Restoring Reason and Connection in Times of Social Unrest
Rosemary Masters, J.D., L.C.S.W.
Can teach your frontline workers how to handle angry, upset people.
When Yelling Back is Not an Option
Public trust and respect for most organizations can be gained or lost by what happens at the reception desk, on the sales floor and on the phone.
Which means your organization depends on coolheaded frontline workers.
Here’s how…
Empower Your Frontline Workers With The eSCAPe Protocol
In today’s polarized society, maintaining civil discourse is an ever-increasing challenge. We are a people on edge.
Insignificant interactions can explode into furious arguments or anxious avoidance of the very issues we need to resolve.
Too many people are “losing it” and the question has become how to stay calm ourselves and calm those too agitated to discuss and solve problems with reason and common sense.
The Cost to Frontline Workers
Few are more impacted by our national volatility than frontline workers, the men and women who encounter and negotiate day to day with people requiring assistance, service or goods from public and private institutions. Police, firefighters and EMTs routinely encounter enraged, panicked or irrational people.
Often overlooked are workers who, as a condition of employment, are expected to calm and placate individuals reacting with unreasonable anger or distress because of delay or denial of what they need.
Highly charged frontline encounters occur in countless setting: the complaint desk in big box stores, the sign-in desk in hospital emergency rooms and the waiting lines in motor vehicles offices. Individual workers suffer. So also do coworkers, supervisors and bystanders.
Frontline workers are expected to remain calm and polite while trying, somehow, to defuse the fury or panic of dissatisfied consumers. When they fail, they are often criticized and blamed; yet rarely are they taught effective strategies for how to manage these volatile situations. The cost to the organization they work for is low morale and high job turnover.
The stress of navigating these encounters is exhausting and demoralizing for frontline workers, dismaying for bystanders who witness such encounters, and confounding for supervisors.
A New Approach to Cooling Things Down
Enter the eSCAPe Protocol
How do we help and angry, panicked person to cool down and let us help them/ What skills does it take to achieve that goal? How can frontline workers learn and use those skills?
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..
The goal was simple: observe, identify and categorize the interventions that seasoned EMTs and paramedics use to ameliorate the panic, rage, and humiliation experienced by many patients receiving out-of-hospital emergency medical care. Out of this inter-disciplinary conversation the eSCAPe protocol was born.
To calm a traumatized person, the LaGuardia team concluded that experienced EMTs employ four verbal interventions that signal to the brain that right now there is no acute danger and that it is safe for the more complex mental capacities for thinking, planning and communicating to resume control. There is no particular order in which the interventions are provided. All must be offered repeatedly. When the interventions are successful, there can be profound relief not just on the part of the traumatized person but of bystanders, supervisors and frontline workers themselves.
Why eSCAPe works
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 whose brains are reacting as if their lives are in danger. In such a state, none of us are capable of reasoned thinking or talking.
The science of neuropsychology tells us that to calm an angry or panicked person we must speak to the parts of the brain that perceive and react to danger. We must let their brain know that things are safe enough to turn control back to the reasoning, thinking parts of their brain and let the frontline worker give them the help they need.
With modern neuroscience in mind, how do we calm the agitated brains of volatile consumers? What skills does it take to defuse that agitation? How do we teach these skills to frontline workers so they them, learn them and use them?
Essentially, the eSCAPe protocol is a mindful interpersonal tool for enhancing connection and reason in ordinary day-to-day employment settings.
Learning, Remembering, and Using the eSCAPe Protocol
Although eSCAPe’s interventions are simple, the challenge is for employees is to remember them and use them while they carry out their essential employment tasks. Not so easy! The La Guardia team adopted a time-honored technique in the medical field, the mnemonic, a word whose individual letters stand for the purpose of the interventions and the four interventions themselves. Learning needs to be carried out in two separate steps. First, learners are introduced to the basic theory of why eSCAPe works and how to use it. In the second step, learners practice employing the protocol using role play and coaching by an eSCAPe trainer.
To help workers remember to use the four essential interventions, the founders of the protocol adopted a method that is time honored in the medical field. Each letter in the word eSCAPe stands for how to calm an upset person. The lower-case e’s stand for every upset client and during every encounter” The upper-case letters stand for the four interventions: Social connection, choice and control, anticipation and planning.
