Tracking Success: An Interview with Dothan, AL Police Department

Tracking Success: An Interview with Dothan, AL Police Department
Resources

December 1, 2021

Resource: Success Stories Industry: Law Enforcement, Public Safety
Tags: Guardian Tracking

GT: When you first heard about Guardian Tracking, what were some of the biggest struggles your agency was going through?

DPD: Not so much struggles, but looking for an easy and simple method of documenting employee behavior and conduct throughout an evaluative period. Our agency was just at the point of placing laptops into the hands of supervisors in all divisions.

GT: What tools did you use for documentation before using Guardian Tracking?

DPD: We used paper and pen. For people whose work is predominantly field work, it is difficult to remember single incidences of good and bad and then come to the office, write it down and then physically place it into a file. Guardian Tracking had the answer to simplification and very high reliability.

“After implementing Guardian Tracking, we have clearly seen potential employee problems being handled sooner and more effectively.”

— Dothan Police Department, AL

GT: What types of struggles were you having with those documentation tools?

DPD: Not being completed either at all or timely enough for the employees or agency to benefit.

GT: What benefits of the Guardian Tracking software really grabbed your attention?

DPD: Simplified principle based, ease of access and use, reliability, customizable for agency needs and structure.

GT: How has Guardian Tracking made documentation easier?

DPD: The way Guardian Tracking works was used to create a policy that requires certain things to be documented and for the employees to actually check it regularly. We no longer have to supply paper documentation to support evaluation scores since the Guardian Tracking database contains the needed information.

GT: What do you see as the biggest asset to using this software?

DPD: First, the fact that it is so user friendly that employees do not fear or dread having to make entries. Second, the transparency from the lowest ranks to the highest is readily available and trends in behavior and conduct can be seen or at least indicated in time for correction or addressing before it becomes a large problem. By placing notifications in the proper place, certain issues can be addressed before they actually become a problem which is now being appreciated by all of the employees who at first thought this was going to be another tool to beat them up, so to speak. After more than two years of use, practically everyone appreciates the value of such a system.

GT: In what ways have you noticed the biggest impact to your agency as a result of using the Guardian Tracking software?

DPD: We have clearly seen potential employee problems being handled sooner and more effectively. We have also seen better performance overall because of the utilization of Guardian Tracking. For those few employees who are destined for failure, Guardian Tracking provides that background of information necessary to show efforts or turn around problem employees undertaken by supervisors, peers and the agency as a whole.

GT: What need was the Guardian Tracking software able to meet that you couldn’t find with any other product?

DPD: We needed a mix of capability, reliability, ease of use, comprehensive subject depth for our specific agency as well as cost effectiveness. We searched for more than 4 months for a product that we could adapt to electronic style reporting that would not over-burden supervisors who already have so much to handle, and that was customizable and affordable. We knew that many things our employees were doing was not getting the necessary attention unless it was bad. That meant that employees almost never got any recognition for positive and productive things they do daily. Now, after using the product for a while, we can clearly show that our employees do far more good than bad and that it has raised morale very simply because they can see what is being written about them and issues resolved before they actually become problems. Not in every case mind you, but by far in the majority.

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