Caught between PADI and an Instructor
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Glad to hear PADI & the instructor took care of you funkyspelunker. The big bad wolf taking care of its customers ... imagine that! 
I think some of you may have missed Drews point though. I tend to agree with what i thought he was trying to say.
If PADI believes it has a quality control issue with any of its instructors, i believe it is their responsibilty to notify that instructor via the fastest means possible. In todays wired world, most have access to at least the internet or a simple fax machine.
We certainly aren't talking millions, thousands or probably even hundreds of notifications a day. If they are only using snail mail for this type of notification, they are way behind todays media curve.
I'm not saying the instructor isn't professionally responsible for themselves because they are. But how is one suppose to respond to a problem if they don't know there is a problem?
For PADI to notify their instructors via the fastest method is just good business IMO. Just like its good business for us instructors to be attentive to our end of the responsibilty chain. Its a two way street.
I think some of you may have missed Drews point though. I tend to agree with what i thought he was trying to say.
If PADI believes it has a quality control issue with any of its instructors, i believe it is their responsibilty to notify that instructor via the fastest means possible. In todays wired world, most have access to at least the internet or a simple fax machine.
We certainly aren't talking millions, thousands or probably even hundreds of notifications a day. If they are only using snail mail for this type of notification, they are way behind todays media curve.
I'm not saying the instructor isn't professionally responsible for themselves because they are. But how is one suppose to respond to a problem if they don't know there is a problem?
For PADI to notify their instructors via the fastest method is just good business IMO. Just like its good business for us instructors to be attentive to our end of the responsibilty chain. Its a two way street.
gedunk:Glad to hear PADI & the instructor took care of you funkyspelunker. The big bad wolf taking care of its customers ... imagine that!
I think some of you may have missed Drews point though. I tend to agree with what i thought he was trying to say.
If PADI believes it has a quality control issue with any of its instructors, i believe it is their responsibilty to notify that instructor via the fastest means possible. In todays wired world, most have access to at least the internet or a simple fax machine.
We certainly aren't talking millions, thousands or probably even hundreds of notifications a day. If they are only using snail mail for this type of notification, they are way behind todays media curve.
I'm not saying the instructor isn't professionally responsible for themselves because they are. But how is one suppose to respond to a problem if they don't know there is a problem?
For PADI to notify their instructors via the fastest method is just good business IMO. Just like its good business for us instructors to be attentive to our end of the responsibilty chain. Its a two way street.
Actually I think we are talking about hundreds and we could be talking about thousands. Just add it up. There are 200,000+ certs issued every year and a portion of those are polled. Lets say 20,000 a year plus incident reports, say 0.01% of the million or so certification dives, non-cert related incidents, say another 10,000 plus dealing with complaints, compliments, and a whole raft of unsollicited correspondence (from pros and from customers) submitted in many forms (much of it non-electronic) about many topics to many offices in many languages 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year. And that's not even getting in to activities related to tracking remedial actions, filtering out false alarms, tracking and responding to changes in laws and the outcomes of legal actions, analyzing successes and failures in QA and so on. And what I'm describing is probably only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what member services does.
I emailed member services twice last year. If everyone does that then they have at least 2 million emails to field every year from members alone.
Where would you put the estimate of the number of actions? More than 40,000 to be sure. Problably more like 400,000. So yes, hundreds if not thousands per day.
It's pretty clear to me that PADI is behind the curve on IT and their back-office is chronically backlogged. Suggestions about using email as much as possible are good but email is maybe worse than post in the sense that it's also "fire-and-forget" and "pull" without guranteed delivery and an instructor who doesn't want to hear bad news can just press delete and claim he never saw it. It just brings up a whole new administrative problem because you'll have to email AND snail mail people to be sure they get the goods ("push" and "pull"). IN other words it doesn't totally solve the problem you're trying to sort out and increases the number of actions your already chronically overworked backoffice has to deal with by a scale of 10 or 15%, maybe more.
Having said that, email will definitely speed up communication some of the time and it's still working looking at for gains that can be automated, perhaps in combination with document scanning software.
R..
Diver0001:
Well to be honest, i have no idea. But i doubt PADI is getting thousands of "incident reports" a day. They may be getting thousands of "inquiries" a day. Most of which probably don't require Q&A actions but thats only an uninformed opinion.
I'm just a mere peon instructor .... sadly uninformed of such large corporate statistics.
The point being, if PADI believes they have a Q&A issue, it behooves PADI and their instructors, to handle it via the fastest method possible. Sounds like we agree on that eh?
gedunk:
Yes we sure do. I wouldn't try to defend the "do nothing" approach just because the job is big and in fact I'm generally on the other side of this discussion arguing that PADI's QA is somewhat disfunctional and needs fixing.... I'd love to have a year or two to run their QA dept. And yes, I was talking about activities in a general sense and not just QA actions.
R..
Windwalker
Contributor
Still, What is to prevent PADI from Emailing an Instructor AND sending a Paper Copy. Email is cheap (looking at my spambox) If an instructor chooses to delete a message then its his problem, However I would Imagine if an Instructor got an email from PADI (And PADI does not get in the habit of Spamming its instructors) then they would probably read it instead of delete it. If they Delete it, then they knew they had a problem and would get the letter anyways.. But one can also always say "I didn't recieve the mail either" After all, I doubt they send it return Reciept.
Lightning Fish
Contributor
If an instructor is suspended, is it not in PADI's best interest, from a liability point of view, to ensure that the instructor is aware of their suspension as soon as possible?
Bill.
Bill.
Windwalker:
Work load. This shouldn't be used as an excuse but I think it's probably the reason. Personally i think they should do both but the backoffice would need to employ people to write and respond those emails in a wide variety of different languages. Those people (some of them) are probably already there but (probably) already busy as hell as it is. The email technology isn't really the problem. It's the people you need and the costs of those people, the overhead it causes to have extra staff etc etc. We're probably only talking about another 30 people or so world wide but such a decision could add up to a couple of million in operational costs depending on where they're located and how it's organised.
R..
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