Creating a user-friendly water park; attention to three key areas: leadership, customer relations and an employee handbook, has enabled Kettering's aquatics staff to thrive and succeed.

The citizens of Kettering, Ohio, a city of 60,000 just south of Dayton, place a high value on recreation-and they expect their city to provide superb facilities and services. The most concrete example of this commitment to recreation came in 1988, when residents put their money where their mouths were and approved a $10.7 million bond issue to finance expanding and renovating the Kettering Recreation Center. The resulting Kellering Recreation Complex included a new senior center, a gymnasium with two basketball courts, an indoor walk/run track, and fitness and aerobics rooms. In addition, major renovations were made to the ice arena and to the main pool area, to include a whirlpool, sauna and steam room.

However, the Kettering Parks, Recreation and Cultural Arts Department didn't stop with the building itself. It moved to the great outdoors and in 1990 constructed a five-acre water park unlike any in the state. The challenges posed by the new Water Raves Water Park, in combination with the main pool and its ongoing programs, required the aquatics staff to stretch and grow. Management and staff had to become even more efficient to deal with the greater responsibilities, the rise in patron visits and the high expectations of those patrons.

Attention to three key areas--leadership, customer relations and an employee handbook--has enabled Kettering's aquatics staff to thrive and its programs to succeed.

Leadership In a Stressful Environment

A busy aquatics facility can be a stressful place for employees. As supervisors, we should make it our goal to help our staff manage that stress. We can accomplish this by properly training our employees, providing documents to support them in their work and sincerely caring about them and our guests.

Managing the stress begins with the prospective employee's interview. You should try to find out what the candidate's stress-coping skills are and encourage him or her to voice his or her expectations. As the supervisor, you should also make your expectations clear. If there is confusion over expectations, it can create a tremendous amount of stress for both employee and supervisor.

Once you have hired employees, the orientation and training sessions that follow are opportunities to further define expectations and to teach coping skills. This is the rime to give your staff the tools they need to perform their jobs confidently on a day-to-day basis. The staff orientation serves two purposes: to disseminate information and to begin to build the team atmosphere.

During orientation, staff should receive all the paper tools they will need. This may come in the form of a manual or another written document. This document should explain staff policies, procedures, emergency action plans, guidelines for dealing with various types of patrons, program structures and so on.

Supervisors may want to find ways to further illustrate the important information contained in the manual. Videos --whether made by existing staff or outside companies--provide visual reinforcement. Videos also are a lifesaver for management when conducting one-on-one orientations. Guest speakers also can lend credibility to the information presented during orientation. Presenters can speak on stress management, coping with difficult people and other topics that will help employees do their jobs with confidence.

Next, it's time for team-building. A supportive atmosphere and team feeling begins at the top and flows down. It's essential that management provide a united front in all situations. When management staff are comfortable as a team, their employees can have confidence in them and their day-to-day decision-making. This is definitely a stress reliever ! You can create a team with employees in various ways. Consider a big brother/big sister program, which pairs experienced staff with new employees. Plan social events before the season begins. During orientation, engage employees in team-building activities such as a scavenger hunt, relay races, trivia games and in-water skill demonstrations and competitions. Knowing each member's skill level builds confidence among the team. This cohesive feeling can aid in stress relief on a day-to-day basis.

Supervisors should recognize that team-building is an ongoing process. Inservice training sessions are great opportunities to reinforce the team spirit. Group discussions, intermingled with skill practice and fun activities, can help keep this spirit alive all season long.

Management must also provide the proper equipment for the procedures presented during orientations and in-services. Equipment can consist of ring buoys, rescue tubes, fanny packs containing personal protective equipment, uniforms and chemical test kits.

As the season goes along, staff will need the proper backup materials to help give them credibility. For example, if a cashier explains to a customer that he or she must provide proper identification to receive a resident rate, that printed information must be accessible to the cashier. This information may be in the form of a brochure, sign or policy manual.

Rule signs can provide backup for lifeguards. They can send a child to read the sign and come back and repeat its message as a reinforcement of the rule. These backup materials give staff confidence when encountering patrons.

Sincerely caring for the employees as if they were our customers is essential. Employees need to know that the supervisors are there for them if a situation becomes too difficult for them to handle. Eliminate the fear of being embarrassed in front of customers. Staff should know that management will support them, and if staff is incorrect, the situation will be dealt with in a dignified manner away from the public eye. Weekly spot checks of performance coupled with immediate feedback will also demonstrate our commitment to staff's success.

Manual Development

Whether you are developing your first employee manual or revising an existing one, keep in mind that this is a dynamic document that continually needs to be used and reviewed by management. When beginning to tackle the important job of developing a manual, it's essential to do some preliminary research. The starting point should be to determine your manual's purpose and how it will fit in with existing manuals for your entire facility. (If your aquatics operation is not attached to another facility, you can skip this part!) Here are some questions to put on your checklist.

* Does each activity area have its own manual or does an all-encompassing facility manual exist?

* Does the entire facility have written emergency-action procedures? If so, what do they include? (e.g., weather, fire, disaster and life-threatening emergencies)

* Are the city's and your department's general policies and procedures outlined in any existing manual?

* Is there a section discussing facility statistics?

* Should the aquatics staff receive one of the general facility manuals and then an aquatics-specific manual? After considering these questions, you'll be better able to decide what style of manual will best suit your needs.

*. If your aquatics facility stands alone (i.e., no other activities are held at the site), you can create one manual that covers policies, procedures and information about the facility and the aquatics programming that occurs there.

* If your aquatics operation is part of a larger facility, you could include information about aquatics operations in an existing manual that covers everything (if one exists). Bear in mind, however, that such an all-inclusive document can be both unwieldy and a little intimidating to employees.

* If a document already exists that addresses city and facility policies and procedures, you can develop a separate manual targeting your aquatics operations and its individual job classifications.

An employee manual should provide support information to staff, so that they can do their jobs with confidence. In order to select information that will help accomplish that goal, ask yourself the following questions:

* What job classifications will be using this document?

* What age range does this material target?

* What information is required? (e.g., federal, state and local regulations)

* What other important information should be included?

* When and how will this document be used to best benefit management and staff.

There are certain federal, state and local regulations regarding aquatics operations that employees and management must be aware of. Two examples of federal regulations are the Americans with Disabilities Act and the blood-born pathogen regulations from the Occupational Safety and Hazard Association (OSHA). State or local health department rules and regulations address such items as water dump markings, water chemistry, renovations and repairs, and lifeguard-to-patron ratios.

Does your local government have input into what types of signs you display, noise ordinances or patron-capacity limits? Another resource is your own department's policy manual. Most parks and recreation departments have developed policy manuals that contain valuable information. Examples include timecard procedures, Job descriptions, public relations guidelines, uniform requirements and procedures for handling mechanical breakdowns.

Your local safety agencies (police, fire and so forth) can offer valuable information for your employee manual. Your aquatics staff can deal with most disgruntled patrons, but when more serious situations arise, you must notify the authorities. Staff must know where their responsibility ends and the police department's begins.

The same concept applies to the fire/emergency department Fire/emergency personnel can tell your staff what they need when they arrive on the scene of an emergency. Where do they enter the facility? Will someone be there to meet them? Will a diving accident victim be in the water or on the deck? Has the staff applied a cervical collar to the victim?

After completing this research, you can now organize the information into an index (see box at left). The index will act as your outline. From this outline, you will fill in all the blank spaces with conclusions and facts drawn from the research.

Present the document in a user-friendly manner. Bold headings, bullets and short concise paragraphs will make reading easier.

Once you've produced your manual and have passed them out to employees, you're finished--right? Wrong. Your next move is to find ways to make the document come to life for your employees-to encourage them to dig into the manual and become familiar with it. You can use a written quiz, crossword puzzle or staff "Jeopardy" game. As a follow-up, staff should sign a statement of understanding to indicate that they have read the manual and understand the information in it. These cards should be placed in employee files. This is to make staff accountable for the information. Manuals should also be placed in the pool office for employees to use as a reference.

Producing an employee manual can be both costly and time-consuming, so the last thing a supervisor wants is to be burdened with seasonal or yearly revisions. One suggestion is to limit the content of your employee manual to the most generic and unchanging policies and procedures and then produce a small handbook each season that targets specific job classifications. For example, a summer lifeguard/water park attendant handbook index may contain pool, water park and program schedules, fees and charges, special events at the pool and water park, operations information, lifeguard/water park attendant rotations, in-service schedule, incident reports and examples of forms used. Above all, remember that an employee manual is only as effective as the management team that makes it.

Guest/Customer Relations

Customers are the driving force behind what we do, and customers need to know that they are respected and appreciated. This process begins by making the front-line staff aware of this important fact. Customer relations and service should be a common thread running through all staff interviews, orientations and in-services. During the interview process, discuss customer relations and ask the prospective employee why he or she thinks it is important. Orientations and in-service training sessions should reinforce the importance of treating customers right. Supervisors must practice what they preach. If you treat each and every patron with respect, you'll be teaching your staff to do the same.

Along with awareness, your staff must have the tools to provide good customer service. These tools consist of clear-cut policies, procedures and program information. Nothing is worse than having a patron call about lap swim hours and then drive out to the pool, only to find that swimming lessons are going on during that time.

Allow your front-line staff to serve. Say, for example, that a patron would like a refund for a swim lesson. But the facility policy states that only a supervisor can approve a refund, so what can the employee do? He or she can help if you have supplied him or her with program change request forms for patrons to fill out. This does not indicate approval, but it allows the staff to provide some type of service, and the patron can feel good that some type of action has been taken on his or her behalf.

When things go wrong and a customer is really disgruntled, the outcome may be both an upset employee and customer. Allow the employee to vent his or her frustrations in private and discuss what other options could have been exercised.

Good customer relations is a partnership. The strength of this partnership can be increased by listening to customers and providing them with some essential information. If you're fortunate enough to have a public relations person on staff, you have a good start. Providing information in advance gives customers a chance to alter their routines and prepare for a change.

For example, you need to close the pool for three weeks of maintenance in the spring. Customers can find this information by reading the facility brochure when buying their fall/winter/spring pool passes, and the front-line staff can reinforce this point by making patrons aware of this and encouraging them to read their brochure.

Correct signage can also aid in customer relations. If patrons learn through a sign in the parking lot that they may not take a cooler into the water park, it alleviates a possible confrontation and an additional trip back to the car.

As you plan for these tools, you must keep two words in mind--customer friendly. Aquatics facilities depend on their users, and if use and access are difficult, we might lose customers to other centers. The key to operating any aquatics facility is to keep the big picture in mind while paying attention to all the day-to-day details. A successful aquatics program is likely when supervisors show leadership, develop manuals and other materials to guide and support their staff and stress customer relations.

  Sample Index

  * Phone numbers
  * History and background of
department
  * Job descriptions
  * Employee policies and procedures
  * Program policies and procedures
  * Americans with Disabilities Act
  * Safety, first aid and severe weather
  * OSHA regulations
  * Main pool--fall, winter, spring
  * Water park

  * What the facility has to offer
  * General maintenance guidelines