Local Project: L.E. Phillips PL – Staff Training

L.E. Phillips Public Library – Eau Claire, Wisconsin
Author: Kim Hennings, Deputy Director
Final Cost: $2,000

Library and Community Information

The Takeaways

• Staff were able to identify if they were naturally more passive, assertive, or aggressive, and learned tools to help them learn to assertively communicate.
• Inebriated customers are a safety concern in the library. Staff learned how to define and identify reasonable suspicion, what unique issues we’re facing in the Chippewa Valley, and how to implement policies and procedures for people under the influence.
• The communication and role playing tools helped staff gain confidence and hone their skills, whether interacting with members of the public, or coworkers.

The Project

Tell us a little about your library and where you are in resilience readiness, including applying aspects of social work in your operations. Are you a beginner, have some experience, or far along?

2020 was a tumultuous time for communities, and public libraries. The Eau Claire library was no exception, with the added stress of moving to a temporary location during remodeling of our existing downtown location, it was a stressful time for our community members that rely on library services and staff members. In years leading up to 2020, we had a renewed commitment to retain and increase direct relevancy to our customers through progressive policies, innovative services, and enhanced collections. These included going fines free, hiring a community resources specialist, and outreach programs like books on buses. Additionally, all staff had access to training like Ryan Dowd, Mental Health First Aid, and Safe Spaces. As the first library in our area to hire a full-time social worker, we have some experience applying aspects into our operations. Overall we would not consider ourselves “far along” as a staff, our social work program is still in its beginning stages.

Describe your project! What did you do? Who was involved? What did it cost, in terms of both purchases and staff time?

The project was designed to give staff the tools they needed to communicate effectively with the public, particularly when enforcing policies like the library’s appropriate library behavior policy, which we updated in conjunction with this project to make it more “plain language”. The library was preparing for the move back to the downtown location and an influx of new customers to the newly remodeled and expanded building. Interim Director Shelly Collins-Fuerbringer, Deputy Director Kim Hennings, and Community Resources Specialist Libby Richter worked together to identify what training would be most helpful for staff. Once the team was able to identify the types of training desired, we worked with the Chippewa Valley Technical College (CVTC) to adapt curriculum to library needs. We had 65 library staff attend one 2 hour training session addressing reasonable suspicion and assertive communication. To accomplish this, we had to have 3 different time slots with 20-25 employees attending. The cost for the curriculum development and training was $2,800.

How did you decide to pursue this project? What needs did it address in your library and community? How did you discover these needs?

At the library, we see many vulnerable people and communities work through challenges and difficulties they face in everyday life. Our goal is to be a trusted community partner for all of our customers, and as such, helping staff develop tools to build relationships and communicate with customers is essential. We used our internal incident reporting system to look at what incident trends were happening in the library as well as staff feedback as to what types of training opportunities they were interested in. The two that quickly became evident, is that we needed consistency in how we interact and enforce our policies, which is where the idea for assertive communication came from, the second is that we were seeing an increase in customers under the influence and/or paraphernalia found inside the library. We wanted to make sure staff had a good understanding of the challenges Northwestern Wisconsin faces when it comes to drugs and alcohol, and also the best way to approach an individual who they think may be under the influence in the library.

What is the intended impact of your project, and how did/will you measure it?

We want to better improve our relationship with all of our customers by being a welcoming place. Part of the library’s mission is to provide access to space and resources to enhance the quality of life in the community. It’s been difficult to measure the success of the project because we have moved to a different location and thus have different customers and much increased usage then our smaller, temporary location and was not located downtown. However, there has been decreased incident reports involving alcohol, fewer calls to law enforcement, and staff have been implementing the strategies they learned from the training, not only with customers, but other staff members. Customer success is important to us. Staff have reported being able to build a better rapport with customers. When our customers feel a relationship with staff, we have better outcomes, without having to implement bans.

What challenges, seen and unforeseen, did you encounter? What strategies did you use to overcome these?

One of the challenges was that in order to have all of our staff attend the trainings in-person, we had to split the staff into 3 different groups. After discussions with each of the groups, it was evident that each group had vastly different experiences and takeaways. While one group loved one instructors perspective, the next group felt the instructor’s approach was not as nuanced and the instructor was reinforcing negative stereotypes, and requested future trainings focus more on harm reduction. We combated this by having our own staff training, that was staff led, including our social worker, in which we developed our own scripts and practiced role playing with customers.

Looking back, what might you do differently if you were to redo this project?

Having the staff attend the training in three different groups meant that they had different experiences. Looking back, we would look for the opportunity to have all staff attend the training at the same time, so everyone could hear the same information/questions/responses. I also think we would work more with CVTC on developing the curriculum to adapt better to the public library setting.

What do you want other librarians to know about your project?

This is a work in progress, we will be constantly looking for ways we can improve our relationship with our community to ensure the best customer experience possible.

How have you incorporated concepts of community resilience into your library’s work? Have you found trainings like Ryan Dowd’s Homeless Training, Sara Zettervall’s Whole Person Librarianship, or others valuable? What have you found to be the most useful and how have you applied it in your specific community?

While not all staff have utilized both resources, many staff subscribe to and follow Ryan Dowd. They like the straightforward approach and his experience working with people experiencing homelessness. Overall, the staff here understand that those methods are not one size fits all, which is where Whole Person Librarianship comes in. Staff are working on setting healthy boundaries with customers in order to be approachable and helpful, while still communicating expectations of behavior at the library.