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Silverbacks on Recruitment, Retention and Recognition
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We start by talking about Terry's wardrobe malfunction, the latest on the Silverback Leadership program, and what we can expect from Nick and Terry at this year's Hazard Zone Conference.
We then segway into the topics of recruitment, retention, and recognition.
This episode features Nick Brunacini, Terry Garrison and John Vance.
We want your helmet (for the AVB CTC)! Check this out to find out more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg5_ZwoCZo0
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This episode was recorded at the Alan V. Brunacini Command Training Center in Phoenix, Arizona on May 8, 2024.
Welcome to B-Shifter Today John Vance, terry Garrison, nick Brunicini Hanging out in the B-Shift room Talking about things that interest us, and maybe you, so we're glad that folks are able to join us today.
Speaker 1Thank you. How are you doing today, terry? I'm doing fine. Thank you for asking.
Speaker 2It's been a good day. You've kind of had a rough start to the day, though, right.
Speaker 1It's kind of a funny day I don't think we need to share it.
Speaker 3Oh you don't.
Speaker 2Terry was wearing a blouse earlier and you didn't realize it, right?
Speaker 1No, I went into the—so there's a large closet. It's actually more than a closet, it's a room here at the office, at the building and the building remember, tom Henry, the building and I went in there to grab a hawaiian shirt to put on. I buy this one, looks nice, got a single button, it fits nice, I put it on.
Speaker 1I came out and one of the ladies well, next daughter says terry, that shirt looks wonderful on you it's a girl's, so I know that in women's clothing I wear a 2x and it, and it fit a little different, didn't it?
Speaker 2Didn't it feel like you were wearing a lady's shirt?
Speaker 1It felt like there was a little more room in the chest area. But it felt strange.
Speaker 2Did you wear any women's clothing today?
Speaker 3Not today, but I had worn that same thing that Terry. In fact, terry may have been wearing the same one I wore. The very first interview of this building was done by the radio people, ktar Radio. Oh yeah, they came and said, yeah, we heard about this building and this mural you painted on it. That was painted on it and we'd like to interview you. And I said sure, and so we get done. And I thought they were like one of the local TV stations. And she says no, we're radio. And I said, really, you TV stations. And she says no, we're radio. And I said, really, you just videotape me for radio.
Speaker 3And she says yeah, it'll be on the news though, so, but I remember seeing it and I think you know I just don't think that's. That shirt fits me. Funny, it's goofy, and I needed a haircut at the time and my beard was all over and I was really kind of crazy. I'd been staring at the sun for about two or three weeks wondering what was going to happen next with the world, yeah, and so they informed me too. The same people.
Speaker 1It's a Hawaiian shirt.
Speaker 3It looks like a Hawaiian shirt, yeah it was, and they said well, those were, yeah, those are females, okay.
Speaker 1So I went and grabbed this one and put this one on. Yeah, and this is a male shirt. Yeah, this thing looks wonderful if you see the back.
Speaker 3It looks good on you. It's an OG. It's OG, icy. No, this is a good shirt.
Speaker 1You know that old saying about you know that shirt looks good on you or you make that shirt look good.
Speaker 3You make it pop, yeah, I know this shirt looks good on anybody you know, what's crazy is the price of t-shirts has gone through the roof for like a quality t-shirt to silk, screen it. It's. It's ridiculous. It's like 10 times what it was just like five, six years ago. That's amazing yeah, it's, it's nuts. Thanks covid. You know they blame it on covid, but I think that's bullshit. I think people are just jacking prices to jack prices yeah.
Speaker 2It's interesting, though it's backfired on some Ford is sitting on a pickup truck F-150s man, they can't sell them. When we were in Detroit, we were in Dearborn doing a train-the-trainer class and there are parking lots full of F-150s everywhere. They don't have enough space to put them in Detroit and that's greed, I think it's.
Speaker 3we're going to get all we can, you know. The other is like Boeing. Well, we're just going to quit making a good airplane.
Speaker 1So yeah, we're going to give the money to the investors. Instead, I want to share one more of those with you. So my wife and I, over the last five years, have done a crawfish boil.
Speaker 1You're always busy but thank you, and we do a crawfish boil. So we order like a giant bag of live crawfish and sausage and stuff from the South and this year was four times as much, it was like 600 bucks. It was over, it was seriously. It's normally a couple hundred, it went 600. So my wife's like, well, we're not going to do it, we're going to cancel the event because I don't want to spend that much on bugs, and so we canceled the event. This was about a month ago. Since then, about once a week, we get a contact from them saying, hey, our prices are back down. We have crawfish now, our prices are back. I think they were trying to take advantage of the public.
Speaker 3I read a deal a while ago that said the crop was off. They didn't have enough crawfish. They said you couldn't buy them and they were very expensive.
Silverback Leadership Program for Blue Cards
Speaker 2So another one of the oh, the pandemic must have adversely affected the crawfish, you think oh okay, it was like eggs were $11, $12 a dozen not too long ago for a while and they came back down somewhat what's happening in this.
Speaker 1I feel like we're in bunch of yeah.
Speaker 2Let's start talking about our medications next and their side effects.
Speaker 3Well, they said most of the inflation is caused by the greed. They said it's like the oil, the price you drive by and gas goes up a dollar over, like two, from the time you got it last to the time you need it and actually you think what is going on? Well, there was a rainstorm somewhere off the coast of South America and it just it adversely affects all the prices on the West Coast. You're like, okay, ridiculous, yeah, wow.
Speaker 1All right, that's a heck of a start, yeah.
Speaker 2We're looking forward to the conference. We are heating up on the talk. You guys are going to be at the conference doing silverback management. The conference is September 30th through October 4th. The pre-conference is September 30th, the conference itself is October 3rd and 4th and you guys will be presenting. So can you talk to us about what that presentation is going to entail, and then it'll kind of dovetail into what our topic is for the day.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think we're making some progress. You know, last year we introduced the silverback leadership. It's the information that we've taken basically from that. Bruno has taught throughout his entire career on leadership. He was big on leadership Everybody kind of knows he was the incident commander guy, but he was also big on leadership and customer service and how you treat people. And we've been really going through that for about a year and a half and repackaging up his information is what we did and we put it in a big, in a nice big program that we're going to offer silverback leadership and we're going to kind of go through some modules on that.
Speaker 1It's tremendous, we call it so. It's actually his books, which are anatomy and physiology, no brainer management, functional boss behavior and what am I missing? Oh, essential is the customer service. And then we like to say and then it was all his napkins, notes and knowledge that he put down for all of us over the years, because I have all those in my office and we went through all that. I think the most difficult part was deciding not what to include. But we have a full program that we're gonna we're gonna present again this year. Yeah, I, I went into that, because I really nick.
Speaker 1Nick's got about uh 10 000 other things going on here at the building and that's been the project that he assigned to me. So I get to go through that and write the notes on it and then Nick adds to it. But his saying yeah meant a lot to me because he didn't correct anything I said.
Speaker 3So thank you.
Speaker 1Nick for your support.
Speaker 3Well, and that's kind of it is. Right now we're at the point where we've amassed a bunch of stuff, so we got all this content, so we got video. We got some graphics stuff. So we got all this content, so we got video. We got some graphics. Terry's been writing a bunch of articles about this that we'll figure out how to incorporate all that into the program that we do online, and I think that's kind of. The challenge is how much writing do you put in versus this, because people don't like to read. I'm finding out Too much reading, especially if you're online. It just disrupts things.
Speaker 1I think the great goldmine we most recently came across is all the videos of AVB and we're including those and that just matches up perfectly with everything that he said back then.
Speaker 1You know he had his schedule when he dropped at the airport, so to speak, is he had his schedule at least two years in advance. In my office over there on the other side of that wall is my office and I have his travel bag that I just kind of opened and looked around for a minute and shut back up that he was dragging as he was going through the airport and the calendar in there he was full and it was all leadership and so we're going to. There's no reason that that information shouldn't be taught out there, and that's what we're going to do. We're going to take his information out, all the stories that he told us, and then we're going to add a little bit what we've been able to kind of do over the last 10 years in our careers, really throughout our careers. We're going to add to it and it's going to be a full program. I think people are going to enjoy it.
Speaker 3I can't wait to see it.
Speaker 1And it's Bruno's program and you know, we were told by one person no, don't say repackage, but really repackaging is actually what we're doing. We're taking his information, we're delivering in a way that makes sense today, using all the technology.
Speaker 3In fact, the term we're using is we're curating it. Garrison and I.
Speaker 1Yes, we're curators. It's the kindness curation we are disciples of Bruno and we're going to take that out and preach that, and it's really good information. I mean, it's actually usable. Okay, I'm a leader in this position. Here's the issue I have. And okay, well, here's a great tool that you can use, or a program you can use. So I think people are going to look forward to it.
Speaker 2So it's you guys and 19 other instructors at the Hazard Zone Conference. You can go to hazardzonebccom and get all the information on that, and not only are you going to present that silverback leadership there, but then it's going to become a program online. And is that going to be for anyone who's a blue card user? Are they going to be able to have access to that, or how's that going to work?
Speaker 3What we're doing right now is the plan is to take all this leadership content and turn it into some kind of blue card centric type presentation online. So, like Terry referred to earlier is we found a bunch of video three hours of video of him at the National Fire Academy, just kind of sitting there being interviewed. So at least half of that, at a minimum, is going to make it into the program. And so what we'll do is, as Terry said earlier is my dad had a thing for eights, so like the eight functions of command. Well, there's eight broad chapters to this leadership, so there's eight different modules. So that's what we'll put together and we'll do the intro. The goal is to have the intro done and then the first module by the time we get to the conference in October. So, based on kind of the current workflow and schedule that is highly doable. Based on kind of the current workflow and schedule that is highly doable. And then the way we'll share that with the world is, if you're a blue card user right now and you're signed up, we're getting ready to jack the CE area of B Shifter and we're going to start filling that with more and more content. The leadership stuff will be some of the next to get put in there. But as the buckslip continues to grow and evolve, we'll start throwing task-level stuff in there. So the CE area of the B-Shifter website is going to be where all this newer content comes into play. And so, really, we rebuilt the website here in October and so today I don't know a little over six months since we took it down and put it back up, I'm going to say it's at least 125, 125 to 130 percent of what it was before. So all the functionalities back. The instructors will notice, especially the ones that use it all the time the system has gotten much faster and there's newer tool sets going in that make it easier to manage all the ICs within your department. We're going to continue that. So the instructor's access and what they have in the system is going to continue to be refined and improved. I mean, that's just the way we do stuff, and then we'll start to add more and more content. The first stuff that'll go in there, you'll see, is the stuff that Terry and I've been working on, mostly Terry. But we'll sit down and we'll start creating more and more, and then we're going to figure out a way for people to kind of comment back to us on this. And so there's some two-way communication where we can start to oh okay, you don't like this, you prefer this or something you want to see, or however it's going there. And then realistically, I think we're going to be screwing around with it for three or four years and we'll just be sharing as we develop it and then one day we're going to wake up and it's going to be done and think, okay, we got this leadership thing and then we'll probably move it out and it'll become its own program in the thing. And then, but with everything we do, at least on the blue card side, is you got.
Speaker 3Continuing education is a big part of that. In fact, I was talking to Greg earlier and one of the things he's been doing blue card forever. And he says one of the things he's noticed is like departments that will be doing the full CE access. He said in his area of the country where he works. He says you'll see a difference when departments they'll go along and do full CE for a while and then they'll change their priorities and say we're going to stop doing full CE and we're going to do something else. And he says within a few months. He says you start to see their incident operations dropping off, and he says you can hear it on the radio. He says they're just not practicing it enough anymore. And he said so. And I think what we'll do is I don't know what it'll look like, but the instruct, the leadership thing there's going to be.
Speaker 3I think the power of blue card are the scenarios in it, it's the simulations. So it's like okay, here's your, your conditions, now here's the actions you're going to take. So we're all speaking the same language. I think we do the same thing with leadership. It's like okay, this is what this looks like, this is why we do it this way. Now here's the scenarios that we're going to be managing. So when you look at, like the customer service book that is probably a premier text on this, at least in the public safety world, and the scenarios in that book have become infamous.
Customer Service in Fire Department
Speaker 3The concrete deal, the old man with his dog who gets in the accident, the two asshole paramedics on the airplane piss off the doctor and the nurse. So we will expand those out. And then I think the key to a lot of that is okay, they did this, what do we do now? Well, I think the power of this program is. And the old man said he says, well, this is what we did to fix it. And they didn't execute anybody. It's like, no, you got to be nice to them. They were rude, so I'm going to go be rude to them to make them not be rude. That's not the way it works. He said. So you know, they gotta understand that this isn't acceptable. And and so that's what you do. That's how, the way you improve your current deal.
Speaker 2So I can't wait to see that at the conference and and online yeah so it's going to be on bshiftercom. And, by the way, the customer service book is uh, available once again at the bshifter store and I know know we sold about a hundred of them last month. I mean, people are clamoring for them and it was $25 more the last time I bought it. So it's a good deal to get that book at bshiftercom.
Speaker 3Well, exactly what happened before is IFSTA produced that book forever and then it just kind of it stayed with them. And then they had all the books for a while and they got out of the Alan Brunicini business and then at some point they said, well, we got this book, we don't know what to do with it. We thought, well, that's because we own it. And so it all kind of came back and that happened about a year ago. And then it took us that long to get the master file where you could print it again. And the only change between the old book and the new book is there's no longer a spiral bound, so it's a regular, perfect bound book, so it looks like a regular book and that makes it much easier to ship. And then we dropped the essentials, so the title of it is Fire Department Customer Service, which is yeah, so that's. But it's the same exact book, same art, same text. We did not change a word in it.
Speaker 3We had talked about doing that when my dad was alive, probably 10, 12 years ago, of taking the book back from Oklahoma. And we looked at it and started tearing it apart and he says I don't know what I would change and I thought, you know, we can change the artwork and leave the text. And he says, yeah, I guess we could do that, and then it would be a new book and we could take it over and blah, blah, blah and it just kind of died on the vine because we had all the other stuff we were doing. And then it comes through the transom. A couple years ago IFSTA contacts us and said hey, we got some books we sold. We have two or three cases left we'll give you, and then would you take it. Yeah, it's ours, we want it back.
Speaker 1It worked out very well for everybody, it's all relevant and it still works today. Oh, it's All the information's right.
Speaker 3In fact, of all I've read some leadership and management. Some genius writes one a week of these things and they come across. Thank you, that's me. Well, exactly, and really none of them that I've ever read have been any better than that book. It was just simple. It's written for firefighters. It makes more sense. It truly is. He was ahead of his time. So, yeah, they said that was the most disruptive thing he ever did to the fire service was customer service.
Speaker 1Identify Mrs Smith, and you screwed us all up.
Speaker 3When we went to DC Washington DC was going to do Blue Card they wanted to customize to DC. They were a special cat and their chief at the time was Reuben, and so my dad and him hooked up, and so I remember going there the first time as part of that and it was their ops staff and they said, you know, we're okay with this. In fact, this is just good, you know, because they were tacticians, a lot of those guys. They knew what they were doing and so they saw it and they said, oh, this is no, this is just good standard practices. And they tell you off the side. They said, what we're the most afraid of is if he brings that customer service book in here, and they said we don't know what we'll do. Then I thought, well, no, I ain't that, that, that ain't yeah. Me and my brother are tactician guys. We're, we're yeah, you ain't going to get that from us, yeah.
Speaker 2It's funny how some people are scared of it. And then I also have gotten from. I've sat in classes with East Coast guys who you know they're victims and they're taxpayers, they're not customers and you know they're doing that routine, yeah, which it's like what you know Bruno always tried to de-victimize. We say it all the time. Why would you want to know them as victims and not as customers? And it just makes sense to me. I, you know, I think that's somebody's platform to stand on a lot of times.
Speaker 1Yeah, you know, I think that's somebody's platform to stand on a lot of times and that's what makes them different. But I'd rather be on the customer service end of things, and I think you hear from that one guy like that, and there's a 200 behind him, who say, yeah, let's treat the customer nice. Yeah, whatever kind of accent they use, they want to be nice to the customer and take care of the customer. At the end of the day, why wouldn't you want to? I of the day, why wouldn't you want to? I mean, if you treat people miserable all day long miserably all day long when you go home you're going to feel miserable. And when you treat people kind, at the end of the day you're going to feel okay about the job you did when you walk away from it, and that's kind of what's important, I think you know, I remember in our department we would have those arguments.
Speaker 3Like you know, customer service, I call them people, I don't call them customers. Who cares what you call them? And you know, what was true about the whole thing is kind of like you said is nobody argued that we should be mean to people? That never came up. They said, no, you shouldn't, Because it was like AA for a lot of us. Because you were like no, there's times that we want to hurt the people who call us. I mean, they need to be tuned up. And you're like no, you can't do that. You said it is, once you jump over the asshole fence, you're an asshole and it's like no, that's not who we want to be. We're not going to jump over the fence, we're going to be nice to them and kind and polite. Well, what if they do this? If they punch us, then that's not a good idea, especially with Engine 11 here. They want to fight all the time.
Speaker 1So I was fortunate enough to take Bruno's prevent harm, survive and be nice philosophy to three departments that I was a fire chief in, and we use different words, right, we use be safe, be nice, be accountable in all three of those departments. Well, that was adopted as the departmental mission in those three, or at least a mission statement in those three departments. One of them is Houston. You got a big department and there was one person that I think throughout the entire system that said no, I don't like that word, be nice. Well, do you not want to be nice? I'm okay with being nice, that's just kind of a weak word. Well, let's find a word that works for you. And I talk about that in other articles and stuff.
Speaker 1But I think, uh, this most organizations uh, want to treat people nice. So what this, what this book or, excuse me, what this program does it? It actually gives you a process to how to change your organizational culture so your culture kind of meets that be nice piece. You know, bruno, to say what's the best definition of culture, the way things are done around here. Well, if you, you know, if you want to treat people nice, there's an easy way to get to that. It's a step-by-step process. You can manage it. You can hold people accountable through the process.
Speaker 1When somebody doesn't treat somebody else nice, either in the system or a customer, you can hold them accountable and it becomes a barren. It's like well, why would you treat them that way? It's not the common way we want to treat people. So I don't think anybody's ever sat on a hiring interview board and said, yeah, I want to be a firefighter, so I can treat people like shit. Yeah, they do tell you that. Hey, I care about people, I want to serve and all those kind of things. So I think it's important.
Speaker 3There's always a number of assholes. There's just going to be. It comes with people. And there was a saying within our fire department that there was seven guys who voted against Joe Bledsoe's dog, guys who voted against Joe Bledsoe's dog. And there was this captain on the fire department, the most fit person, the firefighter, nicest guy. He was prettier than any A-shifter, he was kind, he was like the statue of David is who this guy was. He was and he's riding his bike down the canal and he's going probably 60 miles an hour and he hits a steel cable across the thing. Man, quadriplegic, just horrible, and he was probably late 20s.
Speaker 1He was right around 30.
Speaker 3He was a god. It just breaks your heart and so he's recovering and doing his thing. You know, the fire department and the rest of it and the union. He was going to come home. This is, like I don't know, a year into it and we're at the union meeting and they're voting on getting him a dog, a service dog to help him, you know, and they get your shit and do things and the dog was going to be like I don't know 1500 bucks back then, a million years ago, and it was like I don't know. There's probably 200 people that showed up at the union meeting, so it was like 200 to seven and they you said seven guys voted against the dog.
Speaker 3And you're like you can't, you think and can't. And you would sit in certain places with the most powerful people on the fire department and they get talking. They say if we could figure out who those seven people are and can tell me like I can find out. And they're like you know who they are. And so it becomes a deal like we'll use their skin to build Feed them to the dog?
Speaker 2Oh, it was just. There's always a couple in the bunch. I came from a system where the firefighters ran a pension fund and the pension fund was worth $25 million and they voted on their own raises, so so, they were getting a pension.
Speaker 1That may be a way to run the kiddie vans, but I don't know if you're in the kiddie.
Speaker 2I think it's a bad system, but it's an old system set up by the state. Yeah, they were voting on an increase and there was actually like four people that voted no to the increase and 90 that voted for it, and it's like who the hell would not? And I found out who one of them was and he said I thought it should be more, so I voted no.
Speaker 1Oh well, there you go.
Speaker 2Yeah, so it's like yeah.
Speaker 3It's a big country out there man.
Speaker 1Yeah, it is.
Speaker 3You talk to people you say you're mad, we're getting a 5% raise, we should be double that. You think you know they don't take it away at the end and they double that. You think you know it keep. They don't take it away at the end and they add to it the next time it's it goes into your pension.
Innovative Firefighter Recruitment and Training
Speaker 2Yeah, hey, uh, I wanted to throw out a couple of topics for you guys this week um, because it's hot topics, uh, recruitment and retention and specifically recruitment. Here's a story out of Osceola County, florida. Osceola County, florida, and what they ended up doing was hosting FIRE and EMS hosted a career signing day, just like the NCAA does. So they had the parents there. I'm scrolling through the story right now for the folks who are watching. So these are the students that they signed to the job and you know, parents were over there and they were giving them hats and doing all the stuff like when you become an athlete for an NCAA school. I really thought that was a pretty cool idea. I've never seen anything like this, and part of their deal is earn while you learn, so they're actually hiring them, putting them on the payroll and then allowing them to become a regular firefighter later on. So I thought that was a neat program. I don't know if you guys have ever encountered anything like that before.
Speaker 1That is a great program and if you think about the whole, there's three parts to that right. So you got the recruitment piece, you got the selection piece and then you got the hiring piece right and if you break those down you can kind of be creative in each one of those areas. So they're using a pretty creative recruitment piece. They're not guaranteeing those people are going to be selected. They're not telling them they're going to be hired. People are going to be selected. They're not telling them they're going to be hired, but they're giving them the opportunity to be interested in the job and then telling them what's what you need to do to become a firefighter. I think that's because there's a lot of people that are out there and I think every department is having trouble hiring qualified firefighters, qualified candidates to be firefighters, and you know, if you can show them on the front end, hey, this is how you're going to be included on the team and this is how you're going to be treated. I think we would have more people that would be interested.
Speaker 1And when I was in Houston, the mayor first thing and it happened in every department I worked for, happened in Glendale is that they are interested in a more diverse workforce. And the mayor she says I would like to have more female firefighters. I said so would I? I think every fire chief in the country would say, yeah, we need more. I said, but they have to be qualified. We can't lower the standards to get any candidate, whether it's a female or anybody else. And she agreed to that. So now what you have to do is you need to go out and you need to recruit where people are capable to do the jobs.
Speaker 1So we went out to universities. We went out to areas where people are playing sports, where women are playing sports, young girls are playing sports. Do you put the seed in the candidates when they're in high school that a few years later, that's an opportunity for them, or at least an option for them. So I really like what they did there. I think it's incredible that you know what they did is they practiced a little inclusion? And that's what I told the mayor.
Speaker 1The mayor was like well, we need diversity. I said, no, we need. Inclusion is what we need. We need to include the people that can do the job. If you're a fire chief and you're even thinking about lowering standards to get candidates, think about if you have an event like that and it's because you hired candidates that weren't capable of doing the job. So, finding a group of people offer them a little bit of a recruitment buy-in, but you're not saying we're going to select you. You're not saying we're going to hire you, but we're going to give you an opportunity to apply, and that's very important and train you.
Speaker 2We are going to train you.
Speaker 1We're going to apply you, to apply and train you. We are going to train you. We're going to apply you have these skills. We're going to train you if we select you. That's very important and really the real job of being a firefighter has to be identified up front. The other part of that is when we tell firefighters and we've done this for years you're going to come in and you're going to wear a uniform and every day is going to be a working fire and you're going to be a hero and people are going to love you. And then they go on 12 EMS calls, every shift for months and months, and months. And then that has it.
Speaker 3Well, it turns into years and years and years, right.
Speaker 2And the problem comes in and we talk to our communications department about this is don't make a flyer where every picture is us fighting fire and we've got turnout gear on and we're climbing ladders, because that's 1% of what we do. We're going to be misleading people. We have to show a picture of us taking a blood pressure.
Speaker 3Vance, that's our job to show pictures of the fires.
Speaker 1You know what else they did in that program is they set the culture right. So they're starting to already say, hey, this is the culture of our organization when you get in here. And it's kind of like somebody said the other day that football teams kind of take on the culture of their coaches, you know, basketball teams, whatever and I think some fire departments take on the culture of their their fire chief and their command team Absolutely. And I think that fire chief there is setting the culture that we're going to be inclusive, we're going to help people be successful and hell, I think it's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2And make it a little fun when you get your— yeah, make it fun too.
Speaker 3There was an article that came out the other day and it was talking about the weight that workers have to deal with, just physical weight. They pick up and move and carry. And the second highest was machinist and I want to say it was about 20 to 30 pounds is what they had to deal with. The highest were firefighter paramedics and it was over 100 pounds of what they had to deal with. The highest were firefighter paramedics and it was over 100 pounds of what they had to do. So, like the physical piece of the, well, there's a. The CPAT is the Certified Physical Agility Test. So it's a certified test based on the work a firefighter has to do.
Speaker 1Bonafide job qualifications.
Speaker 3So that's the reason there's not a wheelchair left on fire engines is you have to be able to advance the tack lines, pull the tack lines, put ladders up. It's a very physical job, so that's part of it, but it is. It's harder and harder to sign people up. I mean, just when we came on, we were competing with probably 2,000 people that wanted 100 jobs, and I don't know what it is today, but it ain't 2,000 people taking the test here.
Speaker 1You see Phoenix. They're putting up recruitment on their Facebook page all the time, trying to get people to be interested in the job of a firefighter with the Phoenix Fire Department, because I think it's very competitive right now when you're hiring firefighters too is those qualified candidates out there. They're becoming very popular with the organizations right, so once again, what's the culture in your organization? Do I want to work there where people are treated nice, or I want to work over there where I hear and they hear and they listen and they pay attention?
Speaker 2and they ride along and they know how people are treated. Another weird thing I saw at FDIC this year was the Ventura City Fire Department was one of them. There was one of the fire departments the county fire department around Washington DC, prince George's or Prince Williams, or one of those. They had recruitment booths at FDIC this year, so they're trying to attract other firefighters to leave their job wherever they are in the country and come to Ventura, california. Now I lived in Ventura in the 80s and I could not even get an interview with a fire department then because it was so competitive. Getting an application entailed you went to a high school and stood in line starting at midnight because they were only going to give away a thousand applications.
Firefighter Recruitment and Retention Strategies
Speaker 2So it was like getting Springsteen tickets, where you had to stand in line, get the application, fill it out on the spot. Then you went into the auditorium and took the written test all in the same morning. So we'd sit out there with our hot chocolate and coffee and try to stay awake all night just to apply for the fire department, and none of us went anywhere with it because it was so hard to get. It was like winning the lottery back then you know.
Speaker 1And then when you do hire somebody, bruno used to say you know all the qualifications. As far as being nice, I guess the personal skills of being a firefighter you probably learn from your mom anyway. Right, we can't always teach you to be nice. We could teach you how to act, how to behave, we could change your behavior. But you know, I think that finding people that really are understanding of what the job of being a firefighter nowadays is right.
Speaker 1And in Glendale and I've said it before on this podcast that they had a wonderful system that they would take in the if they were going to hire 10, they're going to hire five people they had taken 30 candidates into what we called the combine. The city manager didn't like that word, but it was a combine, but it wasn't a physical combine as much as it was how you work together as a team. And they would put those 30 people and they'd show up the first day and they'd write their names on the back of a white T-shirt and then they would put them in team exercises, kind of that bona fide job qualifications, kind of things that firefighters would do together as a team and then watch and see how they reacted and how they responded. And once they started doing that and selecting the people out and how they responded, and once they started doing that and selecting the people out, they didn't have people leaving because they were run off the job or they couldn't make probation.
Speaker 1In fact, we ended up with some really good candidates and I remember one instance and I've said this before, but it's worth repeating is that we had a couple guys who were the big buff, strong ex-military guys. Everybody looked at them and said, okay, we're going to hire those guys. After the second day it's like those guys are not going to be hired with us. They didn't participate in the team. They bad-mouthed the rest of the guy. They said the teacher was stupid, they were just too good to be a firefighter and you wouldn't have found that out years ago.
Speaker 2You would have hired them based on how they looked and where they came from and they would have been a problem in the system.
Speaker 1You're going to say something, big Z, right. So you just look at that and so that system worked really well. So you've got to invest. That's why I said you've got the recruitment piece, you've got the selection piece, which was this, and then the hiring piece. I think we don't do a very good job in Houston. They did a really good job in the hiring piece is they would, they would do. They didn't do so well with the interview piece, but they did really well with the background piece and they would have people taking tests to see if they're just nuts, right, what do you call those? Cognitive testsognitive tests or psychological tests? And we were able to eliminate some candidates like no, that person is not a good fit for the Houston Fire Department. I think they've got some good candidates doing that. So we've got to have that hiring process where, before you sign that last document, man, you check them out physically, mentally, emotionally. However, you do that. You check their background and see, find out what's going on with them.
Speaker 2They always couple recruitment with retention and there are a number of departments right now that are having a struggle retaining their members. And you know, here's an example right here of a department they're saying in Virginia they're at the breaking point because of burned out firefighters and retention struggles and it's all the mandatory overtime that people have to work.
Speaker 2If they're in a system, in a department that regularly mandatory, overtimes them and makes them stay. You know you're getting ready to get off work to go to little Jimmy's birthday party and boss comes up and says you're staying for another 12. That's hard to swallow for especially today's generation and really what it comes down to here and in this case, this chief at Virginia Beach is saying they need 140 more firefighters to make the fire department work and we're seeing more and more departments like that throughout the country that are going hat in hand begging for firefighters so they don't have to mandatory overtime people. Back in the day we used to compete for overtime. I mean it was probably one of the biggest sources of tension within the department was who was getting overtime, because it was so important to add to your income and add to your pension and everything else. Now you can't get people to work overtime and because of the vacancies the departments don't have the capacity through having rovers and really overstaffing. So when they're at minimum staffing they have enough.
Speaker 1I've argued with every city manager and mayor that I work for as a fire chief that it's not an overtime problem that you're having, Mayor, it's a staffing problem. We need more firefighters. And it took a little while and with the overtime budget being out of control for a period of time, I think when I got to the Houston Fire Department first day I walked in they said we got a $40 million overtime problem. We're over $40 million in our overtime. I said, well, this fiscal year or next, they go. No, now, and we were. I was hired in November and it's like, oh, my goodness, here we go. So even in that fiscal year we were $40 million out. So it started having discussion with the mayor. Finally she supported not I shouldn't say finally, but she eventually supported uh, hiring people. We were able to hire 300 plus people.
Speaker 1Now houston fire department's back down. They're shutting down companies, forced, forced overtime. That that forced overtime went through that. And, glenda, that's an ugly thing. We didn't have that. We were like, like you, we wanted the.
Speaker 1But when you can't go to grandma's bar mitzvah because you got to work that day and you don't find out about it until the day, you're packed up in the morning you're packed up, ready to go home and they tell you no, you got to work another 24 or 48, whatever system you're in, that's hard on the membership. So these young people wanting to be firefighters are getting smarter. They're talking to firefighters and then they're getting. Does your fire chief have a plan to help with the staffing problem? Because they're having an overtime problem? But does a fire chief have a plan that is, a budget plan to hire more firefighters? Is that something that a council or a board has supported? And if not, these firefighters are going.
Speaker 1No thanks, it's, but firefighters are leaving to go to other departments. They're leaving for that reason. They'll leave because of that and then they'll leave, but because of the way they're treated within the system and the way they're perceived within the system. It seems like nowadays, these people that we're hiring, they're loyal to the job of firefighting but they're not loyal to the city or the jurisdiction. Where we were loyal to our jurisdiction growing up that was kind of the way we were raised and I don't think they should be loyal to the jurisdiction If the jurisdiction isn't doing what they need to do and there's a better job out there that you're going to be treated better. They got a better plan for your work schedule and you can make the same amount of money. Why wouldn't you go?
Speaker 2You guys ready for a timeless tactical truth? All right, a timeless tactical truth from Alan Brunicini. What makes work interesting? Responsibility, achievement, recognition, appreciation. Responsibility, achievement, recognition, appreciation. You got to be authentic. When you're giving that recognition and appreciation part right, I mean that could come off very hollow. You know, we saw it happen with nurses during the pandemic. They were appreciated initially when the pandemic started. Remember what they were giving nurses as bonuses, like a free domino's pizza for working a shift, and and then it turned into a hundred dollars and five hundred dollars and so on. Their appreciation really fell short. Um, does our appreciation fall short in the fire service, or how can we shore that up? So we're showing recognition and appreciation appropriate ways.
Speaker 1Back up there again, I want to look at it. So maybe you can put a cost to recognition. If you're going to give somebody something, most firefighters will tell you I don't want the plaque, I don't want the ribbon, I don't want the pen or whatever. But all this is pretty free, right. There's not a lot of cost to all that. When you give somebody responsibility and you know that means you trust them enough to say, hey, take on this job. Most firefighters want to do. Most workers want to do. They want to take on a little more responsibility to show you they can do that.
Speaker 1Most people just don't want to go to work and kind of sit like a toll booth guy and just not do anything, especially when they become firefighters, because they really probably are high achiever type people. And then you know, just look at that. Appreciation is a simple thank you when you really mean it. Right, bruno talks about in the anatomy and physiology of leadership and the body parts is where are you going to be and what are you going to do? Appreciation means a fire chief or somebody shows up and just tells somebody truly, I appreciate what you did here. The work that you did here was well done, and he used to do that to us all the time when we deserved it, and he wouldn't do it. You probably didn't get that a lot in high school, did you? I'm just kidding.
Speaker 3We had different experiences together, but yeah so. I helped make him a better leader in many ways.
Speaker 1Yeah, you challenged him.
Speaker 3No, not direct challenging. I'm still alive.
Speaker 1I just wanted that to go back up there because to show that again, because that's write those down and realize.
Tactical Fun and Timeless Truths
Speaker 3Well, what makes work a firefighter? There's no more interesting work than being a firefighter, like to do a fire attack. There's just nothing else that anywhere, right, I guess you could be like a deep water diver or something where nature's trying to kill you. Essentially, jet pilot yeah, exactly, a lot of Gs, but you know, I don't know. That's its own reward. I think that's one thing that makes it very difficult to manage is it's hard to manage something that people view as more recreational than occupational.
Speaker 1Managing the tactical fun.
Speaker 2Well, boys, let's call it. I think this is it. Thank you Tremendous Thanks for being here.
Speaker 1Timeless tactical truths. Thank you for sharing that. Did you play the music and we just didn't hear?
Speaker 2it in here. Yeah, that's why I retook it. I did it twice because you were talking one time, which I should let you know the music.
Speaker 1Oh yeah, I don't know. I like to hear the music. I know I need a little speaker in here so you can hear the music.
Speaker 2All right, thanks so much for joining us on this B-Shifter. You can go to the show notes, get links to all the stuff that we're doing, all the stuff that we talked about that's at the B-Shifter store and, of course, the conference. Until next time. Thanks so much for listening.