeting people right where they are and hearing them for who they are, not for where they live, what they drive or what they wear. It’s about listening to everyone because everyone just wants to be heard. That is why my passion is returning the humanity to public safety. Making connections and bridging the emotional gaps between us and our callers can be a vulnerable process. I believe that empathy in action looks like a telecommunicator giving their hysterical, screaming caller the benefit of the doubt because it’s been a rough couple of years, and this could be just one of many rough days they are having. I think it sounds like lacing your words with kindness, and choosing a warm, understanding tone of voice over a tone of cynicism or condescension. And it feels like trying on someone else’s shoes and walking a mile in their footsteps for a change. That’s the real job beneath the headset.
Samantha Hawkins is an Emergency Communications Officer II with Cobb County E-911. She has taught at various state and regional workshops and is a member of her agency’s community outreach team.
