A while ago, I was working with a sea kayak program. I was intrigued to learn about a “missing group” event.
On day two of a nine-day expedition, the lead instructor missed a required check-in. The duty officer on call waited 12 hours, until the next morning, and then notified the Coast Guard. When asked where he expected the group to be, he opened the group’s emergency response plan to the projected itinerary section.
It was blank. He had to tell the Coast Guard that he didn’t know.
After pinging a few cell towers, the Coast Guard found a signal from what they thought could belong to the unaccounted-for group. The duty officer called the number and the assistant instructor picked up.
All was good, nobody was injured, and nothing was wrong. They just missed the check-in.
When I pressed on this incident, I quickly figured out that the organization’s takeaway was that the lead instructor had messed up. That person failed to follow protocol and missed sending a text via Garmin InReach device. Worse yet, that person failed to completely fill out the necessary paperwork and emergency response plan before the trip. But it was the instructor’s first year on the job. The previous person was in that job for over 20 years.
The program had norms and expectations of each other that were unspoken and established over years of working together. When that person left, those routines left, too.
There’s a lesson in this story for the rest of us. COVID sucked, and we learned a lot from it. COVID kicked off a wave of cascading crises in our field. Staff turnover is perhaps the most notable issue that has taken years to recover from (it’s debatable if we’ve fully recovered today).
If a key staff member in your program left tomorrow, what would walk out the door with them? How do you know that newer staff truly know all the requirements, routines, and norms that are expected of them?
It’s not enough to just write them down (you already know this). And, you don’t have time to train and test them on every aspect of the job.
Instead, look for opportunities to integrate the small things into regular touch points, such as staff meetings, announcements, email communications, and hallway conversations, where the way we do things here can be discussed constantly.
Even better, compile a list of things “I wish I had known earlier” from new and veteran staff alike, and scaffold those details across many connection points.
If your org relies solely on people knowing the written protocols (rather than backing them up through consistent knowledge dissemination), you’re depending on the next person to figure out their job on their own. If this is the case, you might not find out what’s missing until something goes wrong.
Stu