Promising Practice #5

Increasing Access to Work Supports

Overview

Through state legislation, workforce development and welfare functions are combined within one agency, the Department of Workforce Services (DWS) DWS operates 36 full service One Stop employment centers. The DWS mission statement includes a commitment to making supportive services available in the context of a comprehensive workforce development system.
A team of service providers—employment counselors, eligibility specialists and information specialists—is available to work with each customer. As a result customers’ work support needs are quickly identified; customers obtain information about their eligibility for various work supports. Importantly they are assisted in having access to those services all in one visit. The staff participates in a comprehensive and ongoing training program to learn about the range of work supports available to clients and computer based tools enable the counselors and clients to have easy access to information about the type of available work supports and eligibility guidelines.

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History

In the early 1990s, the Utah Legislative Auditor General conducted an audit report concluding that employment and training services in Utah were highly fragmented. The principal recommendation of the report was that the state develop a streamlined service delivery system that focused more on customers.

In response to that recommendation, the Governor formed a task force charged with creating a more unified employment and job training system. The task force established the guiding principles leading to the creation of the Department of Workforce Services (DWS) which, through legislation, consolidated all employment, job training, and welfare functions in the state.

An Employment Center Design Team was created to implement the state legislation requiring the integration of workforce development and welfare functions,. The Team included key agency stakeholders, as well as employers and former participants. An independent consultant was hired to facilitate the work of the team. The plan was developed over a 20 week period. The plan established a system that provides seamless service delivery from multiple funding streams with different rules and definitions.

To help eligibility specialists and other staff manage the complex set of rules concerning the wide range of work support resources, Utah created Utah Cares. Utah Cares is a website that incorporates information on work supports such as food, clothing, housing and child care. A second generation of this computerized system is in development, and will include a rules engine to further expedite access to work supports, as well as a follow-up mechanism.
Utah Cares is part of a larger initiative. It is the first component of the state's eREP (Electronic Resource and Eligibility Product) a web-based system of access for all State services. The eREP program is being developed collaboratively by state government staff, IBM Corp. and Ireland-based Curam Software.

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Partners and Funding

In order to implement the state legislation requiring full integration of workforce development and welfare function, an employment center design team was created. The team included key agency stakeholders as well as employers and former participants and used a consultant facilitator throughout its work. The team took about 20 weeks working eight hours a day to figure out a system to provide seamless service delivery from multiple funding streams that have different rules and definitions.

Coordinating services with community partners required an organized plan for exchange of information between DWS staff and its partners. Regional directors ensured that each office manager provides for this coordination in their area. These partnerships help service providers instruct customers on how to have access these additional services and act as liaisons with community partners to facilitate smooth transitions between agencies.
The total cost of the eREP multi-year program has been estimated at around $50 million.

Challenges

Determining customer eligibility for the full range of support services and work supports can be time consuming particularly to remain current on changing eligibility rules. To correct for this issue Utah created the eREP program described above.
Another major obstacle to the full integration of systems was the question of how to charge staff time to different funding sources. Utah developed a creative solution that employs a "statistically accurate random moment time sample" to determine staff time allocation. Staff are randomly contacted at different times of the work day and asked what they are working on at that moment. A sufficiently large sample of these random staff moments are compiled, and then analyzed to determine how much time overall that staff are spending on different types of work. Those types of work are attributed back to specific funding sources, and time is charged to each source accordingly. This unusual system was thoroughly tested before being implemented, and was proven to be so accurate that the agencies involved quickly embraced it as a relatively painless way of solving an otherwise intractable problem.

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Keys to Successful Implementation

Include supportive services in core mission
Include all the stakeholders in the design process
Design services to identify and address support service needs
Use technology to simplify access to complex systems
Address staff time allocation issues

Communication and coordination between eligibility specialists and employment counselors is critical to the success of the customer. Customer need for supportive services is addressed during the initial screening process. Employment Center teams of employment counselors and eligibility specialists conduct a thorough needs assessment to identify barriers and support service needs.

Ongoing eligibility determination and issuance are a key element of intensive services. The eligibility specialist regularly monitors eligibility elements and determines the continued availability of supportive services.

A critical element of on-going eligibility is the communication between eligibility specialists and employment counselors. Both the employment counselor and the eligibility specialist document information gathered from customers in their respective computer systems. The case managers develop methods of sharing information that ensures each has needed information pertaining to their function

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