Public safety leaders must help law enforcement officers improve their job satisfaction and performance if they want to stay competitive and retain their most professional employees. As law enforcement agencies across the nation tackle this topic, best practice solutions that fit the needs of both small and large agencies are becoming clear to many. Here we explore several strategies that public safety leaders can use to enhance job satisfaction and ignite high performance in their personnel.

Key Components

Within the public safety sector, high levels of job satisfaction and performance are essential attributes for an effective and well-functioning agency. Research suggests that law enforcement officers who feel fulfilled and supported in their roles are more likely to be motivated, productive, and committed to their duties. They are also far less likely to develop performance and behavioral concerns related to constant work-related stressors and line of duty, post-traumatic stress injuries. However, achieving and maintaining high levels of job satisfaction and performance at an agency-wide level can be challenging amidst the inherent complexities of modern-day policing.

Impact of Stressors

An examination of the challenges law enforcement officers face each day reveals numerous stressors that can cause concern for their overall well-being, many of which are outside of their control. As such, it is vital that public safety leaders invest in workplace culture and job satisfaction to avoid contributing to preventable problems like low morale, deflated job satisfaction, and diminished performance.

Perceived Lack of Support

Public safety leaders at every level have a direct impact on how law enforcement officers perceive departmental support – or lack thereof – which can further diminish their overall morale, job satisfaction, and performance. It is easy for performance to falter when law enforcement officers feel they receive little to no positive feedback from their supervisors, or when performance evaluation programs are perfunctory and only conducted on an annual basis to satisfy an outdated policy demand. The quality of a department’s training and continuing education programs can also greatly impact how officers perceive support. It is easy for law enforcement officers to feel undervalued when they are only provided with infrequent training that is often immaterial to their duties or unrelated to their career planning goals.

Supervisors Also Affected

While officers certainly feel the full weight of law enforcement’s shortcomings, supervisors are often left ill-equipped or unable to rectify these issues. Policies and workplace culture may prevent them from providing the individualized training and support each of their officers deserves. Moreover, law enforcement supervisors may find themselves in a similar situation where they too perceive a lack of support while working within the same substandard training and performance evaluation frameworks as their subordinates. While all law enforcement supervisors strive to provide the best leadership possible, they often lack the tools, technology, and time to deliver the level of morale building training exercises modern policing demands. They are also frequently constrained by outdated legacy performance evaluation systems that are ineffective due to their tendency to focus on a small number of below-standards incidents that are often irrelevant to the effective delivery of public safety services.

Strategies to Enhance Job Satisfaction and Performance

In order to address these concerns, public safety leaders need to invest in high quality, frequently recurring training, and support the well-being of their officers by promoting a culture of recognition that regularly identifies and celebrates their many successes. These simple changes can contribute to increased morale, enhanced job satisfaction, and better overall performance. Law enforcement officers who are well-trained, effectively led, and strongly supported can be expected to perform to the best of their ability while understanding how their work ties into the agency’s larger public safety and community partnership objectives.

TRULEO supports a public safety leader’s efforts to address these issues by efficiently and effectively analyzing all of an agency’s body-worn camera (BWC) data to identify and highlight the excellent performance of their officers. The TRULEO system provides leaders, trainers, and public information officers with information they already have, but have not been able to process. Unlike other invasive systems, TRULEO supports law enforcement by providing credible, unbiased, and precise intelligence about the high professionalism and high composure events that happen every day, in every department – empowering law enforcement officers to be more capable public servants who play a pivotal role in cultivating a professional organizational culture.

Conclusion

To improve our law enforcement officers’ job satisfaction and performance, public safety leaders must invest in high quality, frequently recurring training, support the well-being of their officers, and regularly celebrate their many successes. This rather simple approach can also help attenuate recruitment and retention challenges which are exacerbated by low morale and widespread job dissatisfaction.

TRULEO is a CJIS-compliant SaaS solution, built on a proprietary audio analysis engine that automatically categorizes all of your department’s body-worn camera (BWC) data enabling leaders, trainers, and public information officers to highlight positive interactions and promote exemplary performance. Our mission is to improve trust in law enforcement by leveraging state of the art BWC data analysis technology to streamline operations, mitigate risks, enhance legitimacy, and facilitate individualized recognition to increase morale, ignite performance, and celebrate police professionalism.

About the Author

Greg Sheehan is the Director of Training at TRULEO.

He retired from law enforcement as an Inspector of Police after twenty-seven years with the New York City Police Department, having served in multiple capacities including Program Director of the Police Academy. He is a graduate of the Police Management Institute at Columbia Business School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where he was the Richard L. Gelb scholar in public administration. His interests include public safety training and body-worn camera analytics, topics that have allowed him to identify and deploy scalable solutions to today’s toughest law enforcement recruitment, training, and retention problems. For questions or comments contact him at greg@truleo.co.

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