At Global Vision Technologies caseworker paperwork is our business. We constantly study caseworker paperwork to discover more efficient and effective ways caseworkers can handle the progressively more complex and critical paperwork requirements of their profession.
A study entitled, Paperwork First, not Work First: How Caseworkers Use Paperwork to Feel Effective conducted by Tiffany Taylor at Kent State University caught our eye because it pointed out how paperwork, if we’re not careful, can become the job itself, at the expense of helping clients.
THE CASE STUDY
Researchers studied the Smithgrove County welfare program in rural North Carolina to see if the paperwork burden imposed on the social workers helped them or hindered them in assisting program participants find employment. After extensive document analysis, interviews, and observation, researchers drew the following conclusions:
- Being good at paperwork allowed caseworkers to feel effective within a program that offered them little room to successfully assist clients.
- On the one hand, caseworkers were expected to help clients, but on the other, they were expected to police the behavior of those they served.
- Paperwork was a way to show you followed rules and were doing your job correctly. It was used, in short, to “cover your own ass”.
- Paperwork was a way to ensure the fair treatment of clients. No one, however, suggested that the paperwork helped program participants find work. In short, the case workers in Smithgrove county wanted to treat people fairly and to them, treating everyone the same, in terms of paperwork, meant being fair.
- While paperwork is externally required and burdensome to doing effective social work, it also becomes a tool for caseworkers to feel effective in a very constrained and often emotionally draining job.
- Caseworkers in Smithgrove County carried a caseload of approximately forty to fifty families. Each family could only get 24 minutes a week of a caseworker’s time, and most of that time was spent checking that the participant was completing paperwork or following rules, not working with them to find jobs.
- Social services work is well-known for high stress, turnover, and conflict with clients. However, when the Smithgrove County caseworkers were asked what their main source of frustration was, they said it was with completing their paperwork.
CONCLUSIONS
- Paperwork in welfare bureaucracies will never go away and, to some degree, a paper trail is helpful to the program participant in the event that a caseworker does make an error and the participant needs to file a grievance.
- Global Vision Technologies sees it as our mission to make paperwork an efficient and effective tool that can help provide a service to clients instead of using it only for surveillance.
- We are constantly at work tracking what works, and does not work, for caseworkers to better inform policy change.
- Global Vision Technologies is dedicated to the task of uncovering best practices and mechanisms within an expanding volume of paperwork to help caseworkers help clients.
- Finally, it is the stated and committed mission of everyone at Global Vision Technologies to improve the well-being and job satisfaction of caseworkers.
Resources
We've created two guides: The RFP Toolkit /Buyer's Guide and the Unofficial Guide to Electronic Case Management to help you streamline caseworker paperwork. Both guides provide information, worksheets and a list of functionality that at one time were based on paper forms. By combining manual processes with electronic workflow, agencies have seen better results. While the use of paper will never go away - being able to limit your dependency on paper is a good thing, don't you think?
