Reducing 911 Dispatcher Burnout & Turnover Through Behavioral Insights

Over the course of a year, the average 911 emergency service dispatcher will take over 2,400 phone calls. These calls can range from connecting a resident to medical care for a sprained ankle to dispatching the right support for someone whose life is being threatened or in imminent danger. The variability of these calls creates a high-stress work environment that is both emotionally exhausting and potentially traumatic, exacerbated by the long hours of an inherently stressful job that requires mandatory overtime and pays low wages. Multiple recent workplace studies have associated employee burnout with high turnover and poor organizational performance, and it’s no surprise that as the volume of 911 calls increases across the country, so are the levels of 911 dispatcher burnout, absenteeism, and turnover — leaving an alarming number of vacancies in a role that is critical to the health and safety of a city’s residents. Over 40 percent of 911 dispatchers exhibit high levels of burnout, more than double the burnout rate of employees in other fields. And, in addition to the public safety risk created by high turnover in emergency call centers, recruiting and training a new hire to replace the dispatchers who have left can cost a city tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes even in the hundreds of thousands range, per resignation. A new <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336830004_Belonging_Affirmation_Reduces_Employee_Burnout_and_Resignations_in_Front_Line_Workers" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">report</a>, however, from a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and the <a href="https://www.bi.team/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Behavioral Insights Team</a> (BIT) offers a promising potential solution for cities struggling to keep their 911 dispatch centers fully staffed and retain these critical front-line workers. The report, authored by Dr. Elizabeth Linos, Krista Ruffini, and Stephanie Wilcoxen, presents the results of a field experiment of over 500 subjects across nine U.S. cities.¹ The experiment was designed in collaboration with the cities to determine if low-cost interventions that emphasized social relationships between 911 dispatchers in the form of weekly, storytelling emails could substantially reduce burnout and resignations. <a href="https://whatworkscities.medium.com/reducing-911-dispatcher-burnout-through-behavioral-insights-301726b80bce">Website</a>