Creating a Team to Focus on Workforce Analytics

A goal of the Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Analytics (QIC-WA) is to increase the capacity of our sites to effectively use workforce data (e.g., human resources administrative data, staff surveys, exit interviews, vacancy rates) to better manage their child welfare workforce. When trying to understand staffing challenges, identify workforce solutions, and use data, it can be helpful to adopt a team approach and involve various experts and stakeholders from across an agency, each of whom can make valuable contributions to staff development. The team must:

• Have the commitment and buy-in from leaders who set priorities, control the agency’s budget, and influence policies.
• Be strengths-based and interdisciplinary, bridging knowledge on data and analytics, human resources (HR), and child welfare practice.
• Be comprised of those with the knowledge (e.g., recruitment, hiring, training, compensation, and retention) and capabilities (e.g., measurement, data management, analysis, and communication) needed to engage in workforce analytics, rather than focusing on specific roles or titles
• Develop a clear goal for workforce analytics focused on accurate data, efficient and effective measurement, analysis, and communication about the workforce.

Identifying Key Personnel

QIC-WA site teams include a cross-section of HR and child welfare professionals to accomplish project goals. These teams may include agency leadership, talent acquisition staff, hiring managers, data managers and analysts, information technology staff, child welfare training facilitators, supervisors, people with lived expertise, and current case-carrying staff. Agencies should consider:

• Champions among HR and child welfare staff who can facilitate partnership conversations.
• Key personnel who can access, manipulate, and analyze the data.
• Key personnel who can present findings to stakeholders in relevant and actionable ways.
• The staff within the agency who will need to see, use, and understand the data.

Key Skills Needed

The following capabilities should be represented in an interdisciplinary workforce development and analytics team. Collectively, the team must be able to:

• Question the current conditions and unique characteristics of the workforce.
• Connect HR efforts and child welfare agency workforce needs.
• Assess organizational readiness for workforce change and analytics initiatives.
• Build the case for the agency to use and invest in the workforce, and a clear understanding of it through analytics.
• Use data to inform strategies for improving the workforce, including recruitment, retention, employee well-being, and more.
• Test a plausible hypothesis that addresses root causes of identified workforce issues.
• Utilize quality improvement cycles to continue to test and modify the intervention.
• Measure how well the intervention is implemented.
• Analyze trends in the data and interpret the meaningful aspects of that information within the context of the agency.
• Document all aspects of the process from problem identification to the impact on the workforce and the children and families they serve.

The QIC-WA site consultants, with backgrounds in evaluation, industrial/organizational psychology, analytics, and implementation, will be part of the project management team. The project management team will guide and support the site team, building their capacity to sustain their workforce efforts after the QIC-WA project ends.