The emergency services workforce of tomorrow needs to be highly adaptable to meet the challenges and opportunities presented by a future where natural hazards are more extreme, longer lasting, and a greater drain on resources, both human and economic.
The Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC initiated a collaboration between researchers and emergency services agencies, as well as key partners and focus groups – such as the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council Workforce Management Group – to imagine what a future workforce might look like.
Research projects in this theme all explore the ways that contemporary research across Australia is influencing workforce and volunteer management strategies into the future, including issues of recruitment and retention, leadership and decision-making, mental health, capability and planning, and diversity and inclusion.
Key outcomes now being implemented in partner agencies include a sustainable volunteering toolkit, a set of teamwork and strategic decision-making tools, a diversity and inclusion framework, and many other resources of value to the emergency managers in government, emergency services and community organisations. Research from the Future Workforce theme has been crucial in the development of important initiatives, such as Australia’s first national handbook on planning for spontaneous volunteers.
Online tools
These online tools were developed with CRC research and are designed to be ready for use. The tools here have been curated for this Driving Change theme. See more tools in the other themes.
DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION FRAMEWORK FOR EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT POLICY AND PRACTICE
The Diversity and Inclusion Framework was designed in response to needs identified in collaboration with practitioners across the emergency management sector, including the need for greater understanding of the implementation process and role of inclusion, identification of structures and practices to support that implementation, and possible mechanisms that address a lack of diversity and inclusion.
RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION TOOLKIT FOR EMERGENCY VOLUNTEER LEADERS
The Recruitment and Retention Toolkit for Emergency Volunteer Leaders was designed to support emergency services leaders with their volunteer management practices. The Toolkit includes easy-to-use guides about: recruiting volunteers for emergency services, supporting new volunteers, volunteer management, emergency volunteer recruitment messaging, and volunteer succession planning.
This evidence-based Toolkit is the product of a partnership between the CRC, Curtin University, University of Western Australia, and Department of Fire and Emergency Services (WA).
TEAMWORK TOOLS
Incident management and emergency management teams respond to emergencies day and night. Decision makers in these teams are often confronted with emergencies that are dynamic, complex and uncertain, with several agencies involved. These complex contexts can lead to an increased number of poor decisions and errors being made. It’s important to acknowledge that errors and poor decisions will occur, and to seek and manage them in an informed and systematic way.
Forming part of the Improving decision making in complex multi-team environments project, these six tools – four team management tools and two strategic decision-making tools – were developed to improve teamwork and enable strategic decision making in emergency management.
TEAM MANAGEMENT TOOLS
Emergency Management Breakdown Aide Memoire
This tool assists emergency management teams in dealing with breakdowns in communication. It is a checklist that helps to recognise team breakdowns through their outputs (for example, incident action plans) and formal/informal organisational networks. It also offers a five-step practical resolution strategy.
Team Process Checklist
This tool assists emergency management teams in dealing with breakdowns in communication. It is designed to provide a health check for teams and, if there is a problem, to help determine what the problem is. This checklist helps people think through three aspects of effective teamwork: communication, coordination and cooperation.
This tool is also to download in Spanish here.
You can also download a how-to guide for the Emergency Management Breakdown Aide Memoire and Team Process Checklist here.
Emergency Management Non-Technical Skills
This tool is designed to help emergency management individuals and teams to enhance their cognitive, social and personal skills (known as non-technical skills) to complement technical skills and strengthen individual and team capabilities. It focuses on seven non-technical skills – communication, coordination, cooperation, leadership, situation awareness, decision-making, and coping with stress/fatigue – and provides descriptions and behavioural markers that can be used to determine how effectively these skills are being used and where improvements can be made.
Download the PDF version here.
Key Tasks Cognitive Aid
This tool is a checklist for regional and state control centres. It is designed to prompt leaders during a crisis to ensure their teams are undertaking the tasks that are most important to effective performance. It covers five phases of a control centre’s incident management process: readiness, escalation, coordination, de-escalation, and termination. Within each phase is a checklist that can be used to tick off the key activities required.
Download the PDF version here.
STRATEGIC DECISION-MAKING TOOLS
Psychological Safety Checklist
This checklist can be used to create a psychologically safe decision-making environment. The checklist acknowledges that there are simple strategies to use so that people can feel safe while enhancing or establishing trusting relationships very quickly.
Download the PDF version here.
Cognitive Bias Aide Memoire
This tool can be used by teams to identify cognitive biases in the decision-making process. It is best used for key decisions and involves two steps: 1) assessing available information, intelligence and decisions and 2) determining the meaning of the information, intelligence and decisions.
Download the PDF version here.
Case studies
CRC research is driving change across communities, government and emergency service agencies, as highlighted by the case studies relevant to each Driving Change theme.
Highlights
This collection is a curation of the best and most recent news articles, Hazard Notes, videos, posters, guides, journal articles and reports relevant to this theme.
News
Resources
Publications
Projects
This selection of user-driven projects allows you to explore the detail of the research. These projects, spanning the eight years of the CRC, are especially relevant to this theme, but may appear within other themes as well.
