Building Accountability with Your Dispatchers Without Destroying Morale

Every ECC leader eventually runs into the same challenge. By letting the little things slide, standards start to erode, but watch every call too closely, and you become the big brother over their shoulder. It can feel like there’s no way to hold people accountable without also making them miserable.

However, that’s the wrong way to frame the problem. The real question isn’t whether you should hold telecommunicators accountable, it’s how to do it effectively and without negatively impacting morale.

Done right, accountability and morale actually reinforce each other because people will trust a fair process, and trust is what makes accountability possible in the first place.

That said, building that sort of culture means understanding exactly where leaders tend to make mistakes and what it takes to build something that actually earns a team’s trust instead of its resentment.

When Feedback Falls Short: Too Soft and Too Hard

Most ECCs land in one of two failure modes, and both usually come from good intentions rather than bad management.

The first is being too soft. Feedback only shows up when something goes wrong, so silence gets mistaken for approval, and nobody really knows where they stand. The problem is only compounded over a year in between formal reviews.

Leslye Harrell, M.Ed., CAPM, RPL, Product Manager at Vector Solutions and former 911 Operations Manager, remembers exactly what it felt like on the receiving end of once-a-year evaluations.

“I would spend a lot of time filling my self-evaluation, but when I went into my review … it was just generic information,” she said. “There was no formal conversation around areas of improvement and that really affects morale over time.”

That kind of feedback vacuum doesn’t just leave people guessing about where they stand. It also lets small issues sit untouched until they’ve grown into much bigger ones, simply because nobody flagged them when they were still minor and easy to correct.

Annual reviews also fall victim to recency bias, which refers to the tendency for whatever happened in the last few weeks to overshadow everything that came before it. This can be especially damaging when a year’s worth of good work and exemplary performance is ignored due to a mistake right before annual review time.

However, the opposite failure mode is just as damaging, and it tends to show up in centers that have overcorrected for the first problem. It’s quality assurance programs that turn into a “gotcha” system, where every miss becomes an individual failing and, potentially, a disciplinary matter, even when it’s a one-off that any telecommunicator could have made on a bad day.

Add inconsistent grading between supervisors, another common issue ECCs and PSAPs face as part of the QA process, and accountability starts to feel arbitrary rather than fair.

Once employees sense that the standard depends on who happens to be grading them that week, they stop trusting the process and start just playing defense instead of actually improving.

The Real Fix

The reframe that changes everything starts with a simple test: is this one telecommunicator missing a step, or is it several people across multiple shifts missing the same step? The first is a coaching moment. The second is a training or policy gap and is another potential negative influence on morale because it puts the blame on an individual for a problem that leadership actually created.

Jason E. Kern, Founding Executive Director of Lake Consolidated Emergency Communications (LakeComm) and past President of APCO International (2021-2022), has seen this dynamic play out in more detail.

Lakecomm utilizes Frontline’s quality assurance software and he explained how the software surfaces these patterns before they become entrenched.

“We can run some reports and find out that we have six or seven people over three shifts that are all struggling with this task. Now we look at it from a standpoint of it, it may not be the individual, it may [be an agency issue],” he said.

The payoff of catching things early is real and measurable.

“Rather than letting something fester for a year, we could identify the problem and correct that immediately,” Kern said. “That helps the employees realize that we’re trying to help them.”

What Consistent Accountability Looks Like Day to Day

Once leadership commits to this reframe, it has to show up in the daily rhythm of the center, not just in policy documents on a shelf somewhere.

A once-a-year review feels like judgment, whereas a quick weekly check-in feels like coaching, even when the actual discussion points are identical.

Naming the intent behind the feedback out loud matters just as much as the frequency of it. Kern described how he coaches his supervisors to frame QA conversations explicitly as non-disciplinary, even when correcting a mistake.

Consistent accountability also means giving employees a real voice in how standards get set, not just in how they get graded.

“Be open to listening to all opinions because somebody might bring something to your attention that just really sparks a great idea,” Harrell said. “So don’t mute those voices. There’s a lot of great information there.”

The Payoff: Trust, Morale, and Retention

All of this points to one conclusion: trust only builds when people believe the process is fair and aimed at improvement, not surveillance. Break that trust once, and it’s difficult to rebuild.

The line from fair, well-aimed accountability to trust to morale to retention is direct, and why agencies should strive to always prioritize providing regular constructive feedback, even when things are busy.

“If it impacts one life, if it helps one employee be successful and not leave the profession or leave the agency, then it’s worth the money and the time that we spent with it,” Kern said.

Building a Culture, Not Just a Process

None of this requires a perfect system on day one. It requires a willingness to ask, every time a mistake shows up, whether it’s really a coaching moment or a sign of something bigger. And, if it’s the latter, a willingness to say “we need to fix this on our end” instead of defaulting to individual blame.

It also requires patience. Building this kind of culture, especially at a large or newly consolidated agency, takes time. It shows up gradually, in the small ways telecommunicators start to talk about their supervisors, their shifts, and their own growth.

Agencies that get this right don’t just hold people accountable, they build teams that trust the process enough to actually grow from it. That trust is ultimately what keeps good telecommunicators in the profession instead of walking out the door.

Curious what this looks like in practice at scale? LakeComm 9-1-1 built its entire quality assurance approach around these principles while merging seven dispatch centers into one regional agency.

To learn more about how Vector Solutions can support operations at your agency, please request a demo today.

Vector Solutions has partnered with Frontline Public Safety Solutions to provide a suite of industry-leading software solutions for emergency communication centers. The suite includes training management systems, online training courses, DOR and quality assurance management, asset management, shift scheduling, community engagement, policy management, early intervention and professional standards, performance management, and accreditation management.