Recruiting, looking after and leading control room teams

Chief Inspector Zoe Hardman, Contact and Control Room (CCR) Recruitment Lead, Norfolk Constabulary: One of our big challenges is people thinking of us as a role to begin with. I think when people think of emergency services, they think boots on the ground and they forget that actually, there’s somebody behind a computer with a headset on making some of that happen. 

One of the things that we have found difficult before is a wide reach for particularly underrepresented communities. So we now go to various jobs fairs, both at our city centre library, and then we’ve reached out to colleges as well so that we can try and speak to people as their career progression opportunities are presented to them. 

So we’ve done some webinars for colleges and been to their open days and we’re hoping to go to their careers fairs as well. And then we have also been part of our local county show, just to try and get word of mouth, so the more we can do to publicise ourselves to those people who just don’t get to see us, the better.

We see an uptick in applications when we advertise on Facebook and LinkedIn and Indeed as well we’ve gone out to. But more often than not when we’ve asked for feedback forms at the end of a recruitment day, people have ordinarily heard through us through our police website, so I think people still go to Norfolk Police’s starting point to find out what’s available and work backwards from there.

So the jobs fairs, the local shows where we’re able to speak to people about what we actually do, it’s not like you can bring them to work with you to have a look around or to hear the content of what you’re dealing with, so we run a webinar now online pre our recruitment assessment centres and while the advert is open, and I think that enables us to show that it's not just picking up the phone and connecting somebody somewhere else.

It’s a really multi-functional, multi-skilled, high-pressure role, and so the webinar enables us to open the window into that for whoever might be thinking of applying or has already booked on to our assessment centre to tell them properly what the different roles in the control room are, the weight of responsibility that will be on their shoulders.

Yes, there’s lots of support around you. Yes, you’ve got tutors and supervisors. But ultimately, how quickly we’re going to somebody or whether we’re going at all is on your shoulders, and so what we find we can’t train is the resilience. 

We need people to be really eyes-open before they come to those assessment centres, before they’re in the classroom and before they’re taking calls to know what it is that they’ve got to be comfortable with when they go home at the end of a shift.

We’ve had our SkillGate training days recently, and we bring role players in for that and some of them are college students. We do a careers talk with them too, and even though they had just run through an exercise specifically for the control room, for communications officers and controllers, when I said to them afterwards, ‘When you think of policing, what do you think of?’, not one of them thought of the person sitting at a computer with a headset on.

Chief Inspector Zoe Hardman, Contact and Control Room (CCR) Recruitment Lead, Norfolk Constabulary: We’re one of the best paid control rooms in the country, to my knowledge, but we found that if we advertised with the basic pay, it didn’t necessarily capture as wide an audience as it could. I think most people who go to recruitment websites and filter by salary for what they can afford to take, it potentially cuts some of those people out without adding in the shift enhancement and weekend pay.

With our webinars, we’re really upfront about, ‘This is your basic pay but actually this is what gets added on top,’ so that they know the full salary rather than just the basic pay as well.

When somebody starts with us brand new, they get six weeks of communications officer training or it’s two weeks for one of our switchboard customer contact agents, and that’s in a classroom completely away from the control room, so that they are just immersed in their teaching.

And then they have three sets of shifts with a one-to-one tutor. Sometimes they don’t need as much as that, sometimes they need a little bit more. And then within their probationary year, they come back to us for another week and a half of training to become a controller because the role is dual skilled and that’s part of their probationary period to achieve sign-off in both areas.

Once people are through their probation period, they can apply to become a tutor, which is an additional skill within the room, and we do a two-day tutor course, which covers things like difficult conversations and feedback and coaching methods, so we advertise it just within the control room because of the skill set that it needs to be able to bring on those brand-new staff members.

And they do some of the one-to-one tuition, but they also help us on our team days sometimes, and if there’s new systems process changes for existing staff, they help roll that out through the teams as well, and they are compensated financially. They get £10 a day for the day’s tuition that they do. It has to be signed off by their supervisor to say that they’ve done that duty, and then it goes off and then they get the additional pay to go in hand with it.

And in terms of career pathway, there are supervisor opportunities as well, and we have another training package that goes hand in hand with that too, which also links in to Leading with Care, which is a learning pathway for the whole force, which people can key into at different levels depending on which pathway they are starting with, whether they’re aspiring to be a supervisor or they’re going from supervisor to management level, there’s a pathway to fit that with various workshops through the year. And it comes with 24 hours of protected learning time, so that people complete the modules according to the pathway that they’re on.

Superintendent Jason Broome, Head of Contact and Control Room (CCR), Norfolk Constabulary: We’ve got a low sickness rate, we’ve got a low churn rate and high-quality training underpins all that. To recruit, to train, to CPD [continuing professional development], it's probably two years minimum before you’ve actually got an unconsciously competent call handler. And if you’re recruiting 10, 20, 30 people a month, a year, that's massively expensive, not just in terms of pounds and pence but in terms of experience and efficiency and, most importantly, giving a great service because experience is worth its weight in gold.

Call handling has become an increasingly challenging role over the years. It’s a highly technical role that requires ever more training in a very complex world. So firstly, it’s about empowering the staff to feel confident in what they do, and that starts on day one of training. And everything we do in here is underpinned by training and that’s the CPD offer throughout their careers.

We have both an operational and occupational training arm, all under the same training inspector. So we have the occupational training, which happens at a different site to here, where we train all of our new call handlers and provide the CPD.

Now we have a senior supervisor in the room who is part of the training team. They will identify any relevant themes or learning. That then goes back into their collective training knowledge to make sure that that learning, wherever it comes from, is appropriately shared across the teams. 

Ysobel Meikle, HR Advisor, Norfolk Constabulary: We have the personal development record, so it’s a PDR. It’s an electronic version we’ve got. And they’re utilised for staff so they can have actions against them to support and help with their development.

And it is about setting those SMART [specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound] objectives for somebody, for their current job, but also, you know, it’s for the line manager to be like, ‘What are you looking to do?’ Or I might even get individuals themselves saying, ‘I’m looking to move into this department, what would you recommend?’

And again, we would look at the different things that we know that we could do to support internally to document in their PDR, because we do have an application process for recruitment in the force, but we also do use the development records because it’s really good evidence to say, actually this person really wants to look to do this and, you know, move forward.

We do have other opportunities within the forces, other roles and things that people can move into. We're very open to supporting short-term secondments out, as well, for people. We could put people through CIPD [Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development], so there is a process for that.

We’ve got our own learning and development team as well, so people can reach out to them to say, ‘Is there any further support or anything else you can recommend I can do to help with my development?’ We also have Leading with Care scheme in-force that we run at the moment and that is banded for different levels of staff depending on where you are.

So if they’re looking to move on for promotion for, say, a supervisory role or, you know, line management role, that kind of thing, there’ll be relevant information in there. And that’s something we also use and recommend for people, which they can document in their PDR.

Supt Jason Broome, Head of CCR, Norfolk Constabulary: Most CCRs are very police staff dependent and I know it’s a constant concern for them, that they sometimes are left out of development opportunities. The force has worked hard to develop career pathways for police staff and leadership development.

And here in the CCR, we’ve recently adopted the modern apprenticeship. We now have our second cohort of five supervisors going through the National Apprenticeship Scheme. Some of them are picking up Maths and English, which they didn’t leave school with. And others, they’re now developing skills which are transferable both within the organisation and to other employers should they choose to leave us in future. 

Ysobel Meikle, HR Advisor, Norfolk Constabulary: Within the control room, the difference is, sometimes the development opportunities are not at a time when they are working, so we do try and be flexible with them. So we run some courses, they’re called Best I Can Be, and we run them on three topics.

So there’s absence management, there’s performance and attendance support. And they’re an hour long and they’re kind of snapshots, as in to talk around the process, you know, the supportive nature of them.

But I know within here, it’s very difficult for supervisors to get the time out. So I try to do them separately, to say ‘Actually, I’ll come away to your supervisor training away days and I’ll put an hour’s input in around performance or attendance support,’ which is really important for the supervisor, especially if they want to continue on for development, because the people work is more and more and they have more responsibility as they progress on.