Article Highlights
- The problem: Struggle to ensure accountability with policies and procedures
- The solution: PowerDMS’s policy management system, PowerPolicy
- The benefits: Maintain policies, hold staff accountable, and save time
The problem: Limited accountability with policies and procedures
As a public service provider, your agency must remain accountable to meet the needs of your diverse stakeholders and provide quality dispatching services. But since everyone in your agency plays an important role in upholding policies and procedures, promoting accountability can be challenging for even the most proactive organizations. Just one or two uninformed employees can put your agency at risk for non-compliance.
It can be challenging to guarantee compliance across an agency, and manual or inefficient processes make accountability particularly difficult to achieve. That’s because paper-based processes require more staff resources and introduce a higher likelihood of error. If your 911 emergency communications center still relies upon manual processes, it likely has trouble:
- Updating policies
- Tracking employee acknowledgment and signatures
- Communicating changes to staff
- Keeping staff up-to-date on required training
This is especially true if your organization is currently understaffed or tight on funds. While your emergency communications center struggles to find resources to pay for costly training and cover shifts, staff fall behind on essential policy and procedure updates. Over time, staff who are unaware of the latest ECC requirements provide inconsistent services. This opens your agency up to compliance and liability risks and reduces its ability to effectively meet stakeholder and community needs.
The solution: A 9-1-1 policy management system
PowerPolicy, an emergency dispatch software tool by PowerDMS, offers a centralized place to manage your agency’s policies and promote accountability in public service. The system makes it easy to update and distribute policies and procedures throughout your organization.
Enforce accountability
With PowerPolicy, you can uphold accountability by including staff acknowledgment features so leaders in your organization know exactly who’s seen what policies – and when. As your agency makes updates to policies and procedures, you can implement the features included in the table below to further promote accountability.
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Feature |
How It Promotes Accountability |
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Custom Tests |
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Side-by-Side Policy Comparison |
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Automate Tasks, Notifications, and Reminders |
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Dashboards |
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Mobile App |
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Improve transparency
Additionally, PowerPolicy’s audit trail feature shows a complete history of every document, including changes, comments, approval status, and timestamps. This transparency enables staff in your ECC to understand exactly who has reviewed, changed, or signed off on a policy over time. Similarly, the report builder tool shows a complete history of these actions and provides proof of employee access and signature sign-off. PowerDMS’s emergency dispatch software also offers version control and auto-archiving features to ensure staff have access to only the most updated documents.
Training support
As you work to promote accountability in your organization, you may also consider PowerPolicy’s training add-on. This policy training management solution allows agencies to create, distribute, and track online training courses, including data validation and tests. In doing so, you can rest easy knowing that employees have the knowledge required to uphold all ECC training requirements.
The benefits of emergency dispatch software
PowerPolicy reliably distributes mission-critical information that’s accessible to your ECC staff from both their homes and the office. This enables your agency to hold staff accountable for:
- Providing excellent public safety services
- Meeting all stakeholder SLAs
- Mitigating compliance risks
PowerDMS’s policy management system also improves the efficiency of your document management processes and helps you update policies four times faster compared to paper-based systems. With these benefits, your ECC can rest easy knowing that all telecommunicators are up-to-date on the policies, procedures, and training that promote organizational accountability and public safety.
Get started
Schedule a demo today to learn more about how PowerPolicy, PowerDMS’s emergency dispatch software tool, can help your organization achieve accountability in public service.