Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Hello. Welcome back to another episode of the Code 320 podcast. Courtney Camano is here with me today. Hello, Courtney. How are you?
[00:00:15] Speaker B: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:17] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. So if you don't mind, if you want to tell the guests just a little bit about kind of how you got into EMS and a little bit about what you're doing today, I think they're always interested in that.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Sure. So I've been in Vermont EMS for about six and a half, seven years now. I started out as a volunteer CPR member, actually with an agency that I'm still with.
And then I worked my way up through the EMT level, the AEMT level, up to paramedic and I worked full time as a paramedic for a while before moving over to some more admin, higher oversight stuff at the state level.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Oh, nice. And you took your paramedic program out of state, right?
[00:00:57] Speaker B: I did. I went to a program called NMETC in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. It was a wonderful program, lots of options for people.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: I recommend it to anyone who's looking to go to paramedic school.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's great. And I think just reminding folks that if you're interested in paramedic school, don't be afraid to shop around a little bit. I mean, I know I've had friends, I've gone to the Bridgewater program, I've had friends that gone down to the North Carolina program. And I think sometimes people are like, you know, oh, I have to go to a school that's 30 minutes from my house. And I think just being comfortable thinking about what your options are. There's a lot of hybrid programs now. I think the North Carolina one, I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's like a boot camp where you go to a bunch of month of asynchronous online learning and then you like, like fly down and do two weeks of intensive hands on. So if you're interested in becoming a paramedic, don't pigeonhole yourself into, you know, saying, I can't go to paramedic school because I can't go Monday through Friday, five days a week. There's a lot of options out there, so that's really cool.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: And I think it's important too to recognize that there's not a one size fits all type of program. Agency or organizations have been able to figure out how to do a really thorough hybrid program too. Because there used to be the general idea that, you know, if it's not in person, it's not going to be a quality education. But people have really been able to figure out and there are some really great options.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Yeah. And there's a lot of different costs associated with those programs too. So I've seen some as cheap as like 7,000 and I've seen some way above 30,000. So making sure you find one that kind of fits your budget as well too is key. So today what I want to talk a little bit about is this concept of work life balance. I found myself just really heavily consuming articles online and books that are related to this idea of how we as organizations interact with our employees and vice versa. And I think it's really fascinating. I know it's an area that you're kind of interested in too as well. And so one of the first things I want to talk a little bit about is how the workforce has changed over, let's say like the last 20 to 30 years. Has there been anything that you've noticed in terms of how the employees want to engage with organizations that's different than what maybe we saw like 20 or 30 years ago?
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that. So I. I'm a mom to two little ones, an 8 year old and a 10 year old. So work life balance is incredibly important to me and I still don't have it entirely figured out. EMS is the kind of career path where you could give your entire life to it and still feel like you haven't done enough.
What I've. So what I've seen in the short time that I've even been practicing ems. Right. So about seven years is the agency I started with was the majority were volunteer people. So they had like their work life as well as coming to shift once a week. And we've definitely shifted as a profession to demanding more for our patients and therefore that falls on our providers. Right. And what I've also seen is as we go more towards a paid workforce with absolutely still having a place for volunteers, but a lot of people, a lot of agencies are finding they need to go towards the paid side because of the demands that have been put on the providers. And people just don't have the time and the ability to continue training to the extent that they used to.
So payment is kind of a way to keep people in the field. And what I've also noticed is that people really want to feel involved. Right. So that idea of volunteering people want to be involved and that's still very much there.
And so, you know, specifically I've seen it in like the younger generation with the college students, they really want to have ownership over their work. And so getting to know how your employees can add to the organization not just as a provider, not just the license that they carry, but also who they are as individuals, and empowering them to pursue their passions in some capacity within your organization, I think is incredibly beneficial to everybody.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: Oh, for sure. And I think of like, something simple. Like what if you have a college student that's volunteering as a provider at your agency and they're a really amazing photographer and that's another area that they have a passion in, like a new way you can engage that staff member and say, like, hey, would you be interested in taking, you know, headshots for all of our staff members and updating our website or creating some cool action shots of our ambulances for recruitment and thinking of ways outside the box to tie in our work life and our passions? I think that's really important nowadays. I think what you had mentioned about volunteerism, super true. I think when you're an ambulance service that runs 150 calls a year and most of those are, you know, bls or maybe like one or two cardiac arrests, having volunteer staffing where you get a pager tone, you pick up the ambulance, the fire company maybe is volunteered too, those things aren't quite as big of a deal, you know, but some of the agencies around here, they're approaching several thousand calls a year, which is equivalent to a lot of paid services around the country. And I think it's. It's a lot to ask someone to go to paramedic school, usually on their own dime, but not always, and develop this skillset that requires X amount of training a year and now spend a night or two a week away from their family for no revenue. I think that that's, that's a hard sell. And to say that everyone will do that just because of the goodness of their heart, I think is a little bit dismissive to those that don't maybe have the financial ability to do so. Because I've heard that before. You know, I've had friends who are like, you know, well, I give a night a week and, you know, I don't get paid. And it's like, well, you may be in a very different place than me. You might be, you know, 50 years old with a whole career behind you and you've paid down debt. And I'm a college student fresh out of college, you know, and my time's the most valuable thing and I need to continually be making forward Progress. And so I think not pigeonholing people into saying, you know, oh, like he doesn't volunteer because he's not dedicated. Maybe he has. Like you said, I watched you go through paramedic school with two young kids. That's a difficult balance. You know, I went to paramedic school and I didn't have kids and I felt like it was a difficult balance. So just being understanding of where people's backgrounds are I think is huge. But I like what you said about, you know, tying their non work passions to their work passions and getting to know to know them a little more.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: And it's important too, like balancing out the idea of we really need this for our organization with I think that this individual needs to have this part of them recognized. And I think that, you know, even if you're feeling like it's not going to be a huge benefit, it's not something that our agency needs right now, like hedge dots for, for instance, it may still be something that is a way to empower that particular employee. And then it keeps them interested in the organization for longer because you've just touched on their passion. Right?
[00:08:10] Speaker A: Yeah. It's like the jocko willing thing where it's like you want someone to be engaged, put them in charge of something. Even if it's like you are going to be in charge of where the spoons go in the kitchen. Like as trivial as that might seem to you or management, there might be huge budgetary problems or these big staffing issues. They're dealing with something as simple as, hey, you know, would you be interested in taking a look at our kitchen and coming up with a way to make it more efficient without spending any money? That's a fun problem to solve. And not every staff member is going to be engaged in that type of thing. And I think as a leader, even if you're not a manager, the leaders in the organization do a nice job of recognizing where people's passions lie because someone might enjoy organizing the inventory room and someone else might enjoy, you know, designing a new logo. Those are very different parts of your brain and they're very different avenues of thought. And I think being a good leader means understanding what motivates the individual so that you can kind of incorporate them into your organizational mission. And one of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately is this idea that back in the day, people used to go to work, they would get a paycheck, they'd go home, they'd spend time with their family. That was a lot of what the workforce did, and that's totally fine. And there were obviously outliers to that. Nowadays you see that there are a lot of staff that are leaving big organizations that are paying them a lot of money to go somewhere where their morals or their values are more aligned with their own. Which I think is a fascinating concept that people will take a pay cut to go somewhere where they feel they're a better mesh with the community of that organization, especially if their values align with the organization.
I'm wondering if you've had any experience with staff members, employees, colleagues or coworkers where you've heard them choose to leave an area that had a lot of potential, earning potential or promotion potential for something that maybe doesn't have quite as much, but makes them happier as a person or feel more empowered as a person.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Yeah. So this is actually something that I've spoken to my own employers about in the past and that is the idea of bringing up, well, here's what the hourly rate is that we can offer you for doing this extra work. And I balance that with, well, I could be home on a Saturday with my kids and that's a Saturday I never get to get back with them. So I'm going to say no to this portion of the paycheck. And of course, like, not everyone is in that position. Right. Going back to the whole idea of who can volunteer and who can't. And so recognizing not everyone can turn down more, more money, you know, they might need to make the sacrifice in the moment to be making more money. And maybe not with an organization that fits all of their values and morals, but it's like the season of their life and they need to get through that.
[00:10:56] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. I think one of the concepts that this brings to mind is idea of guardrails. I read this really cool article on Apple News because I have Apple News plus because I love reading those types of like ancillary, weird, outside the box thinking opinion pieces. And one of the articles I read talks about guardrails in the workplace, specifically how management and the organization in general interact with the employee and where those boundary lines are. Because they might be different for you, it might be different than for me. How you feel comfortable working with your organization. For example, you know, would your boss be able to call you on a Saturday if you're not on duty if they needed something from you? Some staff members would say, absolutely not. I'm not on the clock, I'm not working, I'm not going to do that. Other Staff members might say, yeah, if it's a quick question, give me a call, I'm happy to help. Like, you know, as long as it doesn't tie me up or you're not asking me to go in. Some staff might be willing to work remotely for a few hours in the evening. Some staff might say, when I leave, I leave. And so these ideas of where's the line between work and non work? And one of the articles I read talked specifically about this concept of guardrails. So if you think about like a highway, the highway department is in charge of putting up guardrails to protect the driver. The driver doesn't decide like you. And I don't decide where guardrails go. That comes from the state, it comes from research. And the money and the actual activity of putting the guardrail in comes from the municipality that owns that roadway, even though all of those things are designed to protect the driver. So the article was talking about whose responsibility is it to set up those boundaries. Would you expect, say you're working for, you know, XYZ ambulance service? Would you expect that the ambulance service respects your time off, or would you expect the employee to advocate for their own time off? And I think that's a really interesting piece of discussion because I think it's like a little bit of a foot in both worlds. And so when I recently got a new manager at my workplace, and one of the things I really appreciated that he did is one of the first weeks that he was working, he came to me and said, I want to talk to you about work life balance, and I want to talk to you about how, what types of communication do you feel are appropriate and in what setting? And my feedback to him was, first of all, thank you for asking. Second of all, if I am on the clock, if you look in and I'm clocked in, you can get a hold of me any way you want. You can do smoke signal, you can do Snapchat, you can do text call, phone, email. I don't care how you get a hold of me, I am on duty. Get a hold of me. If I am not on the clock, email me, because that gives me the discretion as the employee. If I can get to it and it's a quick question, I can screen it and send it back, no problem. Or if I'm on vacation with my family, I have the ability to leave that in my inbox. It doesn't get lost and I can address it when I'm back on the clock. So I guess my question to you is where do you think the responsibility lies? And if you had. If you ran an organization, what are some ways that you might think of interacting with your staff members and setting up this idea of, like, guardrails and boundaries between work and home life?
[00:13:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So I absolutely think that it is the responsibility of the employer and the employee. I think that if the employer doesn't come to the employee and ask about what their preference is for being communicated with in off hours. Because this is a job that never stops. Right. But we want to find a way to make sure we're respecting that. It. You have to. Employees have to be able to turn their brain off. So if the employer doesn't come to you, I think it's on the employee to make sure that they go to the employer and say, hey, this is. These are my needs surrounding my time off and communication from you all.
Please understand that you're going to communicate however you feel you need to, to get in touch with me. And when I'm off the clock, this is how I will. This is what you can expect from me. This is what I'm choosing to do. This is the boundary I'm setting. I think that just having that conversation is huge. Put everyone on the same page.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: Yeah. I think that's a good key to making sure that everyone's kind of, like, aware of the expectation and that everybody's on the same page. I was thinking about this the other day that there was a staff member that was talking to me and said that he felt like he was unfairly singled out because he was not to currently have children. And there were other members of the organization that had kids. And so when overtime would pop up, everyone would be like, hey, you're going to take that overtime? And be like, no, I'm going hiking. They're like, well, I have my kid. I can't take it. You have to take it. And it was like this weird pressure of. Because he didn't have kids, he was. His time off was less important. And I would caution everyone to remember that. I think that's a really unhealthy dynamic to create in the workplace. Just because, you know, you have kids and I don't or anything like that. I think it's. It's almost dismissing their ability to have time off. And one of the other things I want to talk about is I read an article from Wall Street Journal recently where they're interviewing senior doctors attending physicians who've been doing it for 30, 40 years, and they're infuriated that the new residents and the interns and the medical students are not willing to commit the amount of hours that they committed when they were going through. So, like, I just read an article where the surgeon said, you know, I had a. I had a resident talk to me about work life balance. And I snapped right there. I was so mad at him. And, you know, I, I didn't want to say anything, but like, in their mind, their view is, when you're a new doctor, your pagers on all the time, you don't get a family life and you don't have a marriage and you don't get vacation and you don't have time off and you're. That's your life. That is what the expectation is. And the new incoming residents are saying, no, I'm not. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not going to drive my marriage into divorce so that I can, you know, do 15 operations in a day versus five operations in a day. I will give you the best of my ability to what I can give you when I'm there, but when I also need my time off to be the best doctor I can be and the best husband and father and family person. And so I think that's a really interesting dynamic that you have. This group of tenured senior leadership who really have performed double duty. They, you know, killed themselves for years to get where they are today. And you see this next generation coming in that maybe isn't quite willing to accept that. Do you have any advice or strategies or ideas about how to get those two groups to kind of share perspectives at all?
[00:17:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's just. It is the ability to intentionally stop and ask yourself, why is this person expecting this out of me? Right. And then on the flip side, for the person who has these expectations of why aren't you doing it the way I've always done it? It to be able to stop and say, why aren't they doing it the way I've always done it? And again, it comes down to communication and understanding that everyone comes from different backgrounds and culture. Absolutely. Culture, society has an impact on our work, life balance and what we want from life going forward. Right. And so the person who has decided that they want to give everything they've got to their career isn't wrong. But the person who said, I want to incorporate family and I want to make my career work with my family plan as well, they're not wrong. Right. It's not like a I for this leadership class I'm in, I watched a TED talk on what is good, what is bad.
And I think it's really important that we intentionally think about not calling certain situations a good thing or a bad thing. It just kind of is. And being able to live with this kind of emotional homeostasis balance and recognizing it just gives you some flexibility to look at a situation or look at someone else, how someone else chooses to live in a situation and just say, okay, that's what they do, and this is what I do. And but with that comes communication so that we can all help to understand why we choose to do what we do and then accepts acceptance from there.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think having the idea that there's multiple paths through the organization that look very different for different people. I think sometimes when we try to make one single path for everyone, you know, your high performers, your performers who, you know, do the absolute minimum and you try to kind of cram them into one box together, everyone gets a little bit uncomfortable and congested. And I think recognizing that you're going to have some staff members that love what they do. They love being a paramedic. They want to treat patients. They want to do a good job with truck check. They want to be spiffy in their uniform and wash a truck, but they don't want to go to budget meetings or think about how to improve protocols or change medicine. Like, they just are not interested in that. And I have some coworkers that they love being flight paramedics and flight nurses, but that's what they love doing. They don't want to get into the nitty gritty about, like, what brand of pen we use on the aircraft and whether it works upside down or something stupid like that. They just want to do their job. And I think making sure, like you said, that we don't label them as underperformers or bad because they don't go above and beyond. And you can have other staff members that want to fix everything and look into everything and flip everything upside down and try to reinvent the wheel every single day when they're at work, and I think giving those folks an avenue and a path to do so and making sure that everyone can kind of coexist in the organization. Both the people that are doing the expectation well versus the people who want to go way above and beyond the expectation, I think is really key.
One of the interesting things I think a lot about is comparing and contrasting this, like, municipal workplace or the fire and EMS service. Fire, ems, police versus privatized business. Because privatized business, in its essence is required to grow and evolve in Order to be competitive, which I think sometimes yields itself to being a little bit more dynamic and resilient to any sort of like workplace intra dynamic problems versus a fire department that's been running the same way for like 200 years is probably going to run the same way for like probably another 50 years at least.
And so some of the things that privatized businesses will do is they'll come up with ways to engage your staff and balance work and home life in ways that fire and email services may not be able to. For example, you know, I think some of the really high performing private businesses are really famous for having like four, three or four day work weeks. Right. Where you can go in and you know you're going to have Monday and Friday off. So really those three days they're trying to get you to engage a lot more, saying do I want someone who sits at their desk five days a week, you know, 8 to 5 and kind of works at 50% power, or do I want someone that's going to come to their desk three days a week and work 12 hour days and just absolutely kill it? And so I think, can you think of any ways that EMS agencies might think about maybe shift schedules or asynchronous non clinical work or what are some strategies that you've seen where they're able to take an employee that might be close to getting burnout and kind of rejuvenate them and reset them?
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So I've heard of agencies considering incorporating like one admin day and then the rest of your shifts are on the truck.
And I've heard of them like including the employees in schedule making, which can be really challenging for the employer. It can also be really challenging for the employees.
And I think that those are some really great strategies if your organization has the personnel to do it.
I do agree that more isn't always better. Right. So requiring someone to be there for more hours doesn't necessarily make them a stronger employee, nor does it make more work get done. Right. So working in a position where I have a lot of flexibility with working from home has really helped me stay focused on a lot of tasks. Tasks. And it makes me a little more driven. With some projects, I feel like I have the space to get things done. I feel comfortable in my own setting and I also feel like I can manage my time better. That being said, there's also a lot of value in being with my colleagues. Right. Because there's a lot of small talk that happens when you're present with your colleagues. And that can be incredibly beneficial to an organization. And that's when some tasks, tasks can get done as well.
But maybe there's room for an organization to say, hey, on your admin day, you get to stay home and get some tasks done. These are your have to's and the rest of the day you can use on, you know, however you see fit that meets the requirements of your.
[00:23:48] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. I think it was really a lifesaver to me. When I was working for a while on the trucks and getting the ambulance, I kind of got sucked into a rut and kind of the same routine. And then being able to go to the training office for like two years and work directly under a mentor that I really trusted, that really treated me well. And I was working Monday through Friday. I had a schedule change, I had an hour change, I had a mission profile change and I had a environment change. So I was around different people working different times of the day with a different sleep schedule, doing different things. And I think if your organization has like training officer positions, you know, preceptor positions, maybe like there's some off site PR events or things like that. If you have staff members that are looking a little burnout and they're interested in that, breaking it up by saying, hey, Courtney, instead of working 36 hours on the truck this week, we want you to do two of your shifts on the truck and one of your shifts we want you to go over to the local high school and you're going to spend a day doing CPR and AED training if you're interested in that. Right. That those little breaks to change up where you are, who you're surrounded by and what hours you're working, I think are really healthy. I think it's been shown time and time again throughout nature that biodiversity is the key to success over time. So having the ability for your staff members to kind of float around at different areas and do different things throughout their career, I think is really important. So if you have an organization where that's like permissible, I think you right on the money with making sure that those admin days can be utilized for staff, especially staff that have something to offer other than like pushing Delta or something. You know, like let's, let's use your brain for all of the components of it, not just the paramedic side. I think it's really key.
[00:25:27] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. A well rounded employee.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: Yes. Which is the key to success. Yes. Well, I want to thank you for joining me today. Thanks for being on the show. I appreciate it. Hopefully, for those of you that are listening, you can think about some ways that your organization either does a good job at balancing work and home or ways the organization could improve. And don't be afraid to share your ideas. There's someone in your organization that will listen and is interested in it. Unfortunately, it's not always your direct supervisor or the chief of the department or the head director position. But sometimes just being in the ambulance, driving back from a call, like, ask some questions about your peers. You know, ask them how they feel about work, life, balance. Because sometimes the best ideas come from just sharing how we feel and listening to how others feel. And then you can kind of recognize that you're not alone. And like, maybe they're just as burnout as you. And I think having that conversation is really important. So try to resist the urge to just sit in absolute complete silence at three in the morning on the way back from the hospital. Because sometimes that's when the best ideas Absolutely. Well, thanks for coming.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: Sa.
