Media Monitor

January 2007
No doubt you’ve just purchased your new organizer for 2007, pledged to become more organized in the coming year and started clearing off your desk. The working world — especially leaders — are continually fed the mother-knows-best message that neater is always better. But hold on: Organizing that desk may not serve you or your career! A new book titled A Perfect Mess overturns the accepted wisdom that tight schedules, organization, neatness and consistency are the keys to success. Using examples drawn from business, parenting, cooking, the war on terrorism, retail and Arnold Schwarzenegger, co-authors Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman demonstrate that “ moderately disorganized people, institutions and systems frequently turn out to be more efficient, more resilient, more creative and in general more effective than highly organized ones.” Humorous, informal and filled with business examples, this book refreshingly points out that despite a societal anal-retentive fascination with order, mess is everywhere and it is not the enemy. Beyond thought provoking, this book could offer the absolution that emergency services leaders need to embrace the necessary mess and chaos that always surrounds emergency work.

December 2006
What kind of restrictions can a public safety employer place on an employee concerning outside employment, providing the employee shows p for work rested and ready and is not working in a disreputable job, such as being a stripper, adult film actor or escort? According to experts at Public Safety Labor News, there is not much an employer can do if the issue is not controlled in the terms of a collective bargaining agreement or memorandum of understanding. “[T]here’s little case law on the issue of the extent to which a fire department employer can regulate work performed by the firefighter while off duty,” according to experts at the newsletter. “Based on law enforcement cases, we suspect the result would be that the employer could control activities that either pose a conflict of interest or which in some fashion diminish the performance of the firefighter’s primary job.”

November 2006
“[T]he fire service does in inadequate job of meeting the emotional needs of its membership,” wrote Scott Ferguson in Fire Chief. The inadequacy shows up in how departments deal with the symptoms of stress, like alcohol abuse. According to Ferguson, a deputy chief from Peoria, Arizona, with a master’s degree in management and psychology, most departments take better care of their apparatus than members’ emotional well-being. He wrote: “Every so often, the department’s mechanic lifts the hood to change the oil, tighten the belts and grease the zerk fittings. It’s time that we pledge to grease our members’ emotional zerks.” Ferguson suggests getting management and unions to work together to identify qualified counselors and make them fire service savvy. But even “with a clear set of guidelines in place, regular training and significant buy-in, the process most likely will fail,” Ferguson wrote. But, keep trying. “Psychology is not a perfect science, and neither is personnel management,” he suggested. “We can no longer scurry into the darkness.”

October 2006
Despite the dramatic growth in air medical services (AMS) in the last decade, a public policy paper circulated nationally in August by the Foundation for Air-medical Research & Education ( FARE) claims that, “[T]he need for increased access to ever scarcer specialty care resources, and the increased need to make such care mobile, will increase the need for AMS.” The paper points out that: “AMS has been shown to be cost-effective when looking at total medical cost as well as lives saved.” The AMS team “generally has physician-level capabilities exceeding those of ground ALS providers” and “helicopters more closely resemble a ‘flying emergency department’ than simply an air- borne version of the typical BLS or ALS-level ground ambulance.” Concerning safety, the paper describes steps being taken to make AMS safer, but acknowledges that AMS is complex and conducted in hostile environmental conditions and that “risk cannot be completely eliminated.” It concludes that it is “imperative that policy and funding support the availability and sustainability of AMS to every community.”

September 2006
The Supreme Court has broadened the definition of actions that constitute retaliation against workers who complain about sexual harassment. The decision gives employees the right to sue for retaliation both at and outside of the workplace for a variety of actions that can be as subtle as being excluded from a training lunch. Managers risk being accused of retaliation if an employee who complains of harassment is no longer “included in all of the same activities he or she had previously attended,” according to management attorney Joel W. Rice of Fisher & Phillips. Nancy E. Pritikin, who specializes in employment discrimination and sexual harassment law in San Francisco, suggested that companies “make sure that their policies explicitly prohibit retaliation.” The Supreme Court opinion comes at a time when several high-profile companies (including Toyota and Wal-Mart) are facing sexual harassment allegations and three states are mandating anti-harassment training in the workplace. According to Workforce Management, “Many employers are updating their prevention strategies.”

July 2006
Attitudes toward personal debt have changed dramatically in the past two decades from embarrassment to acceptance. The lowest personal saving rate since the Great Depression and ballooning debt are causing stress and anxiety that sap worker productivity, contribute to health problems and increase the likelihood that employees will leave a job in search of better pay. All of these problems are in addition to the time and effort workers spend trying to managing creditors and finances while on the job. Twenty-eight percent of workers served by the employee assistance provider ComPsych said in 2005 that they were not only worse off than last year, but they were just one major setback away from financial disaster. ComPsych’s most requested workshop is “How to Get Beyond Living From Paycheck to Paycheck.” With rising health insurance premiums often wiping away annual raises, employers are discovering that teaching employees to make good financial decisions, invest in retirement and learn to create workable budgets is a benefit to everyone.

June 2006
“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” Those words have come to symbolize organizational hypocrisy on a grand scale. But according to Swedish economics professor Nils Brunsson, organizational hypocrisy exists in every organization when decision and actions are inconsistent or conflict with previously stated ideals, values or performance measures. Organizational hypocrisy is not necessarily bad, he admitted, but rather may be the only way that organizations can operate, given the often contradictory demands they face. Internal hypocrisy is how an organization is perceived by its own employees. External hypocrisy involves how credible the public perceives an organization to be in meeting its stated mission. Most organizations operate at a Stage 1 level of mild or healthy hypocrisy in which the gap between the public image and what is actually happening inside its private sphere is narrow. In Stage 2, some event widens that gap enough to start employees questioning the judgment of senior decision-makers (often the start of something more serious). If this moderate hypocrisy becomes institutionalized (Stage 3), then the organization will suffer from a full bout of cognitive dissonance or Dilbertism. The trick is to keep organizational hypocrisy to a minimum by working aggressively to keep the gap between image and reality narrow. Once it begins to grow, it is devilishly hard to control.

May 2006
Does your service have a policy on family-witnessed-resuscitation (FWR)? With a large portion of the population aging and public expectations and perceptions about resuscitation continuing to be formed by television, it is not surprising that the popular press is increasingly talking about this issue. In broad brush strokes, research shows that chaplains, family members and nurses are in favor of FWR while physicians overwhelmingly oppose the practice.

April 2006
A hostile political climate coupled with language barriers and the fear of deportation all contribute to hesitancy or even a refusal by illegal immigrants to call 911 when they have an emergency. Last year, about 80 pieces of legislation in 20 states sought to cut non-citizens’ access to healthcare or other services, or to require benefit agencies to tell authorities about applicants with immigration violations.

March 2006
More than a dozen states are considering laws to protect healthcare workers who do not want to provide care that conflicts with their personal beliefs. The surge of legislation reflects the intensifying tension between individual religious values and patients’ rights. While half of the proposals would shield pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions that they believe cause abortions, far broader measures are being considered that would shelter doctors, nurses and…

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