Give the Shift Its Hours Back
Robert Grand · Battalion Chief who still runs calls
One of the best days I get as a Battalion Chief is the day I make it out to the drillfield with my crews. Not watching from the side, running the drill with them, then standing around afterward listening to what they thought went well, what went sideways, and how we make it better next time. That time is priceless, and it’s the actual job: passing on what I’ve learned so the next call goes better than the last one. It doesn’t happen nearly enough.
For the first time in my career, I can see a way to protect it.
The Day I Wanted, and the Day I Got
Yesterday was one of the good ones. Our Operations Chief and Assistant Chief sat down with our future officer development candidates. On paper it’s an administrative checkbox in a taskbook. In reality it was one of the most important hours we spend. We talked about what it means to step into a leadership role, what it actually means to be a Captain, and then we got quiet and listened to these candidates talk through their own experiences and what they’re seeing. I sat there as a Battalion Chief and still learned something. I listened to our Operations Chief lay out his philosophy on leadership and thought, add that to the bank. I listened to our Assistant Chief talk about managing change while the organization moves through a turbulent stretch, and I took that in too. That’s the work. That’s the department teaching itself how to lead.
Those days don’t happen enough. You know what does happen? Our scheduling software had an issue, and I spent four to five hours rebuilding something I never wanted to touch, work I never should have been doing in the first place.
That rebuild wasn’t the job. It was the thing standing between me and the job.
The Work That Was Never the Job
Every one of us has a version of that rebuild. The call is the job: the fire, the wreck, the cardiac arrest, the crew that needs your read on what just happened. Around it sits a second layer that was never the job at all. The scheduling software that breaks. The charting typed into three screens that don’t talk to each other. The report reshaped to fit what the state wants, the county wants, and the billing side wants. For our whole history that layer was a fixed cost. You did it because there was no other way to get it done.
That’s the part that just changed. The tools landing now are best at exactly that second layer, the moving of information from one form into another and the routine work that eats a block of your day without making a single call go better. For the first time, that load is separable from the person carrying it.
That’s not a small thing. That’s the first real lever we’ve ever been handed here.
Capacity Has a Second Lever We Never Had
Yes, we’re short. Nearly every EMS agency in the country is reporting a staffing shortage right now, and the calls keep climbing (FirefighterNow, https://firefighternow.com/firefighter-staffing-shortage/). I’m not waving that away. But the exciting part isn’t a new way to describe the shortage. It’s that we suddenly have a second way to build capacity that has nothing to do with the hiring pipeline.
Capacity has two levers. The first is headcount, how many people you have, and everybody already pulls that one as hard as it goes. The second is load, how much of the non-emergency work each person carries through a shift. Nobody could pull that lever before, because the administrative load was baked into the job. Now it’s the exact thing the technology is good at lifting. A lever we never had is sitting right there.
Other high-stakes fields are already reaching for it, and we get to learn from them early. In emergency dispatch, the smart deployments aim the automation at the routine data work so the dispatcher spends more of the shift on the human on the other end of the line, not less (EMS1, https://www.ems1.com/artificial-intelligence/beyond-data-entry-turning-high-stakes-data-into-real-time-human-connection). Let me be honest about where we actually are, because the honesty is part of the optimism. No fire department has solved its staffing crisis with AI yet. Nobody’s built the finished version. That’s not the bad news. That’s the opening. We’re early enough to shape this instead of inheriting it, which is the best seat an operator can have.
What We’d Actually Do With the Time
Here’s what makes me want to build this. Give me back those four or five hours, and I don’t spend them on more email. I spend them on the drillfield. I spend them in a room with future Captains, hearing what they’ve seen and handing them what I’ve seen. I spend them adding to the bank and passing the bank on, which is the one thing a scheduling program will never do for this department.
And it isn’t just a Battalion Chief’s time. It’s the medic who gets to stay at the patient’s side instead of breaking eye contact to chart. It’s the company officer who gets an extra half hour with a probie instead of a report. Every rank has its own version of the priceless time, and every rank is losing some of it to work that was never the job. The move is the same at all of them: pull the load, hand the hours back, and point that time at the people who need what only a person can give them.
We Get to Design This On Purpose
Being early is the gift. We get to decide what this looks like before it hardens into whatever ships by default. Point the automation at the load, never at the judgment. Keep the human on the call, the decision, and the mentoring, and let the machine carry the clerical weight around all of it. And hold one plain test for every tool that comes through the door: did it hand time back to my people.
That’s the standard I’d build the whole thing around. A tool that adds three clicks to a crew’s worst night failed, no matter how sharp it looks in a demo. A tool that gives a chief an afternoon on the drillfield, or gives a medic twenty minutes back on every call, is doing the real work. We’ve spent long careers adding steps. This is our chance to be the ones who remove them.
The Shift We Build Next
The department teaches itself how to lead in the hours we spend together, on the drillfield and in the room with the next generation of officers. That’s how the department never forgets, one conversation at a time, one drill at a time. Every hour we lose to a broken scheduling program or a triplicate form is an hour that teaching didn’t happen.
So here’s the future worth building. Not the one where we finally recruited our way back to full staffing, though I’ll take that too. The one where we decided, on purpose, to hand our people back the hours that were being stolen, and pointed every one of those hours at the work only we can do. The shortage didn’t hand us a wall. It handed us a reason to build the better shift we’ve always wanted, and for the first time, the pieces to actually build it.
Robert Grand is a Battalion Chief at Eugene Springfield Fire with 24 years of service. He writes Frontline Intelligence, a newsletter on operational doctrine, technology, and leadership in Fire & EMS.
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