When I became the first outside fire chief ever hired at my department, members and city officials alike warned that I was stepping in to an environment marked by extremely low morale. Various reasons were cited for the decrease in our firefighters' overall attitude and emotional well being, and fingers pointed in so many directions that I had no idea where to start.

After much soul searching and input from my command staff, I landed on the most obvious answer to discovering where our problems originated: Ask our members. After all, if you want to find out why your personnel claim they don't like coming to work anymore, the best people to tell you the reasons for that are those very same personnel. The process sounds simple, but an unprepared chief officer attempting to gauge staff satisfaction can either open a Pandora's box of complaints, or wind up with middling results that provide no clear direction for improvement.

Employee-satisfaction surveys have been around for more than three quarters of a century. It is believed that the first surveys were used as early as the 1930s. The basic idea was that happy employees made productive employees. Happy employees also were the most likely to show up for work every morning. Productive employees are perhaps most important in service industries. The fire service and EMS arguably can be looked at as one big service industry.

The idea of running a fire department like a business is certainly not a new one. It's also an idea that is not without its detractors. Just ask the fire chief who has a city administrator on his case about increasing costs in an atmosphere of decreasing or stagnant revenues. The fire service is not a significant profit center for any municipality, nor should it be looked at as such. Most fire departments, even ones providing EMS, run in the red when it comes to expenditure/revenue comparisons unless they have a significant volunteer staff.

However, the one area where the fire service can learn from the business world is in the area of human relations. If used properly, one of the more useful human-relations tools is the employee-satisfaction survey. It can help you pinpoint your department's problem areas as well as show your personnel that you're empathetic to the issues they consider to be most important.

One fire chief I knew was dealing with extremely low firefighter morale. Sick-leave use was high and firefighters were jumping ship to other departments. When an employee-satisfaction survey was suggested, he scoffed and replied, “It's not my concern why they're upset. We can always hire replacements.” Clearly this is a chief officer who's going to be dealing with turnover for some time to come. However, this attitude does highlight one of the major downfalls of conducting an employee-satisfaction survey. If the leader isn't open-minded enough to ask for input and take ownership of potential criticism, the process is doomed to failure and morale will most assuredly suffer new lows.

Another pitfall of employee-satisfaction surveys is that the questions asked must be detailed enough to provide meaningful feedback. Vague questions lead to vague results and subsequently to a poor foundation for making changes to the work environment. Questions that are too detailed or lengthy will cause interpretation headaches or personnel simply won't want to participate.

At the broadest level, employee-satisfaction surveys tend to evaluate:

• The employee;
• The job itself;
• The company (in this case, the fire department); and
• The environment in which the employee and the fire department exist.

In the employee-satisfaction survey that we implemented, we sought input from our staff on a variety of areas:

• Autonomy;
• Climate and work conditions;
• Communication;
• Meaningful work;
• Support and relationships;
• Stress, work pressure, and burnout; and
• Overall satisfaction.

Implementation and analysis

I firmly believe that most employees will participate in a satisfaction survey as long as they are guaranteed two things:

• 1) That the responses will be kept completely anonymous; and

• 2) That the responses will be thoughtfully evaluated and used to improve the department.

The fastest way for a chief officer to lose the respect of his personnel is to ask for their opinions and then disregard them because he doesn't like the answers. Regardless of these assurances, you may have some personnel who do not wish to take the survey. There is not much that can be done about these people, as it would be exceedingly difficult to force them to submit responses.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the employee-satisfaction survey is to ensure total anonymity of personnel. Employees will never be honest with their responses if they think they could be used against them. The easiest way to ensure this is through electronic collection of responses. The commercial Web site surveymonkey.com is superb for this purpose and it's the service my department used. Fire chiefs also may elect to use the low-tech but equally effective method of a paper survey with checkboxes for responses.

Interpreting the results of your employee-satisfaction survey can be as time-consuming as collecting the responses. It's not a simple matter of a black-and-white response that tells you whether people are happy. One thing that will make interpretation of the responses easier is to ask each respondent to identify what shift they are on, or in larger departments, the station at which they work. This allows you to identify particular problem shifts, stations or battalions. Without this separation, you run the risk of losing negative results among multiple positive results. For example, you might have five of your six stations that are overwhelmingly happy in a particular category, but your dysfunctional sixth station might barely make a blip in the results. This gives you little information for determining where to attempt improvements.

Experience and decades of employee-satisfaction surveys have shown that workers are much less concerned about the things you think would be most important to them (salary) and much more concerned about less obvious issues (communication and work environment). As a result, many employee-satisfaction surveys don't even ask whether the employees are happy with their paychecks, and our own internal survey likewise didn't raise the issue. In the fire service, firefighter salaries are something generally outside the control of a fire chief, and most firefighters know that. Asking your employees about it on a survey simply becomes a waste of space and one more number you have to crunch.

I recommend using a spreadsheet program to compile your results. Each category/question should be scored from left to right, from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” If you've asked focused questions, as exampled previously, you'll have a quick method to see how your department scores in each area. In the case of our department's survey, I also color-coded each response category. “Good” results were given a green color and “bad” results were given a red color. This gave me a fast visual reference when looking at a category.

What we learned

As noted previously, I used green and red colors for quick reference of the results in each category. The color-coding demonstrates the complexity in interpreting the results. Rarely do categories have clear responses. For instance, under the “autonomy” chart, personnel responses to the question, “I am given opportunities for professional growth,” varied widely. Further examination showed that it was the most junior members who felt they weren't given such opportunities, while more senior members gave a favorable score. In the “climate and work conditions” chart, some employees felt they were allowed to contribute to joint decision-making, while other employees didn't share this sentiment. Investigation of this category showed that it was the firefighters on one specific shift that gave the negative scores. This method of detailed analysis gives the chief officer a place to focus improvements.

Compiling our results was an eye opener for me as our department's fire chief. While I'd only been on the job for just over a month, I knew I had to own the results, regardless of whether I thought they existed before my arrival. Overall, I was cautiously optimistic about the results of our internal examination. While there were clearly areas we needed to improve upon, we had more “green” on the charts than “red.” We obviously had some communication issues, and I worked immediately to establish a centrally located memo board to keep our members updated, along with monthly staff meetings and daily briefings.

We also had issues with firefighters feeling that they weren't allowed to have input, while others felt that they were not given opportunities for growth. I addressed this by establishing a departmental team approach and also by implementing a formal officer development program to encourage our personnel to take dedicated paths to advancement. We also implemented an award recognition program and began to strongly lobby for more positions and stations, since this area was of high concern for our employees.

One final step I took during the analysis of our results was to visit with the entire department as a whole at a monthly union meeting. I went over the results with the union, and asked for clarification on certain items. I also asked for their input on what I could do as their fire chief to improve in areas where we were struggling to meet their needs and expectations. Several members later told me that this was the most important part of the process for them. It demonstrated that I was willing to publicize our problems and to try to tackle them head on. The process also gave individual firefighters the opportunity to offer direct input and suggestions on improvements.

Conclusion

Even seemingly well-functioning and content firefighters can offer useful advice on areas where your department can be improved. If your department is suffering from poor morale or high turnover, an employee-satisfaction survey can help you pinpoint problem areas and formulate a strategy for improvements. Given the costs of hiring and training new firefighters in today's economic environment, chief officers need to be as proactive as possible.

• View a "sample employee survey" to learn more.

Dominick J. Swinhart, BSHS, EMT-P, is chief of the Watertown (S.D.) Fire Department and works as a fire-service and EMS consultant. He is a graduate of George Washington University's EMS management program.

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