Empowering Your Frontline Workers

How should civility be taught? How can we convince an agitated person that we understand their concerns and want to collaborate with them not overpower them? What educational methods can allow the beginner to integrate the skills of civility in daily life?

It was to answer these questions that led Rosemary Masters to take part in a ten-year study of a training program for emergency medical technicians and paramedics offered by LaGuardia Community College, a branch of the City University of New York.

Originally the goal was simple: to identify and categorize the interventions that EMTs and paramedics use to ameliorate the panic, rage, and humiliation experienced by many patients receiving out-of-hospital emergency medical care. The research team soon saw that the same interventions EMTs and paramedics employ might be useful, not only to first responders, but a huge swath of the American work force, the men and women we call frontline workers. The eSCAPe Protocol was born.

The eSCAPe protocol is a mindful interpersonal tool for enhancing connection and reason in ordinary day-to-day employment settings.

Rosemary, who holds dual degrees in law and social work, began working with trauma survivors in 1980 when she served as the first director of the Families of Homicide Victims Program of the New York City Victim Services Agency (subsequently renamed Safe Horizon).

She was trained in psychoanalysis and family therapy at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and has taught and supervised in the Institute’s Family and Trauma Divisions. As a psychotherapist she has a specialty in the treatment of developmental trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She is trained and certified in the use of EMDR, Internal Family Systems and other trauma treatment techniques.

More about Rosemary »

Neuroscientist Stephen Porges asserts that we navigate the world and respond to traumatic stress with two specific and very different hard wired neural networks.

The survival brain focuses on our individual survival without much regard for anyone else.

The social engagement brain promotes safety through cooperative social interaction.

We propose that our contemporary unrest, unreason and overall incivility has come about because our brains are misreading the world. When frontline workers are dealing with panicky, angry or confused people they are likely dealing with people in a state of traumatic stress. The survival brain is in charge and thoughtful, reasoned discourse becomes difficult or impossible.

Frontline workers succeed in doing their job when they notice that they are interacting with someone who is showing signs of traumatic stress and take steps to help that person to turn off their survival brain, calm their surveillance brain, and activate their social engagement brain.

By frontline workers we mean the people who greet, serve and negotiate day to day with people requiring assistance, services or goods from public and private organizations.

Most obviously the term applies to first responders: police, firefighters, EMTs, paramedics and medical personnel in hospitals. More broadly, we use the term frontline work to describe a huge swath of the U.S. workforce. Examples include civil servants in motor vehicle and social security’s offices, airline personnel, employees in big box stores, sales clerks in small and mid-size businesses, and waitstaff in restaurants.

Frontline workers are expected to remain calm and polite while trying, somehow, to defuse the fury or panic of dissatisfied consumers.

The stress of navigating these encounters can be exhausting and demoralizing for frontline workers, dismaying for bystanders who witness such encounters, and confounding for supervisors.