Why a Quality Improvement Center focused on Workforce Analytics?

Workforce analytics is the process of using data to better understand and improve how people work. It provides a framework around measurement, data management, analytics, and reporting to support careful planning and decision making. Child welfare agencies face a number of longstanding workforce issues, including recruitment, selection, high and complex workloads, long and unpredictable hours, burnout, secondary traumatic stress, inadequate supervision, insufficient training, unhealthy organizational cultures and climates, and turnover. In recent years the pandemic and social justice movements further influenced child welfare to incorporate remote work strategies, address diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging practices, and address moral distress or injury related to doing work that may cause harm to people who workers want to help. Although agencies recognize the need to address these challenges, they often lack the capacity to do so. Building their capacity to use workforce analytics can help child welfare agencies incorporate and test specific strategies to address ongoing workforce challenges.

The Children’s Bureau uses Quality Improvement Centers (QICs) to systematically generate and disseminate research and knowledge to help agencies improve in a variety of areas related to operations and service delivery. QICs are responsible for building evidence, and establishing and evaluating practices and frameworks that can improve child welfare outcomes. They are part of the continuum of capacity building services offered by Children’s Bureau, designed to address specific challenges or areas needing improvement in child welfare.

The QIC for Workforce Analytics (QIC-WA) is designed to help build the capacity of public and tribal child welfare agencies to effectively use their data to address longstanding and more recent challenges facing the child welfare workforce. The QIC-QA will create a framework for workforce analytics and test a mix of workforce development strategies in six local sites, sharing lessons learned and building evidence in the process. The long-term goal is that a positive, stable, resilient workforce will yield better outcomes for the children and families that interact with child welfare agencies across the U.S.