Increasing Workforce Development Performance One Step At A Time

With unemployment hovering close to 9% nationally, and funding cuts happening across the board, agencies providing workforce development services are increasingly being asked to do more with less. Unfortunately, due to the current economic conditions agencies really need to be doing more and receiving more. The question is how do we get there?

Whether you’re part of a workforce development agency utilizing a fee for service model, paid for performance through various contracts, or funded entirely by grants, there are steps you can take that will get you on the path of doing more with less in the short term and receiving more to do more on an ongoing basis. We are going to briefly look at these steps here, and dive much deeper into each one in subsequent articles. Please keep in mind that while it isn’t necessary for all agencies to go through all of these steps from square one, every workforce development agency can benefit greatly from going through activities in at least some of the steps. It’s all about constantly improving and being able to adapt to the changing needs in the community.

1. Doing more with less through operational efficiencies – Serving 100 clients each month with 10 staff can be a difficult task. Now try serving 500 clients each month with only 5 staff. I recently worked with a workforce development agency faced with a similar scenario. Higher demand for services and reduced funding quickly made them realize the model they had in place wasn’t as scalable as it needed to be and clients started falling through the cracks.After some deep analysis and discussions with many key staff we came up with a plan to restructure workforce development operations into a phased approach. Grouping together similar programs and streamlining efforts across program areas gave staff more flexibility to help within each stage, and also made tracking client progress from one phase to the next easier. This drastically reduced the “cracks” that had formed. An entire restructure is a more extreme measure for sure, but there are likely a number of smaller steps that can be taken to increase operational efficiencies. Just keep in mind the importance of involving staff at all levels of your agency, and not being afraid to think outside the bounds of “this is how we’ve always done it”.
2. Tools to help find what works – There are resources available to workforce development service providers to help put promising practices in place and identify what works. These practices provide a great baseline approach; the trick then becomes finding the right tool(s) to capture information about the work your staff are doing. Having data easily accessible across the agency will help frontline staff in their daily efforts, and will help director and executive level staff make informed decisions about which activities have the most impact and where to focus future efforts. Whether crediting job placements to programs, viewing the most effective efforts, or tracking job retention, a solid foundation of best practices combined with tools to automate many of these activities can drastically change how effectively an agency improves its performance.
3. It takes a village – Think about how many players are involved in successfully placing someone in a job. The client themselves, multiple staff within your agency, employers out in the community, partner agencies you send referrals to for related services and potentially other stakeholders in the workforce development process. In many cases it makes sense to get some or all of these players more involved. Strategies that empower these stakeholders—such as enabling client self-registration, allowing employers to easily search your client list for potential matches to their job openings and subsequently to mark retention, and having referral partners automatically accept and record outcomes of your referrals—can take much of the burden off you and your colleagues while growing stronger relationships with each client and each employer.
4. Getting more dollars just makes sense – Everyday I read articles about funding cuts and agency lay-offs, even in the field of workforce development. I also read an equal number of articles about new funding sources and agencies being awarded more dollars. These two concepts seem to be at odds with each other, but high performing agencies understand the nearly unlimited potential of capturing new dollars because they can easily show the impact they are having in their communities. This goes well beyond showing a number of clients served and instead shows higher job placements, higher retention rates, advancements in salaries, and an overall reduction in the number of unemployed individuals. Regardless of the economic outlook, if you’re part of a high performing workforce development agency that can show the impact you’re having and the associated cost benefit, funders won’t say no.

Becoming and staying a high performing agency is a process of constant adaptation, demanding tools and strategies that enable us to continually monitor and improve the services we provide to our clients and our communities. Taking the steps to better manage performance and capture new funding dollars begins with the commitment to identifying and measuring outcomes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2011 at 2:58 am by Steve Butz and is filed under Workforce Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.