Meeting the Rise in Off-Duty & Overtime Demand: 5 Tips for Law Enforcement
Did you know that the average law enforcement officer works 500 hours of overtime and off-duty details each year?
Between college sporting events, weekly concert performances, and nightlife entertainment, the demand for off-duty across the nation has never been higher.
Learning to adjust can be challenging for some agencies, especially those who rely on non-digital solutions for managing off-duty details. Certain homegrown processes can no longer keep up with the amount of back-and-forth communication it takes to schedule, coordinate, and collect payment from an off-duty job. To do so requires a change in thinking.
What’s the solution?
1. Stay Organized
Outdated paper and email systems often result in messy data, making it nearly impossible to analyze trends, hours, and billing histories.
Organization is key to understanding where to allocate resources and where to make necessary changes in your process. Moving data and the job-bidding process for off-duty details to a centralized system can relieve the headache of constant upkeep.
With just a few clicks in PowerDetails, off-duty coordinators can release new jobs for officers to log in and apply, address upcoming jobs that are unfilled, run reports for the command staff, and enjoy automatically generated invoices after an officer reports worked hours from their mobile device.
This saves coordinators from the pain of manual data entry and saves officers from having to drive to the agency to fill out paperwork.
2. Streamline Communication
It is important to get information out to your personnel as fast as possible when jobs are requested. Even more so when a scheduled job has last minute updates.
Sending mass emails and texts can be laborious, especially if certain jobs are only open to a specific group of officers. PowerDetails has the ability to send automatic alerts for things like job detail changes or cancellations.
Officers can provide as many addresses as they would like to receive alerts so they will never miss the opportunity to work a last minute job request. Employers can even request jobs directly through the system, saving coordinators from excess phone calls.
Keep your communications and job lists organized for specific officers with the Groups feature within PowerDetails.
3. Fairness Keeps Morale High
When off-duty management gets hectic, it’s critical that your officers trust in the agency’s process. This is why fair job distribution is so important.
Features such as Rules and Job Sets in PowerDetails provide a way to enforce agency policy automatically and level the playing field when applying to jobs.
For example, limiting the number of job applications in a day can ensure that everyone gets a chance to bid before upcoming jobs are all taken.
4. Choose If/When to be Flexible with Certain Policies
Flexibility is sometimes necessary to get “unpopular” jobs filled and sometimes the best solution is to allow more eager officers to pick up those extra-hours despite agency policy.
Alternatively, administrators are given the authority to assign personnel manually if needed. The Rules feature in PowerDetails allows you to specify a time frame in which some policies can be flexible, or if they must always be enforced.
5. Get Help from Outside Agencies
Does your agency ever need to reach out for extra help in filling jobs? PowerDetails allows the inclusion of officers from other agencies when you need them.
Easily place restrictions so that this does not interfere with jobs only available to your officers. Our Groups feature allows you to advertise specific jobs and place specific limitations on any outside help.
For more information on how to make your agency more efficient and fair, email us at team@powerdetails.com
Are you ready to streamline your Extra-Duty Details?
