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Chapter IV: Delivering Services In Dispersed Areas: Program Outreach, Staffing, And Management

Large geographic service areas affect how Rural Welfare-to-Work demonstration programs operate. To maintain adequate enrollment, the programs must extend outreach to eligible clients who may live far from local welfare offices. Staff members must work effectively in locations that often are far from their colleagues and managers. Program leaders must stay apprised of staff activities, and provide support, from a distance. In this chapter, we describe strategies the demonstration programs have used to accomplish these tasks and consider how successfully they have done so.

CONDUCTING OUTREACH TO ELIGIBLE CLIENTS

Outreach for the demonstration programs typically involves identifying low-income people eligible to participate, giving them information about the programs, and meeting with potential clients to secure their participation. Accomplishing each of these steps and involving clients who live in remote areas requires active participation from the welfare agency and its partner organization.

• Large service areas demand intensive, well-coordinated marketing and outreach efforts.

The demonstration programs appear most likely to achieve a steady flow of new clients when both welfare agency caseworkers and demonstration program staff members take active roles in recruiting throughout the service area. In all three programs, agency caseworkers are responsible for singling out potential clients, determining their eligibility, and completing the paperwork necessary for a referral. Program staff can contribute to recruitment, however, by ensuring that agency caseworkers know when program caseloads fall and spaces open for new clients. They may also communicate directly with potential clients in their service area to make them aware of the program. BNF educators increased their outreach efforts when they encountered lower than expected referral levels soon after expanding the program. Educators now distribute simple program brochures at welfare offices and other service providers’ locations and conduct periodic, one-time life skills training sessions for interested TANF clients. Educators may also meet personally with people referred to BNF to describe the program’s services and benefits.

The quality of relationships between demonstration program and welfare agency staff members appears to affect how broadly outreach occurs. Future Steps career specialists and welfare agency caseworkers were co-located in five IDHS offices, which made ongoing communication and client recruitment throughout the service area easier. Future Steps and IDHS staff in each office reported being in frequent contact about outreach efforts and client status. In Tennessee, First Wheels staff members appear to work more effectively with some welfare offices than others, depending on local administrators’ enthusiasm for the program and First Wheels program managers’ efforts to encourage their support. Enrollment patterns reflect this local variation, with some Tennessee counties making frequent referrals to the program, while others rarely or never do so.

First Wheels’ experience with outreach illustrates the importance of coordinated efforts between the welfare agency and its partner organization. Although TDHS and the Tennessee RC&D have separate program tasks within First Wheels, the two organizations share general responsibility for promoting the program and encouraging clients to apply. Neither organization fully embraced these outreach duties, however, and creating a coordinated strategy has proven to be challenging. This difficulty in allocating responsibility across organizations and synchronizing outreach activities is one factor affecting the program’s ability to enroll clients consistently.

• Clear incentives and alignment between welfare agency and demonstration program goals promote active recruitment.

Performance goals or financial incentives can motivate welfare agencies and their partner organizations to conduct aggressive outreach for the demonstration programs, even over a large service area. If welfare agency staff believe that a program’s services will help clients accomplish key goals, they are more likely to make a referral. For example, IDHS consistently emphasizes work for TANF clients and tracks the ability of individual offices to engage clients in work activities. Future Steps, with its focus on rapid employment, offered an appealing referral opportunity to caseworkers interested in meeting these standards. NHHS caseworkers see BNF as a way to meet the needs of clients with severe barriers, who can be difficult to serve otherwise.

BNF administrators have a strong financial incentive to ensure that educators have full caseloads. The Nebraska Health and Human Services System compensates UNCE on a case-rate basis for BNF services, paying a fixed amount per client per month. This link to program income encourages staff to respond quickly to declines in enrollment through cooperation with NHHS and increased attention to outreach.

An application process that welfare agency caseworkers feel is burdensome or unreasonably restrictive can act as a disincentive for outreach. Some caseworkers in Tennessee expressed the opinion that the First Wheels application was too time-consuming, since it involved several phases and required such steps as creating a household budget.

Local welfare offices that designated one caseworker assistant as a First Wheels liaison, who would handle all applications to the program, were able to streamline the application process and largely address caseworker concerns. In some offices, First Wheels referrals were also hampered by a belief that few clients could meet the minimum requirements of employment and clean driving records. In this regard, the First Wheels program faced a difficult tradeoff, because prior experience had indicated that relaxing eligibility requirements could lead to more loan defaults or damaged cars. Program administrators chose not to take this risk.

STAFFING REMOTE SERVICE AREAS

For all three of the demonstration programs, service quality depends in large measure on staff capabilities. Staff members provide key services—case management, education, and links to job opportunities and other service providers—and generally do so with limited on-site supervision. This circumstance influences the kinds of skills staff should possess and the level of effort involved in finding and hiring qualified people.

• Program staff members must function as independent professionals.

Based in separate locations from program administrators, staff members of the Rural Welfare-to-Work initiatives exercise substantial discretion and autonomy in their daily work. By and large, they independently manage their schedules, conduct client meetings, and decide when to travel to more remote parts of their service areas. Staff members also decide how to prioritize their tasks, and they act as representatives of the program and its sponsoring institution in their local communities. To work effectively with this level of independence, staff must have a high degree of maturity and professionalism, as well as broad skills.

Staff members face service delivery challenges related to the programs’ rural environment and must exercise independent good judgment in addressing them. A recurring issue for staff members of BNF and First Wheels, for example, is managing the amount of time they spend traveling to provide services over a large area. Distances between clients or welfare offices vary among individual service areas, so each staff member must decide how to schedule in-person contacts with clients and others to make their travel as efficient as possible. A BNF staff member who does so may still spend as many as 10 hours a week driving to home visit appointments.

Staff members who appear to be most effective not only accomplish core tasks independently, but also possess the skills and take the initiative to develop local connections they need to do their jobs well. Helping link clients with local employers, service providers, and other resources is an important component of the demonstration programs’ services, as noted earlier. Program administrators noted that some staff members are especially resourceful in identifying and making the most of existing job opportunities and services in their communities. Because the resources available in each community are different, staff members must be able to develop local connections with limited assistance from program administrators.

• Recruiting adequately qualified people in rural areas can be challenging.

Demonstration programs have sometimes found it difficult to identify and hire people who have the combination of qualifications desirable for staff. At a minimum, candidates are expected to have relevant work experience and strong interpersonal, communication, and organizational skills. They also need the maturity necessary to work with autonomy and, ideally, familiarity with the communities in which they are posted. Job applicants with such skills and characteristics may be scarce in rural areas. BNF staff members must also have a master’s degree, a requirement for all UNCE educators, and this adds to the staff recruitment challenge the program faces. In contrast, neither Future Steps nor First Wheels requires line staff to have college degrees, although many staff members have completed some undergraduate education.

Staff training is one way to enhance the skills of available job candidates, and the demonstration programs provide varying levels of this support to staff. The BNF program coordinator trains new educators on the program’s curriculum, performance-monitoring tools, home-visiting strategies, identification of community resources, and confidentiality issues. This instruction is reinforced at regular staff meetings. In addition, educators can participate in trainings with welfare agency caseworkers on such topics as wraparound service delivery. Initial training for new staff of Future Steps usually involved a single session to review policy, procedures, and program goals, followed by temporary on-site supervision by a fellow staff member. Future Steps administrators acknowledged that this preparation was somewhat limited and noted that offering more comprehensive training for new career specialists could have strengthened the program.

MONITORING AND SUPPORTING PROGRAM STAFF

Leaders of the Rural Welfare-to-Work demonstration programs monitor and support staff to ensure that the programs are implemented consistently over a wide service area. They also play a role in enhancing program quality by helping staff members access information or training they may need to build their skills and do their jobs well. Program leaders offer such support directly and encourage staff members to help each other.

• Case note reviews and other monitoring tools help managers stay aware of staff activities.

BNF and Future Steps program administrators use case note reviews to keep informed about the services their staff members provide. BNF educators are required to document the content of teaching sessions and any other client meetings, as well as their contacts with other service providers. These notes are then sent electronically to the program coordinator. The coordinator regularly selects several teaching records to review, largely at random, and gives feedback to educators based on these reports. Comments from the coordinator might include suggested teaching strategies for difficult subjects or ways to address larger client issues while maintaining an educational focus. Case notes can also give the coordinator an idea of how extensively educators are working with other service providers. The Future Steps program coordinator reviewed case notes with similar objectives in mind—ensuring that staff members provided appropriate services and documented them completely. Particular emphasis was placed on reviewing case notes of less experienced workers who needed extra support in their day-to-day work.

Key indicators of First Wheels activity—such as the number of applications received or approved, cars placed, and loan payments collected—give the program director basic information on the results of staff activity in each service area. These data allow the director to make comparisons across service areas and assess the overall workload of individual staff members. When workloads have seemed out of balance, the program director has occasionally reallocated cases among program managers working in adjacent service areas to create a more even distribution. Assessments of individual workloads take into account the special responsibilities of some program managers. For example, one manager is the program’s liaison with the state surplus vehicle supplier, and another has taken a lead role in creating a manual to document the program’s procedures.

Another form of program and staff assessment relies on customized monitoring tools. Both Future Steps and BNF incorporated the management information systems developed for each program into their monitoring activities. This step may have been natural for the programs, since each MIS was based on the program’s existing approach to record keeping and was created with the input of program staff. BNF designers also have created program-specific assessment tools to track improvements in clients’ ability to manage their lives. These instruments are intended to measure incremental changes in soft skills that normally are difficult to discern. Success markers and an entry/exit checklist itemize the attitudes and skills that BNF seeks to encourage and measure participants’ progress toward developing them, from month to month and over the course of their participation in the program (see text box). In addition to assessing changes in participants’ skill levels, these tools help educators focus on an explicit set of program goals.

• Managers support remote staff through regular communication and team meetings. They also encourage staff interaction to create a sense of program cohesion.

In all the programs, email and telephone communication occurs regularly between the program administrator and staff and is a primary way that managers offer support. Regular communication allows program administrators to provide ongoing guidance and technical assistance to staff members—particularly those who administrators feel could improve their work or deliver services more effectively. Staff also reported communicating with one another on a regular basis, to raise questions on program policy, share effective service delivery strategies, or offer one another encouragement. To encourage this kind of communication, the BNF program coordinator has established an email bulletin board for educators. The coordinator also is attempting to create informal mentoring relationships between staff members, matching more experienced educators with those who could benefit from additional guidance.

First Wheels and BNF program administrators also use formal performance evaluations to communicate with staff members. Annual reviews for First Wheels program managers focus on their knowledge of program policy, workload management, and ability to advocate for the program and participants. BNF educators are evaluated by UNCE district directors, their official supervisors, with input from the BNF program coordinator. Unlike in First Wheels and BNF, Future Steps staff did not receive formal evaluations. The SCC placement center director and Future Steps program coordinator observed and discussed each worker’s performance, but they did not provide structured feedback to the staff in an annual review.

PROGRAM-MONITORING TOOLS IN BUILDING NEBRASKA FAMILIES: ENTRY-EXIT CHECKLISTS AND SUCCESS MARKERS BNF uses two customized tools—entry-exit checklists and success markers—to monitor program operations and track changes in clients’ ability to manage their lives. Entry-exit checklists document pre-post changes in clients’ behaviors and attitudes, and success markers provide a monthly indicator of clients’ progress toward meeting predetermined goals. The entry-exit checklist helps educators understand participants’ strengths and weaknesses and provides a point of comparison for assessing changes in clients’ lives. The checklist asks participants for responses to 20 statements that reflect life skills and personal behaviors and attitudes. Using a five-point scale, participants indicate how often they do or feel what the statements indicate—for example, “I feel positive about my life,” “I keep a record of how I spend my money,” or “I miss work or appointments.” Participants complete the same checklist when they exit the program. Although administrators recognize the limitations of self-reported information, the checklist is useful for characterizing participants’ progress during their time in the program. Success markers convey program expectations and track participants’ monthly progress toward meeting goals. The markers are divided into three tiers, corresponding to the perceived likelihood and difficulty of achieving them: (1) basic tasks the program “expects to see,” such as attending appointments and being prepared for lessons; (2) higher-level activities the program would “like to see,” such as setting short-term goals and practicing new skills; and (3) accomplishments the program would “love to see,” such as maintaining employment and serving as a volunteer or mentor for others. Each month, educators use a four-point scale to indicate how frequently participants show each behavior. Some bias is inevitable, since educators not only provide instruction and support to clients, but also rate their improvement. However, success markers have allowed administrators and educators to examine clients’ progress against program goals and compare client groups, such as those who graduate from the program and those who drop out.

 

Regular staff meetings help promote a supportive work environment. Staff members value these gatherings as opportunities to share information, discuss job-related challenges, create a sense of program cohesion, and foster ongoing commitment to the program’s mission. The First Wheels program director holds in-person quarterly staff meetings to address ongoing operational issues and review policy changes. BNF staff members attend two-day meetings about every three months. These meetings include in-service trainings on such topics as new curriculum modules, welfare agency policies, and how to handle difficult client issues like partner abuse. Future Steps administrators convened occasional staff meetings, but scheduling problems prevented them from doing so regularly. A more typical form of support for career specialists was direct contact with Future Steps program leaders whenever questions arose, sometimes several times in a single day.

 

 

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