Administration

It’s All about the Customer Service! — If you really stopped and thought about what percentage of your job in the National Park Service is related to customer service, I think you would find it rates fairly high. No matter what discipline (paid or volunteer) you may work in, there is likely a portion of the job connected to a customer. Your customers may be internal (employees) or external (park visitors) but they are still customers and we should be in the business of providing quality customer service. The experts say that you can hear smiles as well as see them. When was the last time you smiled before picking up the phone?

My nearly 20-year NPS career has always put me in the customer service business. I started out as GS-3 fee collector at Oregon Inlet Campground at Cape Hatteras and now happily serve as the chief of administration at Saguaro. All through my career I have dealt directly with either the park visitor or the employees of a park. No matter who they are, I always have thought of them as customers. Customer service should be a part of any job description in the NPS, and hiring the right people goes a long way to creating a positive customer service experience.

I worry that today the NPS may be losing some of the customer service skills that benefit the internal customers (the employees). In the past two years we have seen the shift to centralizing human resources and contracting. Moving some of these positions out of parks and isolating them in central offices have left the parks without the direct customer-service contacts that employees often need.

At many parks new employees never meet with a human resource employee. They may anonymously receive a hiring packet in the mail and are then asked to mail it back. Any benefits, payroll or general human resource questions must now be funneled through the supervisor or even someone on the administrative staff to act as the go-between with human resources and the park employee.

The same has happened with contracting. Many parks have lost the invaluable opportunity to have an in-person conversations with a contracting officer or purchasing agent when developing a purchasing or contract request. I can understand the need for centralizing. It makes sense in small regions or areas that have several park clusters. As budgets shrink and we continue to do more with less, centralizing (in theory) should work. However, the current situations for most of the Servicing Human Resource Offices and the Major Acquisition Buying Offices have resulted in high employee turnover, workload backlog and communication barriers to their very own customers — the employees of the NPS!

These customer service issues are beginning to be addressed at the national level in the NPS and I want to be part of a solution. I hope for an attitude that complaints should be looked at as a great opportunity to fix a problem and keep the customer. If everyone walked the customer service talk, just think how employee morale would improve. Why would we not want to treat the employees of the NPS as valued customers just as we would any visitor?

Basic customer service slogans such as “customers come first” and “we’re here to serve” are good reminders that we really are an agency that can provide quality customer service not only to the general public but to our own employees. After all, we do have the word “service” in our agency name.

Now go ahead and smile first before you answer that next phone call. Try it . . . it really works!

Interpretation

Collateralized — I had dinner with a couple of my friends and co-workers recently. As is usually the case, our conversation centered around our work, specifically the future of our profession. One of the more interesting things to come out of this discussion was the creation of a new word that summed up the way we felt as interpreters in the National Park Service. That word is collateralized.

The definition is simple: having so many collateral duties that one becomes incapable of doing their primary job with any kind of effectiveness. In other words, most of us felt that we were jacks of all trades and masters of none.

At first we laughed and were somewhat amused at our brilliance in creating a new word. Then we quickly became sullen. The reality of the situation seemed to hit us all at the same time. It was not just the four of us at the table who felt this way, it likely was most of the members of our profession. To make things worse, we also realized that the system, which measures success and ultimately validates promotions, was set up that way.

All four of us knew reality because we were living and breathing examples of it. Most of our careers have been spent in the acquisition of skill sets that will allow us to go from intern to seasonal, from seasonal to permanent, from permanent interpretive park ranger to chief of interpretation and further. In other words, we had become great at checking off boxes on our applications.

Our discussion led to this troubling conclusion: We (most seasonal and permanent front-line staff) have become skill-based rather than knowledge-based interpreters. We (the supervisors and those who hire) have forgotten that knowledge of the resource(s) that we interpret is the fundamental thing that makes a great interpretive ranger. Both of these things are big problems.

When I say “we” I know full well that there are some interpreters and supervisors out there who don’t fit this mold, but most in the NPS do. Those who don’t have chosen not to for reasons that are almost certainly not career advancement based. Rather, they have chosen to put the resource(s) in front of their careers.

Thinking more about this subject, I realized that in my entire career I have never been asked in an interview about the level of my resource knowledge of my current park. (I have worked at 10 NPS units and have interviewed for countless others.) Rather, I have always been asked about my knowledge of the profession of interpretation or about specific skill sets.

Another interesting note is that while preparing this article, I asked some of my past supervisors if they had ever been asked about my resource knowledge in any reference check about me. The answer was no. I know that I have never been asked that question during a reference call on one of my employees.

There are a number of problems with this paradigm, too numerous and too big to discuss here, but the consequences are clear and simple. The status quo is resulting in substandard interpretation being given to the public due to a lack of resource knowledge. The long-term risk of substandard interpretation is a public that hasn’t connected to public resources strongly enough to want to protect them.

We need interpretive rangers to be resource- and subject-matter experts. We need the programs that we present to the public to have as much substance as they do style.

Unfortunately, the four of us eating dinner that night couldn’t come up with a practical solution to the problem. We were able to identify a number of root causes for the problem, but in each instance we found ourselves up against a wall.

The one thing that we agreed on was our unanimous support of the rumored return of the GS-11 master interpreter position description. The dream job of just being asked to intimately know a resource, present the highest quality interpretive programs to the public, and to mentor and coach fellow interpreters while being appropriately compensated for it, is one worth raising a glass to, which is exactly what we did.

Protection

No Such Thing as “Just a Seasonal” — We need to rid our vocabulary of the phrase “just a seasonal.”

You might think it would never be uttered on National Park Service soil or amidst NPS personnel, but having recently completed a weeklong training course at the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, I lost track of how many times I heard that exact language.

Over the course of this training, I had the pleasure of working with many high-caliber, professional people, at least a dozen of whom were seasonal NPS employees, and all of whom had arrived at the Blue Ridge by way of a variety of national park sites. Listening to their stories, I began to detect a disturbing pattern in some of their remarks.

It seems that we, the NPS, have instilled among many of our seasonal employees, albeit inadvertently, that because their employment doesn’t span a 12-month period, their importance is somehow subordinate to that of permanent employees. The message we’ve sent them is clear: Because their time on our payroll falls short of a full year, they themselves somehow fall short of being a “full” or “real” employee.

Listen up, seasonals. Here’s the truth: There is no such thing as “just a seasonal.” Yes, you are viewed through a different lens administratively in the same manner any other employers might view part-time employees. As far as valuing you as a real employee and the indispensable skill sets and collective experience that you bring to the NPS each year, you’re as real as anyone among our permanent ranks.

It seems that too many of our seasonal folks are feeling less than valued by our agency. We need to remedy this right now.

Several of the seasonals I met during this most recent training, coupled with more than I can remember from past encounters, say the NPS fails to value them. As a supervisor I hear seasonals just arriving at my park make statements like, “I didn’t think you’d be able to get that piece of equipment for me because I’m just a seasonal,” or “I guess I won’t be attending that training with the other rangers because I’m just a seasonal.”

I shake my head at these statements and ask them where they developed such skewed views on how to expect to be treated by their employer. Without exception they answer, “That’s how it always is . . . seasonals never get training or equipment.”

Wake up, NPS! These seasonals are the very future of the NPS. If we fail to equip and train them now, during their seasonal years, what caliber of work can we expect from them once they’ve acquired that Holy Grail of permanent status? How will our treatment of them affect their treatment of future seasonals once they’re the next generation of permanent employees?

There are 480 to 500 seasonal commissioned rangers working at our national parks during any given summer. Imagine the impact it would have on our operation if we didn’t have their help. And that’s just the commissioned folks. Apply this idea across the board to all park disciplines and consider the impacts. Obviously, we’re not going to suffer such impacts because these positions are not vacant. We need them.

Let’s begin acting like we need them. Let’s supply them with the same caliber of equipment and training that we give our permanents. Let’s take the time to write well-crafted performance appraisals that sing their praises if they’ve done outstanding work. They use these appraisals to apply for their next job, so why not equip them with an honest recommendation where it matters most?

If we think back on our own experiences as seasonals, we might recall some unfortunate memories of being treated like we were less than valued. Let’s save this current generation of seasonals, the upcoming generation of NPS leaders, that same unpleasant experience and give them our best, as so many of them give us their best and more.

I look back on my recent training at Blue Ridge and recall the exceptional seasonal rangers there. I learned as much from them as they learned from me, and knowing them made me confident in the skill sets of tomorrow’s rangers. I’d be proud to work with any one of them and refer to them as “partner.”

Refer to them as U.S. park ranger.

~ Kevin Moses, Buffalo National River

Climate Change Response Council — Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued a directive a year ago on the department’s response to climate change and its effects on water, land, and other natural and cultural resources. To ensure a coordinated strategy, he, his assistants and bureau chiefs, including NPS Director Jon Jarvis, make up the new Climate Change Response Council.

The secretarial order established regional Climate Change Response Centers, under the leadership of the U.S. Geological Survey, to coordinate data, analysis and adaptation strategies.

It also called for bureaus to join with state, local and private entities in Landscape Conservation Cooperatives. They would be organized around climate change and other stressors, focused on developing, providing and sharing monitoring and research results to inform outcome-based adaptive management actions.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the lead on LCCs, but the NPS is to help formulate some half-dozen this year. The cooperatives aim to address landscape-scale issues for an entire range of priority species or groups of species. Initial efforts have included assessing science needs related to habitat connectivity and water scarcity, and preparing vulnerability assessments for species at risk.

Meanwhile, the NPS Inventory and Monitoring networks received increased funding in FY2010 to add or modify existing vital signs to track the ecological effects of climate change. This first effort is focused on 94 highly vulnerable parks grouped in high-latitude (Alaskan), high-elevation, Pacific Island, coastal and southwest desert areas, some of whose technical staff and managers met this spring to begin choosing how to bolster their I&M programs.

Within the NPS and beyond, new emphasis is on data integration and communication across program and agency borders. NRInfo currently makes existing non-sensitive data, such as that in NPSpecies and the NRBib list of literature citations, available to all users. Future versions plan to provide access to more NPS and other agency databases such as the USGS reference search, USFWS ECOS database on threatened and endangered species’ status and the integrated taxonomic information system, ITIS.

A servicewide Climate Change Response Strategy should be finalized soon; the review draft outlined approaches for mitigation, adaptation, science and communication. Key messages are that climate change is happening and humans have an influence in it; there are consequences for parks, people and the planet; the NPS is responding with practices that address climate change concerns; and people’s actions can make a difference.

Efforts to better link managers, planners and interpreters with the best available science information is a key task if we’re to manage for change and for resilience in the face of it, at the local level and beyond.

NOTE: If you work in resource management and are interested in becoming a columnist in this space, please contact the editor at fordedit@aol.com.