Saturday Morning Stretch

I felt like I should show up for Saturday morning’s “Stretching Existing Staff” in disguise. Or, perhaps, in a bull’s-eye t-shirt with a “Kick Me” sign taped to my back. I mean, I know all too well that my colleagues are being stretched, and they know they’re being stretched, and they know that I know, etc. Why rub salt in the wound?

And yet, the allure of having library managers tell me how they do more with less was too strong, so I screwed up my courage, showed up as me, sat right up front, and here I am blogging about the presentation. Because it was a great one. Worth the price of admission all on its own. That great.

The big takeaway from “Stretching Existing Staff: New Service Delivery Models,” is that it’s extraordinarily important to work smarter, not harder. Of course you know this already. Even I already knew it. But it’s far, far more important than you or I realize. Smart is hard. It’s often counterintuitive, and sometimes we have to confront our own limitations and mistakes. But it’s worth it, because two good things happen when you do things that make sense: your colleagues become a lot more productive and your neighbors—the people who make use of the resources you steward—begin to like you even more than they do already.

The PLA group that sponsored this session, the Workload Measures and Staffing Patterns Committee (which is related in some way, I believe, to the Issues and Concerns Cluster) selected a great group of presenters:

• Ruth Barefoot, Manager, The San Jose Way, San Jose (Calif.) Public Library
• Valerie Rowe-Jackson, Deputy Director for Public Services, Richland County (S.C.) Public Library
• Anne T. Haimes, Branch Group Manager, Atlanta-Fulton (Ga.) Library System
• Dale McNeill, Director, Community Library Services Department, Queens (N.Y.) Library

One very cool thing: they didn’t futz around with a moderator. Instead, the speakers provided very brief introductions for each other. Another cool thing: two of the presenters used PowerPoint presentations that consisted almost entirely of photographs (brava!), another told his story without the hindrance of a deck to distract us (bravo!), and the fourth, though she used a fairly typical PowerPoint slideshow, was very good about using the bullet points as textual cues for the audience, not as her script (brava!).

San Jose’s Ruth Barefoot

• Reinvent your environment: get the good stuff—your “gold”—off the shelf and put it in the marketplace where your customers can find it more easily. San Jose particularly emphasizes the first ten feet of the library, which has a bookstore look and feel in order to win people over immediately.
• Emphasize self-directed services, such as self-checkout, renewals, and holds, and also paying fines online. This is all part of their goal to teach customers, because they want “to learn how to fish.”
• Simplify your policies: all checkouts are for three weeks, except movies, which are one week; everything has a $.25/day overdue fee; customers can check out as much as they want; they display DVD’s and CD’s in their cases.
• Provide customer service training for everyone on staff, and train everyone to mentor elementary school students and teens. This is part of empowering staff to put customers first: the phones on San Jose Library’s floor don’t ring when there’s an outside call, which means floor staff working with customers aren’t distracted. People working in the office answer the phone and can ring floor staff when there’s a call they need to take.

Richland County’s Valerie Rowe-Jackson

• When their bookmobile became too dangerous to operate, they opened a branch in what had been a convenience store, which they renamed The Link.
• They parked the bookmobile outside while The Link was being set up, to help their patrons make the transition, and they employed their librarian/bookmobile driver in The Link once it opened. The pictures of The Link look great: all the best aspects of a small library combined with all the best aspects of a small bookstore.
• To provide better service, save space, and make better use of existing staff, they provide reference via dedicated videoconference from the Library’s main branch.

Atlanta-Fulton’s Anne Haimes

• When they renovated the 15,000 square-foot South Fulton Branch, they merged their two reference desks, Children’s and General, into a single desk.
• They made the desk more visible and accessible, and in so doing freed up space for public programs.
• They cross-trained their reference staff, which meant that fewer person-hours need to be spent staffing the newly combined desk. This fostered teamwork and freed up time for programs and outreach.

Queens Public’s Dale McNeill

• You need to know your community, your staff, and your buildings. What’s big in Texas, what plays in San Jose, may not befit Queens.
• When they realized just how much social work librarians were doing, they asked themselves, “Do we really need librarians to do this work or could someone else do it better?” So they hired social workers to work in the libraries not as librarians, but as social workers. Some of them even do home counseling.
• They have converted 20 of their 60 branches to self-service only. Patrons don’t have an option of going to a circulation desk; it’s self-service only. The self-checkout machines take cash, credit cards, and checks, as well as payments, and they’re multilingual. They also provide a receipt for check-in of materials: patrons wanted proof that they’d returned items.
• Some changes are rolled out slowly, such as self pick-up of holds, which was introduced over two years.
• It’s important to have clear expectations for staff and to make sure everyone knows what the positive and negative consequences of their actions will be. When retraining is required, it’s best to have someone model good behavior, though that someone may not be a manager; it might make more sense for it to be someone at the same level as the person who would benefit from retraining. And be sure there are rewards associated with growth and change, even if it’s just a pat on the back. People need to have their effort acknowledged and appreciated.