To celebrate a special occasion, I had the pleasure of taking my wife to a luxury buffet. The food looked fabulous, and I salivated through the small talk that preceded my turn at the head of the line.

Once I was at the start of that unending sea of food, my blissful anticipation quickly turned to awkward dismay and anxiety. The food choices were many, but the plate could fit into the palm of my hand. It was a mismatch of pitiful proportions.

As distressing as this experience was, it also rang oddly familiar. It paralleled in many ways the mismatch between fire station workloads and the hours available for personnel to complete station goals and objectives. Our service-oriented work environment has evolved with great speed — but without great organization.

While most fire service providers think nothing of committing vast hours to training in support of emergency operations, many have committed few resources to training department officers and managers in the organizational skills that will serve them during the many hours spent in a non-emergency setting. That's where the demand on work time is increasing most rapidly.

By thinking about how we organize and manage station workloads, we can increase productivity. In other words, you can get more food on your plate if you have a chance to plan before you get to the front of the buffet line.

A brief history

In the beginning, we fought fires. There wasn't EMS and there wasn't much else, except maybe for some training. There was time to play checkers and pet the spotted dog. Life was good in the fire station.

Then one day, almost overnight it seems, we decided we needed to be everything to everyone. Now, personnel at any given fire station may have to:

• Teach school children,
• Attend neighborhood meetings,
• Install smoke detectors,
• Run charitable drives,
• Conduct industrial site inspections,
• Preplan buildings,
• Use cad software,
• Participate in community disaster planning, and
• Legislate code changes.

This list could go on and on. Don't get me wrong; life in the fire station is still good. It's just not the same. Just as our workload has changed, so must the methods we use to organize, prioritize, and manage that workload.

Neverending work demands and always-ending time constraints create stress and potentially minimize the collective efforts of station personnel. With so many demands covering such a diverse arena of expectations, it's easy to feel as though food is falling off of your plate.

Fortunately, there are some very helpful tools at our fingertips. And best of all, they are simple. Simple methods, taken from simple philosophies, can streamline some of our endless workload-related complexities. If you organize how you stack the food, you can indeed eat a lot off a small plate.

Paramilitary problems

Even if a fire station's inefficient work environment is never overhauled, tangible progress can be realized by increasing awareness of some of the more common productivity killers. Even though it can be easy to assume that common sense will prevail, the limited exposure of most fire officers to traditional office management techniques should make this a valuable review.

Knowing what doesn't work well is half of the solution to controlling conflicts between time and tasks. At the top of that list is the paramilitary command structure we sometimes cling to with a death grip. This structure, priceless and necessary for emergency operations, is cumbersome and inefficient in the business office environment of a fire station working in a non-emergency capacity.

The recognition of rank, the barking of orders and the reflex response of personnel with characteristically sparse amounts of dialogue are both typical and essential to rapidly achieving objectives in the highly dynamic surroundings of an emergency scene or military operation. This system is designed to localize control and limit authority — just the opposite of what we want to see unfold in the fire station office.

If you have any nagging questions about the importance of or need for a highly linear system in an office environment, just take a look at very successful office-oriented workplaces in the world of private enterprise. There are no captains or lieutenants down at the local State Farm office. IBM doesn't have battalion chiefs. Fortune 500 companies would have these strict, linear ranks if they helped, but they don't.

A paramilitary hierarchy inherently restricts communications, limits authority and centralizes responsibility in a way that promotes success outside of the fire station but ensures failure on the inside. Get out of the command mode when you get back to the station. If you set aside your collar brass, you'll have taken the first step toward managing your station better.

E-mail inefficiency

Despite the extraordinary benefits of computers and e-mail, they can also get in the way. Most of us enjoy the convenient communications we are afforded by e-mail, but most of also know it wastes far too much of our time.

Fortune 500 companies may not have captains and lieutenants, but they do have e-mail policies, and so should you. Consider reviewing the e-mail policies of other organizations to extract the components that will best serve your work environment. At a minimum, restricting listserv subscriptions and organizing e-mail groups to prevent frequent mass mailings are good general concepts because of their simplicity.

E-mail also seems to have an insidious ability to divert and misdirect an organized work effort. In the olden days, whom we took direction from was much more restricted. There were far fewer people with a convenient and direct line of communication to us, so there were far fewer people who could try to direct our work efforts.

Today, within a few hours station personnel can be overwhelmed with tasks handed down by a variety of people. They may receive an e-mail from community services to install a smoke detector, then an e-mail from the chief to check an extinguished burn-to-learn. A request from the fire marshal's office to check apparatus access on a long rural driveway, a request from training for cpr recertification — everyone with a computer becomes your boss, and none of them knows the requests made by others.

Office managers

As long as we're inclined to somewhat disregard our paramilitary hierarchy for greater productivity, why not adopt an office model common to private enterprise? A good place to start is by being an office manager rather than an officer. In this role, the supervisor organizes, prioritizes, delegates and monitors the quality of work being completed within the station.

Instead of being the person who does the most work, an office manager organizes those who are doing the work. This broad task of organizing for a group of workers can be described in simple terms as time awareness. The office manager must track the timeline of special projects alongside recurring annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily tasks, and ensure that each is fulfilled through effective delegation.

The office manager also will shoulder the responsibility for prioritizing station work. Although this is very important, it doesn't take much time because employees are generally aware of the relative importance of one task to the others in their workloads. As long as the office manager assigned tasks while staying aware of time constraints, there should be a natural evolution of priorities. This isn't to say that communication on the subject is unnecessary, because an oversight in time awareness is capable of instantly changing priorities and creating a scramble for everyone involved.

Effective delegation is also an aid to prioritization. If the office manager decides to place a task on a list of 10 other tasks of similar importance, there will be some competition for time and the priority of the new task may fall. If the new task is delegated to someone who has no outstanding work to complete, the new task is attended to immediately. For all practical purposes, the task has been prioritized higher by virtue of delegation.

Delegation, demystified

While prioritization sometimes takes care of itself, delegation requires concerted effort. The ability to effectively delegate work may be the single most important area of improvement available to many people charged with running fire stations.

Within the linear confines of our command system, we have had the notion of maintaining control over others drummed into our very core. Try to let go of that concept while you're inside the station. You need to feel comfortable delegating anything that doesn't require your level of authority. You don't have to delegate everything, but you have to be able to let go if it's in your best interest.

Delegating is like filling up your buffet plate and handing it off to someone else while you fill another. But there's even more benefit than the increase in workload capacity. Think about what makes you determined to do your best. As you were promoted through the ranks and given increasing amounts of authority, your sense of ownership in your workplace increased. Delegating work, particularly work traditionally performed by officers, may increase subordinates' sense of ownership, which will always translate into good things for the office manager.

For ownership to increase, however, increased levels of workplace responsibility should be accompanied by increased levels of authority. Failing to give away the authority needed to do the work places the entire effort to delegate in jeopardy. Think very carefully about both actual and potential needs for authority prior to assigning a work responsibility.

Don't view the sharing of authority as a weakening of yourself or your position. No one else will. View it for what it is: Empowering others to fulfill your objectives. Now others in the buffet line are filling their own plates and bringing them to you for consumption.

Once you have bought into the fact that maximizing the delegation of work will improve your work environment, you may want to consider this one key aspect of being skillful at it: Know your people. Each person has unique skills, experiences, attitudes and desires. The better you understand these facets of each individual, the better you will be at delegating work that's both skill-appropriate and rewarding.

Lacking this understanding can prevent you from capitalizing on the strengths and potential of your work force. At its worse, it can lead you to make inappropriate work assignments that set people up for failure. When in doubt, communicate. Don't be afraid to ask people how they feel about a particular work assignment. This is a common occurrence in private enterprise, and it should be more common in the fire service. They'll appreciate your concern, and you may be surprised at what you learn.

Quality control

Now don't just head for the espresso line thinking you've given away all of your work. Remember that the office manager has other responsibilities, including a new one you created when you put the process of delegation into overdrive.

Now more than ever before, the office manager becomes the quality control agent for the organization. You can't always expect that delegated work will be completed in the same manner as if you'd done the work yourself, but you must always expect that it will be done to the same acceptable standard.

All work activities must achieve and support a standard set by either the fire department or an individual officer. The office manager is the pinch point for work going in and out of the station. Work is disseminated as it comes in and checked for quality as it goes out. Quality control means being certain that the food others collect for you in the buffet line are items you'd select for yourself.

Making changes in how a work environment operates takes time, patience and an understanding of the impact it has on individual lives. It's easy to attend a class or read an article that builds your enthusiasm to implement change for a short time, but it's more difficult to dig in for the long haul with an ongoing commitment to create positive change.

I've emphasized simple techniques because simplicity is a tremendous ally when you want to put forth an extended effort. Such techniques are easy to remember and considered standard operating procedure in offices around the world.

Many office workers would have a difficult time becoming good firefighters. Likewise, many firefighters find it difficult to become good office workers. In both cases, the key to success lies in being exposed to the simple principles that can promote efficiency. In neither case are these simple principles intuitive or natural. They must be learned. Unfortunately, the amount of time a typical office manager spends learning to fight fire is often the same amount as a typical fire officer spends learning to manage an office.

Firefighters are the heart and soul of the fire service. There's virtually nothing they can't accomplish, even without the supervision of an officer. But they also appreciate working smart. Reorganizing your station work environment is an effort to facilitate and support, not control. Discuss this with your troops and listen carefully to their input. Their resulting work effort will surprise and impress you. If you were to take this kind of efficiency to a buffet line, you would never be invited back!

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Twenty-year fire service veteran Capt. Larry Pfeifer is the quality improvement manager for the EMS, fire operations and fire prevention divisions of Tualatin Valley (Ore.) Fire & Rescue, where he has worked for the past 10 years. He has a bachelor's degree in education and a master's degree in education psychology.