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An Interview with Lois Blanchette, Regional Office Manager Lois Blanchette has been WDFW's Eastern Regional Office Manager in Spokane since February of 1997. Although a relative newcomer to the agency, Lois has given the state of Washington more than 27 years of service. She was an administrative assistant for the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) Division of Child Support, and for almost 24 years was an employee in several capacities for DSHS Division of Vocational Rehabilitation.Lois was recently honored with the WDFW's annual Public Service Award for her many efforts to make the agency more "user friendly."

Q: What do you do as a regional office manager? A: I do a little of everything. I'm in charge of maintaining the office and making sure it runs smoothly, buying all the services we need, keeping the doors open. When something breaks I get it fixed, when we run out of supplies, I buy more. That part of my job is the easiest part — you buy a service or product and pay the bills. Another part is being the person that all the other 100-some regional employees gravitate to when they have a need for a meeting room or where to buy something on contract or get a vehicle or computer fixed, or get software or other training. Q: How are WDFW employees to work with? A: People here are genuinely interested in what they're doing . They really like their jobs. I haven't seen anyone who's just punching a clock to get a paycheck or who doesn't like to come to work. And that shows in the way they carry themselves and the way they treat each other. This is a place where you can let go of being serious and joke with each other and no one raises an eyebrow about spending a little time to build morale. It's a more family oriented situation here, definitely more than child support services, but then that's a whole different business. This is a business where people are much more relaxed. I think they work harder and longer because they do like what they do. I've never encountered anyone here who's been too busy, when asked, to lend a hand, to drop what they're doing and help me solve a problem for a customer. Q: So you do customer service too? A: Oh yes. I coordinate that, too, and back up our customer service specialist. I like the interaction with the public. It suits my personality because I tend to be a little flippant. I tell it like it is, and I think most of our customers appreciate somebody who's just not totally straight. I think by and large the hunters and fishers probably like the human touch, that side of my personality. So the customer service is not an unwelcome interruption of my other work because I enjoy the people. It's just that the other stuff doesn't stop. I have to take care of people first, but it's the first time in my life that I've not met deadlines. Q: What kind of deadlines do you have to meet? A: We're supposed to pay our license bills and reconcile our bank accounts and all of that by the 10th of the month. We deal with a lot of money each month. I think that relative to the agency's other regional offices, we handle some of the most traffic, if not the most. That's partly because this office is in the biggest metropolitan area in the state where this agency has offices (the Seattle region's office is in Mill Creek.) We also have more people here, per capita, who hunt and fish, maybe because the hunting and fishing isn't that far away. We did over $30,000 worth of fishing and hunting license sale business in October of 1998. On October 16, the day before the big deer hunting opener, we did over $7,000 in business. Some of our offices don't do $7,000 worth of business in a month. Q: Why do hunters and fishers buy licenses at the regional office when they could get them at many dealerships around town? A: They get more than licenses here. We had a push when I first got here to upgrade our reception areas. We now provide more handouts and flyers and up-to-date materials and information in highly visible displays. Special permit holders get information about landowners who welcome hunters and we've got some maps on where people can go. Besides hunting and fishing though, a lot of our traffic is for information on watchable wildlife, the backyard wildlife sanctuary program, and visits from students and teachers for our educational materials. We have our "Kids' Corner" where we make children welcome and provide them an animal coloring sheet or something to take home so they have a positive experience. We take the little kids around and show them all the dead animals on the walls, let them pet them. I think that's made a difference, because word gets around that we have these things. For instance, we get a lot of home-schoolers who show up because they heard from others that we have materials they can use. Q: How does this job compare with what you were doing before? A: There is no comparison. For one thing, in social services you're providing people with money or a means to live, and the concerns there are so deeply felt about whether a person is going to have a job or survive or support their family or pay their child support. Here we have a service that provides recreation for people and it's a different perspective. Most of our customers are by and large very happy people. They're excited about fishing and hunting. They come to us because we provide information to help them enjoy that more. Q: What do you like best about this job? A: I think for the first time in my 27 years of state employment, I've come home — that this is really where I belong. The level of appreciation we have, both from our employees and from our customers, is a valuable bonus in working here. This agency does value its employees a great deal. I don't believe anybody's taken for granted. I also like the wide variety of things to do. One minute I'm fixing the toilet in the men's room, and the next minute I'm fixing a problem for a hunter who's purchased the wrong tag or license, or I'm fixing a problem for someone on the phone. I like to fix things, but some things will take more work. Q: What needs more work? A: We're understaffed in many areas, and the only thing that's going to fix that is the ability to hire more people. That's especially true in customer service all over the state, because we've got regional office managers who can't get their work done in a normal amount of hours because they're on the phone or at the counter all the time. And we have customer service people who are clearly working above and beyond the call of duty. It would be ideal if we could have an outlying office in each regional district team's area. We could definitely provide better service to the public and to our own employees if we had an office in Colville and Walla Walla in this region. We have people stationed out there but they all work out of their homes and they're never in one spot where they could have office hours or a phone system or someone who could take questions or messages or whatever. The public would be much better served. We could also consolidate computer and phone and FAX equipment, in lieu of employees having all of that in their individual homes. Another thing we could do better is work with license dealers. Because of the large land mass this region covers, our license dealers in the small outlying towns are one of our most valuable assets and we need to let them know that. One of the concerns that dealers have is that all they do is sell licenses, but they take the heat when something changes or closes, and they don't have anything to explain the changes. So I'm working on that. I am setting up a system with our dealers on this side of the hill where I could FAX them when we have an emergency river closure or policy change or news bulletin that they need to have. I hope to provide at least a quarterly contact with them, either on the phone or in person. I want to make dealers feel that they're a valuable spoke, and that without them the wheel's not going to go anywhere. I just started doing some license dealer training, with the new fee system coming up in 1999, and getting back into the training mode has been a real bonus. I was a trainer for almost 22 years, traveled all over the United States and the state of Washington. I did motivational speaking for National Rehabilitation Association conferences and seminars. In this new training, I've made some positive inroads with dealers. They've been real thankful to have someone they can associate with a face and a name that they know they can call if they have a question or a problem.