Workload Management in Justice and Human Services
Staff time is a critical resource to promote positive outcomes through service delivery. But far too often, the time direct-service staff have available can seem inadequate to meet the demand for services. When staff time doesn’t match demand, agencies may face performance issues, burnout, compliance problems, and—perhaps most importantly—negative impact on the people and families receiving agency services.
Workload studies can help agencies address these issues and more. A workload study serves two major purposes: helping agencies make the best use of their resources and generating quality data to inform ongoing workload management.
Evident Change’s approach to workload studies is uniquely useful. Whereas other workload approaches describe what is happening in an agency or what things should look like “on paper,” our methodology uses data from actual practice in your agency and combines it with policy and practice expectations. We help you understand the resources and time required to meet your local practice standards for various types of cases as well as how much time your staff realistically have available to complete this work.
The result? A clear picture of how your agency can meet your desired level of practice under actual local work conditions—a more useful metric that enables you to create powerful and lasting improvements.
Benefits of a Workload Study
- Accurate data about staff time required for different types of cases and how time was spent on those cases.
- Clear understanding of time staff have available to do casework.
- Better knowledge of how current staffing levels compare with staffing needs. This can be used to support budget requests for more staff, make regional staffing adjustments, or suggest where policy or practice expectations may need to be adjusted.
- New ability to develop workload accounting systems at the worker, supervisor, office, region, and statewide levels that account for the time required to serve different case types.
Our Unique Approach
Evident Change has conducted dozens of workload studies in adult and youth justice, child welfare, and foster care agencies over the past 30 years. Evident Change staff have expertise in research methodology and analysis as well as policy and practice in the justice and human services fields. Our cross-systems, multidisciplinary experience positions us to understand and accurately assess an agency’s needs, as well as to recommend potential next steps for policy and practice improvement once a workload study is completed.
For more information, contact Andrea Bogie, Data Solutions Project Manager, at ABogie@EvidentChange.org or call (800) 306-6223.