How many visitors should Ombuds see on an average day?

How many people is it safe for Ombuds to see in a day? By Amanda Dean and Wayne Marriott

This post is intended as a conversation starter for Ombuds interested in understanding how their peers run their office and wrestle with professional safety and quality service.

While many factors influence workflow, many are outside the Ombuds' control. The one thing we can control is our ability to say yes or no to consulting with our visitors on any given day or time.

So, what influences workflow? Let’s compare the factors outside and within our control.

Rigid conditions and environmental factors:

1.      The office environment. The location, layout and the systems employed to manage these.

2.      Financial constraints.

3.      Emerging issues throughout the organisation and external forces affecting the constituency.

Malleable conditions in the environment:

1.      The timing of appointments in our diary.

2.      Maintaining a personal disposition that is welcoming, present, and empathetic.

3.      Meeting visitors at venues and times that suit them. [and having helpful travel options at your disposal].

4.      Creating time to reflect on and process the content so you manage stress, pressure, and trauma triggers.

5.      Make time to write notes and create follow-up actions.

6.      Maintaining time for office administration and duties associated with compliance, health and safety, and making sure ‘the lights stay on’.

7.      Managing the Ombuds relationship with organisational leadership.

8.      Creating space for measuring quality service and planning and implementing changes based on service evaluation.

Given our best efforts, those rigid conditions are managed by having in place systems and resources that facilitate excellent service delivery. Physical resources are often allocated in advance and based on their own mysterious dynamic forces. Rapidly evolving incidents create high levels of ambiguity and require the investment of time to assess, plan and react to the responsibilities of the Ombuds for that moment.

So, given the complexity of these rigid and malleable factors, how should we structure our day to ensure self-care in Ombuds practice?  

The assumptions:

Let us assume we base our day on a standard eight hours. Visitor appointments should be long enough to give time for the visitor to tell their story to be heard and for the Ombuds to guide them through the coaching process of identifying options and planning action. As a guide, we suggest this will take 60-90 minutes. Then, time is allocated for notetaking and attention to any follow-up actions required of the Ombuds. Let’s allow 15 minutes for this. We should also allow for one refreshment break for 30 minutes. The following example is based on an estimate of what could be optimal for our self-care. It assumes that back-to-back appointments are a hazard to this self-care as much as it can diminish service delivery and safe practice. A further assumption is that we need to create space to attend to calls and emails from people wanting to arrange appointments and other meetings that we must facilitate.

 The optimal day:

00:00 – 00:30     Start work, caffeinate, system login, and check in with colleagues [30 min].

00:30 – 01:30     Review the day and make provision for activity supporting the schedule [60 min].

01:30 – 03:00     Visitor #1 consultation [90 min].

03:00 – 03:15     Administrative tasks associated with that previous consultation [15 min].

03:15 – 03:45     Rest and food and refresh [30 min].

03:45 – 05:15     Visitor #2 consultation [90 min].

05:15 – 05:30     Administrative tasks associated with that previous consultation [15 min].

05:30 – 07:00     Visitor #3 consultation [90 min].

07:00 – 07:15     Administrative tasks associated with that previous consultation [15 min].

07:15 – 07:45     Review the day and make provision for activity supporting the schedule [30 min].

07:45 – 08:00     Pack up and bid farewell to colleagues.

From this, we can only consult with three visitors daily to maintain self-care and safe practices. My first reflection is on those days when we facilitated group meetings and training. These sessions can take anywhere from 60 to 180 minutes or more. They leave us drained, so it’s important to schedule downtime so that we can recover before attending to all the messages left while your phone was off and slot in maybe one urgent consult before the end of the day. The scenario does not allow for travel or bathroom breaks.

My second reflection is that our work is so varied and punctuated with a plethora of random events the mere management of our schedules is fraught with conflict and ambiguity.

Self-care is paramount. Without being on top of this, we risk being buried in work and the trauma associated with it. The resulting burnout will deplete our ability to function [professionally and personally] and deprive our organisation and constituency of an Ombuds service they so desperately need.

You can't provide what the visitor needs if you are not operating at 100%. Our advice is to “Know thyself and plan accordingly to maintain self-care.”

Next steps:

We hope that this article will inspire the reader with new questions that help us develop further avenues of inquiry. Research into this critical area of our work seems necessary to help us understand the dynamic environments we work in, which in turn helps us develop new flexible and nimble approaches to quality service and personal safety.

Please accept this invitation to contribute to the discussion. Add your thoughts and help us develop research questions that will apply to ongoing research.

The authors:

Amanda Dean is the Ombuds at Austin Community College, Texas. She was elected to the Board of IOA in 2022 as a director until 2025.

Wayne Marriott is the Ombuds at Auckland University of Technology [AUT], New Zealand, and was elected to the Board of the IOA in 2022 as a director until 2025.