Since Alan Brunacini wrote the Essentials of Fire Department Customer Service in 1996, fire and emergency services agencies have engaged in vigorous discussions about ways to add value to their service by focusing on “Mrs. Smith.” This trend echoed the emergence of a broader emphasis on performance and accountability in the public sector as a whole, which often placed customer charters and customer service expectations on par with privatization and competitive tendering for public services as ideals in the delivery of government services.
The ever-expanding needs of Mrs. Smith have driven a revolutionary repositioning of fire departments as the agencies people turn to when no one else will help. This shift started long before Brunacini gave these expectations a name. Firefighters’ desire to be of service have provided fire departments with opportunities and challenges alike. Many communities have experienced declining fire incidence and fire death rates in spite of — rather than because of — their fire departments’ lack of attention to fire prevention, yet they have not enjoyed a “peace dividend” largely because fire departments can count on increasing response demands for non-fire services to justify their budget requests.
In an attempt to restore balance to the debate about efficiency, effectiveness, economy and equity in the provision of public services, citizen-focus and civic engagement recently have replaced customer service as organizational imperatives. The difference between citizens and customers distinguishes the public service ethos from the quid pro quo motives of private enterprises. Understanding how to engage citizens rather than serve customers should then represent a core function and top priority for any public entity. Getting a grip on how people appreciate and value public services can provide public managers with insights into new or different ways of meeting community expectations, often without increasing costs.
The ways public agencies interact with and serve their citizens vary widely depending upon their operational functions and the nature of the communities they serve. In this sense, communities include not only the residents or inhabitants of the political subdivision overseeing the public service entity, but also the communities of interest that influence the public agenda.
Placing the various forms of civic engagement between a public agency and its citizens along a continuum will help illustrate how leaders can improve, expand or at least alter the interactions between their agencies and communities to improve service performance, efficiency and accountability. Such improvements offer the possibility, if not the promise, of durable, constructive and respectful relationships between citizens and public agencies.
Communication. At the most basic level, public agencies communicate with citizens. Efforts to communicate with citizens often involve little more than efforts to inform or educate people about the agency or its activities. In some cases, communication with citizens seeks to change their behavior as a means of fulfilling the public agency’s mission. As the relationship between an agency and citizens evolves, communication often becomes both an activity or output of the agency and an input into its processes. When communication from the public influences an agency’s agenda or programs, then it advances along the continuum toward consultation.
Consultation. When public agencies consult their communities, they seek information from citizens to guide them in the development of policies, the implementation of programs, or the evaluation of results. Consultation involves active listening as distinct from simple hearing. Rather than providing a forum for the expression of opinions and the venting of frustrations, effective consultation yields valuable insights into the aspirations and expectations of citizens and communities. Effective consultation can help build consensus, but failing that can still assure opponents that their concerns have been given appropriate consideration.
Cooperation. Public agencies that find themselves regularly confronting controversial issues often find it appropriate to apply the old adage, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Cooperating with key stakeholders to identify problems, determine priorities, or evaluate alternative solutions helps ensure that public service remains aligned to the public agenda without turning the organization’s direction or operation over to special interests. Cooperation with key stakeholders falls short of slipping toward direct democracy, and properly understood and applied it builds the public agency’s capacity to anticipate and respond to public expectations without compromising the interests of the public officials ultimately responsible for organizational governance.
Partnership (co-production). Public agencies can’t meet every demand placed on them. And in many cases they cannot deliver what’s really required. In such instances, public agencies often find it valuable, if not imperative, to engage citizen stakeholders in the enterprise of delivering service to affected communities. In some instances, public participation augments agency capabilities by working alongside existing delivery systems. In other cases, it replaces public agency delivery systems altogether by providing a more efficient or effective means of meeting public expectations. Often, but certainly not always, the public agency retains overall authority and responsibility for policy decisions and the overall direction, but depends on partner organizations for program delivery.
Participation (collaboration). In some special circumstances, public agencies find it not only possible but desirable to enter into relationships with their citizens and communities that involve either shared decision-making or action. These processes often involve carefully crafted discourse, reasoned deliberations, and decisions taken by consensus. In a few instances, public agencies turn the decision-making process over to citizens entirely, and assume the sole role of service provider or policy implementer. The effective execution of this sort of engagement often requires public officials to display extraordinary leadership skills as facilitators rather than directors.
Few fire and emergency services agencies ever get beyond the communication stage of civic engagement. We often mistake the highly favorable opinions of citizens as an indicator that consultation on important matters is unnecessary because people trust us implicitly. As a consequence, we often marginalize the opinions of nay-sayers or opponents of public safety programs, concluding that they are a small and disaffected minority operating far outside the mainstream.
When we do engage in co-production, we often compromise its effectiveness by systematically co-opting program participants, leaving little distinction between their interests and our own. This has the effect of aligning their interests to ours, rather than vice versa, which leads us to believe that our actions are already congruent with the public interest rather than a only narrow segment of it that happens to share our perspective.
Turning the future over to others is the farthest thing from the minds of most fire and emergency services executives. Conventional wisdom seems to suggest that decisions about public safety should be kept as far away from the public as possible. Efforts to develop and impose staffing and response time standards on fire departments through NFPA 1710 and NFPA 1720 are a classic examples of an intention to undermine, if not overturn, the public will.
Getting to know Mrs. Smith has helped fire and emergency services look beyond ourselves. Now is the time for us to expand the conversation and get to know others in our communities. By engaging our communities outside the usual discourse of emergencies and customer service we can have the opportunity to gain understandings that can help us mediate conflicts between competing conceptions of what’s good and what’s right such as who pays, who benefits, how much things cost, and what kinds of alternative arrangements exist. If we truly open ourselves us to what citizens have to offer, we might discover that they know a lot more than customers do and care much more deeply about how we operate and how well we perform.
