Client Moments: A Better Social Service Work Load Measure

The Caseload has been a prominent measure of the amount of work rendered by a social service worker. Commonly defined as the number of clients assigned to a worker, this measure provides unending frustration to the act of administrating a public service agency. There are workplaces short of their goals due to overworked caseworkers, poor planning due to the obscure relationship between resource levels and client needs and worker dissatisfaction arising from inaccurate performance evaluations. Moreover, the inadequacy of caseload as a measure often results in wasteful continuous improvement efforts.

To illustrate the problem, Midwest Social Services’ aging and disability case management social workers averaged a client load of 170 clients while their counterparts in the case management of children's mental health averaged 6.3 clients. The difficulty lies in relating these operational differences to the mandated minimum contact levels of twice a year for aging and disability clients and the minimum of once every 14 days for children's mental health clients.

An ideal measurement has to incorporate time into the caseload measure. The proposed measure, Client Moments complies with this requirement as it is defined as the number of client contacts in a time period. A period of a month appears to be a convenient time measure in comparison to an exceeding precise hourly or an overly gross yearly time measures.

Midwest Social Service senior managers embarked in a rapid test to apply this measure in field conditions. Randomly selected case managers across all offered services were each given a custom survey. Client moments per month and cycle times were calculated from the responses and displayed in the following table. As an example, the table shows that a case manager providing aging and disability services made an average of 35.8 client moments per month with each moment having a cycle time of 4.2 hours.

While client moments and cycle times presented in the table above were calculated with custom survey responses from an actual social service agency, the ratios are specific to that agency and may be used by others only as a starting point. These ratios can be calculated with precision and readily accessible in every agency’s social service information systems.

By Noel Jagolino, Management Consultant

Content contributor, Mgmtlaboratory.com 2019