[MUSIC]
It's characterized by
a sense of emotional exhaustion,
feeling like you just can't handle another day of work.
A sense of depersonalization,
that feeling of being
removed from the people you're serving,
and a sense of lack of personal accomplishment.
You feel like even if you're trying your best,
you're not really accomplishing your goals,
you feel like you can't meet
any adversity that's coming your way,
and those three factors
together are what we call burnout.
Most of my research is
about how we can support governments,
improve government services, make sure people are
getting the services they're eligible for.
But the way I focus on that is really
thinking about the people who deliver those services.
So the government workers, frontline workers,
and I think about how to recruit them,
how to retain them,
and how to support them on the job.
You see people motivated to enter the profession,
oftentimes, they're motivated by public service.
But then by the two-year mark,
almost 40 percent of them have quit.
One question that I study is,
why would you go through
this huge investment of
trying to get a job in government,
of getting trained for these really complicated jobs,
only to quit two years later?
I think the answer has to do
with really high levels of burnout,
especially if you're on the front line.
Even though these seem like very different jobs,
there are some things that a social worker,
a teacher, a correctional officer,
or a police officer have in common and that's they're
directly dealing with people
who are themselves facing trauma.
Same thing with 911 dispatchers.
So 911 dispatchers are picking up the phone and
answering calls that handle everybody's trauma,
whatever stress or difficulty they're going through
is transmitted to the 911 dispatcher,
not just for that one case,
but for the hundreds of calls
that they're taking every day.
Various departments across the country
were coming to me and saying,
"The recruitment problem is really a retention problem.
The reason we have so many vacancies,
the reason we're facing this challenge of constantly
needing to recruit new officers is because people leave."
That led to conversations with
911 dispatch centers that said, "You know what?
Our main struggle is
not only turnover but also absenteeism.
We're really struggling to keep
people after we've hired them."
For a specific dispatch center,
this is a costly, costly exercise.
It takes about 16 months to train a new 911 dispatchers.
Depending on the city, that might be
around $30,000-$60,000 per person.
If that person starts showing sick leave more or starts
being absent a lot more and
quits very soon after they get hired,
you've created a negative cycle of absenteeism and
turnover where the staff that are still
there are more burnt out,
more stressed because they have to
do extra shifts and mandatory overtime.
This creates a culture where everyone is
emotionally exhausted and everyone
feels like they can't take it anymore.
I started this project when
a few centers contacted me and said,
"Can you help us with this challenge
of absenteeism and retention?"
The initial study that we've done now
focuses on a collaboration between nine cities
across the country that were willing to take
this leap of faith with us and test something new.
[MUSIC]
Sixty-eight-year-old male, conscious, breathing.
When you start learning
about what it's like to be a dispatcher,
one thing that often comes up and certainly
came up in our research is that
dispatchers feel like they're not seen or they're not
valued even within the law enforcement community.
When a major event happens,
the emergency responders are the EMTs,
[BACKGROUND] the fire department, the police officers.
But for various reasons, the 911 dispatcher,
the person who's picking up the phone,
isn't considered an emergency responder.
They're considered just a call center
worker and that has real ramifications.
It means they don't get as much mental health support.
It means they have to go back to work after
a traumatic event without days off.
We wanted to build a program around that idea to really
professionalize and elevate the importance
of the 911 dispatcher.
Rather than trying to show to
dispatchers how important they
are to the residents that they serve,
they already know how important that work is.
What we wanted to do is show them
how important they are to each other.
What we ended up doing is creating a series of
prompts that we sent to half of
these dispatchers asking them
to reflect on their experiences
and to give advice to
new hires or newbies that are entering the profession.
The idea there was to
give them an opportunity not only to share
their own experiences but also
to hear stories from other people.
In practice, what that meant was for six weeks,
they got weekly emails that nudge them to reflect
on a specific part of their job
and how that connects to other dispatchers.
But then we also give them the opportunity to read
other people's stories on a common confidential platform.
Even if you weren't yourself
participating by sharing your story,
you still got the opportunity to
read other people's stories.
We hope that that would build
a sense of what we call social belonging
or a sense that this is
a community that has
your back that understands what you're
going through and that you can
really make a difference by supporting each other.
We measured two types of outcomes.
The first was actual burnout on a validated scale.
It's called the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory and it's
a validated scale of burnout that we
measured at the beginning of the program,
immediately after the six weeks,
and four months later.
We found that burnout was
reduced by about eight points and it's
statistically significant and has
a really meaningful effect.
An eight-point difference on the scale is approximately
the difference between a social worker
and an administrative assistant,
so a really large difference in burnout.
What I was most excited about is
that you could have this effect four months later,
that this isn't something that disappeared
the day you stop sending emails.
The second was then going back to
the cities and looking at their administrative data.
There, again, four months post-intervention,
we saw a large difference in turnover,
so on actual resignations.
Of course, this is the public sector.
There's a limited number of
people who quit in six months,
but even still, we were
able to reduce turnover by about half.
Well, it's surprising that a small, low-cost,
light-touch intervention could have
a disproportionate impact on
something that is really systemic,
and long-term, and chronic.
But a lot of behavioral science is like that.
If you're unlocking the right psychological barrier,
you're able to see impacts from
a small lodge on a really big outcome.
I'm hopeful that this is one of
those cases, that we're unlocking
a really important basic human need
to feel connected and to feel like you belong.