De La Rosa asks about emergency surge staffing protocol
Chair asks about staffing surges during emergencies. Morrisroe says 311 uses its contracted overflow vendor to quickly add trained staff, citing weather emergencies and the recent Nor'easter as examples.
What is the current protocol if a need arises of having a staffing search of 311 call takers, such as during an emergency?
Oh, okay.
We do have a protocol for that.
We've actually used it several times this year because of the weather emergencies that I mentioned before.
But this is where our contracted vendor resource comes into play more so than ever.
Because they do steady state work, they're already in the 311 program.
They have the 311 systems.
They have people who are trained on that.
But we go to the vendor and say, we need more.
We need it quickly, and we need people who are qualified.
Because the vendor is a private organization and they have other business, they have the ability to have resources, right?
They can have them available quickly.
So we'll anticipate something's coming up.
This past weekend, we had the Nor'easter.
My executive director who runs the call center said, yep, weather's bad.
We're going to get more calls.
Let's see what we can do about adding some staff.
So if people are calling for downed trees, for example, we've got some additional staff to be able to do that.
So we go to the vendor for that.
They can turn that resource up pretty quickly from their pool.
But then equally, they can then also take that resource down when it's needed.
So that is our primary response to, that is our primary approach when it's responding to a surge.
We tend to call it a surge.
Great.