RECRUITMENT, RETENTION, REWARDS AND RAISES Event Date: May 19, 2010 Presenter: Stacey Summings Facilitator: Steffany Stevens Overview Steffany Stevens: Well, good afternoon, or good morning, depending on where you are in the southeast region. I would like to welcome you to the 2010 Southeast TACE Region IV Webinar series. My name is Steffany Stevens, and I am a member of the Southeast TACE Region IV Team. I want to welcome back many of you who have participated in our previous sessions and a great big welcome to those of you who are joining us for the first time. As most of you already know, the mission of the Southeast TACE Region IV Center, along with our other nine counterparts across the country, is to work together and work together to improve the quality and effectiveness of vocational rehabilitation services. The primary purpose is to enhance employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities. Our TACE works in the eight southeastern states. We have the largest region to serve, and we are very proud of that. And we are working with some great people. As you know, we serve Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Our TACE is a collaboration with Good Tech, the Southeast ADA Center. Both the TACE and the Southeast Good Tech are managed by the Burton Blatt Institute. We are hosting quite a few Webinars this year, as many of you know, and you've already signed up for those topics that are of interest to you, and that is great. All instructions about how to register are provided on the site, and of course if you need any assistance our staff is ready to assist you. Just a quick note, we have moved to a new system, which is a system that you're in now, and it is called our Elluminate system. So if you are experiencing any type of difficulties our system is fully accessible to everyone regardless of their disability and/or assistive technology that might be with a computer. This system does make it possible for us to conduct workshops over the Internet from just about any computer with Internet connection and Web browser. And unfortunately there may be a few computer issues that you have reported to us that are inherent to your systems and beyond our control. That is why it's important for you to check your systems prior to the session. And of course, staff is available to you, upon request, to work with you in advance of the session. For those that are joining on a telephone line and not in our Elluminate system, you will not be able to see what is in the chat room, but all of that will be voiced and captured. Please make sure that you use our chat room for questions only. And after our presenter presents today we will have a question and answer session right after the end of the presentation. Also, I want to let you all know that captioning is available and our captioning service is live. You can use the captioning service by pressing the CC icon on your row of icons above the participant's window. Okay. Well, at this part we are ready to begin, and we are so privileged to be joined by our featured speaker today, which is Stacey Cummings. Stacey Cummings is the program administrator for administrative services with the Utah State Office of Rehabilitation. She started as a rehabilitation counselor in rural Utah and has held positions as a supervising counselor, trainer, and CSPD coordinator, field service director, and case director for the Utah Division of Rehabilitation Services. She has a B.S. degree from Brigham Young University and a master's degree in rehabilitation counseling from Utah State University. I now would like to turn it over to Stacy Cummings. Welcome, Stacey, and thank you so much for presenting your expertise today. Stacey Cummings: Thank you, Steffany, and welcome to F31 (phonetic). Good afternoon. I'm going to start my presentation with a confession. I have never done a Webinar of this type. I have done multiple video presentations, but I have never done a presentation where I am in my office and I can't see or hear anybody else. And so if I sound like I don't know what I'm doing a couple of times, that's probably true. I hope you'll be patient with me and we'll watch questions and we'll take them at the end. I told my secretary yesterday it's almost like I'm in my office by myself practicing my presentation instead of giving one. So it's really different, so bear with me as I work through this new system. I'd like to start by telling you a little bit about where this presentation comes from. A couple of years ago our executive director Don Eucheeta (phonetic) was talking to some people about what we've been through in Utah, some of the things we've tried, some things that didn't work, some things we thought might finally work, and somebody suggested to him that other states might benefit from hearing this information. He originally submitted a proposal to the MCRE conference, which is the council on rehabilitation educators, the conference that rehabilitation educators go to in Washington, D.C. And he created most of this PowerPoint for that presentation. He had a family emergency at the last minute and so I agreed to fill in, in Washington, and I gave this presentation, a very similar presentation, in Washington, D.C. And through that presentation someone got that information and asked eventually if I would come and share that information with you today. Hopefully some of this information is helpful for you. Obviously, it is difficult. Every state is different. You know, we have things in Utah that you don't have, and we don't have things like unions that some of you are probably dealing with. So there are some things that we can do and some things that we can't. But I'm excited to share the information with you, and hopefully each of you will gain something that might possibly work in your agency. You can also -- even if you just learn from our mistakes, I always consider that a good thing. Slide 2: The Utah State Office of Rehabilitation The first slide we have is Slide Number 5 and it states the mission of Utah State Office of Rehabilitation. I am going to -- the Utah State Office of Rehabilitation, the abbreviation is USOR. And within the office rehabilitation we have the Division of Rehabilitation Services, which is called DRS. That is the division within rehabilitation that does all of the vocational rehabilitation services specifically. So I know that I will mess up and I will go back and forth between those two acronyms, so I apologize in advance. You know, when I say USOR and I say DRS, you know, DRS is the subdivision within USOR that does all of the vocational rehabilitation services, and most of this information is relevant specifically to that division. So specifically that division provides rehab services to persons with disabilities to assist with gaining employment and independence just like every other vocational rehabilitation program across the country. And in Utah our counselors are specialists with at least a master's degree and eligibility for state licensure. We give them five years to meet their CSPD plan, and within five years they have to obtain the master's degree. Before January 1, 2010, we did not have the state certification, so we were looking to the national certification, and our standard was they have to be eligible to sit for the CRC. We have a new state licensure that is for specifically state vocational rehabilitation counselors. That was a long time in coming and we could talk about that for an hour. But it's finally up and it's finally running. So as of now our new CSPD standards will be that you are eligible within five years of hire to hold that state licensure. Slide 3: Where Did It Start? Where did the problems begin? They were pretty much twofold. First of all, in 1997, just before the passage of WIA, our human resource department decided to consolidate six separate agencies at least in terms of the human resource part of things. And what they did is they threw all employment counselors into a great big pool and gave them all the same title and the same pay range as everybody else. So we have about 116 to 120 VR counselors at any given time in Utah within DRS. And we had our 118 or 116 counselors thrown into a pool of 1200 generic employment counselors that included everything from DSPD counselors -- our division of people with disabilities -- to long-term employment funding service to Department of Workforce Services -- that's where most of them are. They have, at last count, about 600 of them. So what happened is we were thrown in with all of these counselors, and we are the only agency out of all those that require our counselors to get a master's degree. Some of those generic counselors need a high school diploma; some of them only need a GED. So not only do they not even need a bachelor's degree they do not even need a high-school degree. This was not a huge problem at first because the other part of the issue was that for several years VR in Utah had a very stable workforce. So when I started in the mid-90s for the first several years that I worked there was not any turnover within VR. I mean, you might have a counselor leave every three or four years. You might have a supervisor job open up every five or six years, and it was a big deal when people left. But we have this bubble. We have this bubble of people that came to work for VR in the 60s when the agency did some expansion and changes. And all these people had been with VR for about 30 years, and we had this huge bubble of people rising to the 30-year mark that retired within a couple of years. Not only did we have people that stayed counselors for 30 years and retired at the counselor level, but we had this huge bubble at the administration level that retired within a couple of years of each other. So you had this sort of vacuum effect from the top where you had -- it is very, very rare for DRS to promote from outside DRS, and there are only a couple hundred employees within DRS. So you have this huge vacuum from the top sucking up people from the ranks trying to fill these positions with the mass exodus at an administrative level. And when we went to fill all those positions at an entry level, we were stuck filling them with this new VR HR system, which dumped us in with these generic employment counselors and had a ridiculously low start rate when it came to pay. Slide 4: The Problem: Counselor Turnover So within a couple of years we immediately saw huge turnover problems. These people that we were hiring at these low pay rates just did not stay with VR. I am on Slide 7. They asked me to keep track of the slides and I'm forgetting already, so I'm sorry. So Slide 7, the problem with counselor turnover, we immediately sought huge problems. By 2006 we were turning over between 20 and 25 counselors per year. And I just told to that we only have about 120 counselors, so we were experiencing around 20 percent turnover just decimating our ranks, and it was happening year after year and we could not get a handle on it. Slide 5: Voluntary Terminations The next slide, Slide 8, voluntary terminations, from a high, you know, we had 2006. You know within those people that left you had some people who were still on the far end of that bubble and were retiring or leaving for medical reasons, but these were voluntary resignations. These were almost all within the 18 to 16 a year we were getting 2006 and 2007 were voluntary resignations and almost every one of them was related to pay. Slide 6: Why? There were multiple reasons, Slide 9, that we thought we were losing people, but at the top of the list was pay. We started keeping a list of where are people going, and they were going to other private sector employers. The VR became known as the proving ground and the training ground for VR counselors in Utah. W were competing against workman's comp, we were competing against the Veterans Administration, we were competing against Deseret Industries, which is a program in Utah that's run by the LDS church that is similar to Goodwill in other states. We don't have Goodwill in Utah. We have Deseret Industries, which is a training program that is run by the LDS church. And actually, what happened with Deseret Industries is even worse. They hired away one of our counselors, and they were all paying and still pay -- well, not still pay -- but they were paying much more than we did and they hired away one of our counselors. That counselor convinced them of the value of having CRC counselors and the professionalism of that employment field, and she convinced them that all of their counselors needed to have the CRC. So they were only stealing a few before and they immediately began to steal all. What happened is people went -- most of them went to the Utah State University, graduated in the masters program at USU, came to VR, did their time and put in a couple of years with us until they felt like they had enough experience and they were marketable for these private sector employers, and then they would leave us and go to work for them. That, not only did we have -- we had immediate issues with burnout. People had these huge caseloads. Not only were they handling their own caseloads, but they were also getting the extra 20 percent of the clients that got dumped on them because at any given time 20 percent of our caseloads were vacant. So burnout went up. Everybody had huge caseloads. There was this huge paperwork burden. And we started to ask ourselves is it more than that, are there some organizational/cultural issues that are contributing in addition to the pay that might help us keep people longer. So that's where we were. Slide 7: Turnover Cost Analysis What we did is we did a turnover cost analysis at one point [on the board]. What we did is we used information that was on the Internet that talked about how much it costs to train new people and to replace people, and what we figured out, and this is Slide 10, is that for rehabilitation counselors our separation cost was about $20,000; it cost us $10,000 to $11,000 to replace one; and we spent $152,000 on every counselor that we had to train. So we figured for every counselor we lost, we lost $180,000. And we lost 16 in 2007 for almost $3 million. We had been asking along the way for a market comparison and we had received a couple and they were not unsuccessful. A market comparison is what our human resource department will do, and it's requested at least every once in a while. They will go out and they will compare what the state employees in a particular job title are making against what individuals doing that same job in other jobs in other state agencies and in the private sector are making. We asked for those over and over again, and what they would do is they would go out and they would compare us against those 1200 generic, only-require-a-GED-and-sometimes-a-bachelor's degree-counselors, and they would come back and say no, your counselors are making what other people doing the same job out there are making. Well, they weren't. They were making the same as what other people with a high-school diploma were making, but they were not making what other people who had that same CRC certificate and had that expertise were making. And we were having absolutely no success having human resources listen to us because we were all dumped into that great big pool and stuck in that great big range and that was all they were looking at. So we said: What can we do? There's got to be something we can do. They're not listening to us; they won't let us raise pay; they won't take us out of that big group. What can we do? Slide 8: Incentive Program Criteria So we came up with this incentive program [on the board]. This is Slide 11. And what we decided is that there would be an incentive program and it would only apply to closed cases. We built an extra closed case review, so as people closed cases there was a little checklist that sort of said, yes, this meets the criteria to count towards the incentive, or no, it does not. We felt like that was important for an audit trail since we were talking about extra money. And we implemented a program where we said we're going to pay counselors $75 per case for successful closures beginning with the 31st successful closure, and for supervising counselors beginning with the 23rd successful closure. So what we have in Utah is we do not have a lot specialized caseload, and the standards for closures in people's performance plan is about 30 per year. So what we wanted to do is push that a little bit. We wanted to give people an incentive to do more than average, more than what is expected of everybody, and we wanted to pay them extra if they were able to do that. Our supervising counselors hold caseloads as well, but they do not have as high expectations for closures, clearly, because they so much of their time doing supervision. So the average performance standard for them is 22 closures per year, so we're going to pay them for the 23rd on. We also devised a system where we paid $150 per case for which Social Security reimbursement was received. So throughout the year we get Social Security reimbursement on cases that were closed successfully and go on to go off Social Security benefits and we get paid back for those cases. So we kept track of those cases and when we'd get paid back at the end of the year the incentives for the closures we also tracked the counselors that closed those cases that we got paid back for during the year, and we gave those of them who still worked for us -- and some years most of them did not work for us anymore, because we were turning over 20 percent every year and it takes a couple years to get paid back. But we tracked down everybody we could who still worked for us in some capacity and gave them $150 for each case that we had gotten paid back as an agency. We set a limit of $3,999 per counselor per year, and that is a pretty easy number to figure out. Obviously, the reason we set that is within Utah the executive director has the discretion to give individuals within their department up to $4,000 of incentive payments or bonuses during the year for performance. So the limit was $4,000 per counselor, so we said we are going to do up to $3,999. And that's where that number came from that was imposed by HR. So even though we were not allowed to increase pay or change the pay ranges, there was a clause in there that allowed us to do some bonus payments and some incentive payments, so we tried to take advantage of that. Slide 9: Incentive Program Goals Slide Number 12, what we wanted to do when we sent out information on the incentive plan is we said we wanted to improve retention and decrease turnover. That was our biggest problem at the time. It was a huge problem, a huge, ugly problem, and that was our biggest thing. At the same time we said we want to increase compensation for those who already work for us and are doing good work for us, whenever possible, and this was the only way that we knew how to do it. We also said it we want to increase the quantity and quality of successful closures. So we were looking for productivity boost. And we said we're going to do this on a trial basis for a year or two and see how it works and whether or not it answers these issues that we have. Slide 10: Since Implementation So what happened? We sat down and we looked at it three years in and we said, okay, since implementation -- Slide 13 -- voluntary resignations have increased from an average of 15 per year to 21 per year and voluntary resignations did not decline with the existence of the incentive program. So not only did we not lose fewer people, we actually lost more people. So it did not answer the problem of people leaving, the problem with retention, and the turnover actually increasing in those three years since the implementation of the incentive program instead of decreasing. Slide 11: Compensation So we said, okay, well, let's look it that issue of compensation. That was one of the things that we wanted to try and do is look at that and say, well, maybe those are new people and didn't get any incentive maybe we can still increase compensation for the others. So on Slide 14 we looked at compensation. What we found out is that an average of 20 counters received the incentive in a given year. So in any given year we were only giving out the incentive to about maybe 20 percent of our counselors. 91 counselors didn't get any money. And the average increase in compensation across the board is $180 before taxes per counselor for the three-year period. So that was -- I mean when you look at that right there, you know, $180 was not enough to make a difference. You know, did they love the $180? Yes. But was it enough to make a difference about whether or not they wanted to go make 20 percent more with Deseret Industries or Workman's Comp? No, it wasn't making a difference. Slide 12: Compensation On Slide 15 we looked at the pattern of compensation. The first year we didn't have as many payouts. We had many more payouts in the next couple of years but the amount went down. And if you look, we paid out to more counselors -- less counselors got it the first year because we had a lower number of payouts, but even in 2006 and 2007 the numbers were in the 80s as far as the counselors who did not get anything as far as any kind of payout. Slide 13: Compensation So Slide 16, the other thing we figured out is that out of those twenty-something counselors that we were giving the incentive to there were about five counselors who got the incentive every year and who took a big chunk of that incentive. So in 2007 we had five counselors who got almost $9,000, which is 35 percent of the total. So not only were not giving it to very many people, but within that group of people who actually got the money there were a handful of people who were getting more than their share, or what seemed to be a disproportionate amount. And that seemed to be based on the type of caseload that they had. So that did not seem very fair. Slide 14: Productivity And the last thing we looked at was productivity, because that was the last thing we said we wanted to do when we implemented the incentive was we wanted to know if the incentive would increase productivity. So we looked at productivity. We did have a jump in 2005, but from 2005 to 2006 to 2007 it pretty much stayed the same. So when we started looking at average 26s for counselors, Slide 15: Increased Productivity on Slide 18, it even looked more the same. We had a few counselors that we added in those years, so when you started taking into account there was an improvement in the economy early on in that period, inflation was down, and unemployment was down, and we added more counselors. When you added all that together we really did not feel like -- yeah, we had a slight jump, but from then on it was straight across after that -- but we really did not feel like we could look at it and say, yes, we were getting more successful closures because of the incentive program. The increase was minimal, it was flat after a while, and there were a lot of other things that we could have written that off to besides the incentive program. Slide 16: Productivity Data Interpretation So we decided it couldn't be shown to have a significant impact. There were other variables. Slide 19. Slide 17: Costs And so then we looked at how much this program is costing us to administer. On average, if you average out the three years, average payout per year was about $20,841 per year. We figured out the administrative costs that were involved in administering that program and figuring those payouts and reviewing those cases -- we have a system where we went out did random case reviews to make sure the checklists were being filled out right and we had all this administrative overhead cost. And we averaged that when we added in all the administrative costs we spent almost $200,000 in administrative costs to pay out about $62,000 in incentives. And we've already talked about how few of the counselors were getting those, and how the few of them who were getting it were getting a disproportionate share. So we said after three years we're not going to do this anymore. We need to do something different. Slide 18: So What Now? So what now? So we sat down and we talked and we said what we want to look at and decide what we want to do from this point on. We talked about our mission and vision and values. Our mission is obviously that we want to increase employment for individuals with disabilities. But we have a vision and values statement that we worked on through our leadership group that talks about how we want to do the things that we value like kindness and integrity and some of those things. So we looked at that in trying to make a decision about where we go. We looked at the cost to administer something verses how much money actually gets into the hands of the counselors. We looked at our leadership development. As I said, we had just developed a mission and vision and values statement through this leadership development process. We were going through training counselors and supervisors in supervision techniques. So we had this leadership development movement going where we were trying to do some additional leadership development and training for our supervisors. We also had a group called USOR Horizons. And we could spend another half an hour talking about that, but basically what USOR Horizons is, is a group based on a model that we borrowed or stole, depending on your terminology, from Montana. And we'll talk about that in a minute. And in addition to that we looked at our recruitment and retention policy and all the things that we said from the beginning that we wanted to implement an incentive program. Slide 19: USOR HORIZONS So a little bit more about USOR Horizons group [on the board]. Slide 22. What we do is a couple of times a year we've put a group of people together out in the field who volunteer to participate in this special project. They have to express an interest and then they have to get letters of recommendation from their supervisors and others who support them in participating in this particular group. And what we do is we charge that group with looking at a certain product or a problem or a process within the division of rehabilitation services and ask them to make recommendations. To research it, analyze it, and to make recommendations for changes to that program or improvements that could be made to that program. It gives staff an opportunity to participate in some additional skill development and professional growth experiences outside their day-to-day. So they get out of the office, meet with other individuals, some at a similar level, and some at a supervisory level. It gives them some experience in a different type of research and problem solving. It gives them exposure to the administrative staff and some relationship building there, and opportunities in skill development in putting together a presentation and a researched product, and all of those sorts of things. So that's what USOR Horizons is. Slide 20: After Studying Situation So we looked all of that, and in Slide 23 we said we need some help in the area of supervision. That was one of the areas that we sent horizons to look at. We need to improve in the way of career pathways and we already knew that we needed to improve in areas of recruitment and retention. We've tried things and they are not working, so we have to do something. Slide 21: Findings of Horizons Task Force: Supervision So one of the things that -- how we got the idea about supervision is we had asked the horizons group to look at supervision and what they did was an anonymous survey and an analysis and made recommendations based on those surveys -- and interviews. They actually did interviews with a select number of people. So they came up with a set of recommendations based on those. We got a broad and varied range of responses. Generally, most people saw their supervisors in a positive light, but there were some very specific recommendations that came out of that. And what they said is that we need to increase the degree of time that the supervisors have to give to their staff. We need to increase the approachability of supervisors, or the perception of approachability, how ever you want to say that. And we need to increase the general knowledge of supervising staff. What happened is that when we had this huge vacuum at the top that sucked up all these experience people, and then at the bottom we had this incredible turnover of 20 percent of more, when it came time to fill those supervisory positions we were in a position where we were promoting people who had much less experience than we were used to. It has evened out significantly lately, but prior to this time in VR history we were hiring people with five and six and eight years or more of experience as VR counselors. When we started this landslide we were requiring at least two years of experience as a VR counselor to even apply for a supervisory position. We eventually had to lower that to a year was a preference. We eventually got to the point where we were hiring supervisors who had actually been VR counselors for less than a year. So that was no surprise that we need to increase the knowledge of supervisory staff. Slide 22: Supervisory Enhancements One of the things that we did as part of a plan to fix things is we did some supervisory enhancements [on the board]. We said we're going to go out and give more supervisors -- our ratio at that time was about one supervisor to four and a half counselors. And we said we really think that we need one supervisor for every three counselors. I am on slide 25. We targeted six counselor positions, upgrading to supervising counselor towards meeting that goal. And we also had a big push to make sure that supervisors were spending half of their time supervising. Within their job description it indicates that if you're a supervisor more than half your time must be spent supervising or technically you should be in a counselor role. So more of their time needed to be spent supervising. We really pushed that. We lowered the expectations as far as closures from supervisors and we lowered the expectation as far as the counseling range -- as far as the number of clients. We had supervisors who had huge caseloads and we said that is not going to be okay anymore. It is not okay to have a really low caseload but it is not okay to have a really high caseload either. So we pushed all of those things and we rolled out more supervisors and we found that we were able to make our ratio of supervisors to counselors much more favorable. The other thing that we did -- we already had this leadership development activity going on as a group. And we really thought that we needed, and have needed for years and years and years, a specific supervisory training program in the leadership development program for supervisory counselors and other supervisors within the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. We had utilized and still utilize to some degree a certified public management program that is available in Utah through our human resources department, but it did not teach skills specific to vocational rehabilitation supervising. And you all know that there are some very specific skills, and basic management skills work well in some areas, but do not translate so well in other areas, particularly when you're in that position and still carrying a caseload and are a supervisor. So we had been asking for help and we had been looking at research. Jared Schultz at Utah State University had published a paper talking about supervision of rehabilitation counselors. And he used what he called a tri-paret (phonetic) model that takes three different aspects of supervision and brings them together in what might be a model supervising training program for vocational rehabilitation counselors. So he was willing to develop a specific training program for vocational rehabilitation counselors. We asked him to do that. We agreed to pay him a certain fee to administer and to train counselors within this program. Slide 23: Supervisory Enhancements (cont.) We currently have a pilot program going. We decided to do a district at a time. It turned out to be a much longer training --when we started developing the topics of all the things we felt like they needed it was much longer than we anticipated. And what we came up with is a six-month program. It is all done by distance, but they have projects, they have groups and assignments and lessons every week where they watch presentations and do assignments related to that presentation and then they get together for group activities, et cetera, et cetera. I could spend a half an hour just on that. We are about two-thirds or maybe three-quarters of the way through that first pilot group. We evaluated people's responses about halfway through that program, and they were very positive. In fact when we said this is a six-month program and you guys complained about it when we first started, and you know, let's talk about some of the things you've been through so far and what kinds of things could we cut out and what things were least helpful. And they came back and said everything is really helpful and we do not think we can cut anything out. So it might be a six-month program and our intent is to follow through with Utah State University and to develop that program as a model supervisor academy for vocational rehabilitation supervisors. We're very excited about the initial response to that and the availability of such specialized training. So that is where we are on that. Slide 24: Professional Enhancement Plan So, that didn't fix the pay problem, and we had to fix the pay problem. This is what we were able to do, on Slide 27. I will tell you what we were eventually able to do and then I'll tell you how we were able to do it. On July 1, 2008, in order to replace the current recruitment and retention plan in order to provide more equitable across the board impact to the compensation for the profession and to stop the bleeding in our primary profession, which was the rehabilitation counselor position, effective July 1, 2008, a five-step ASI for staff benchmarked to the counselor position was implemented. Slide 25: Professional Enhancement Plan (cont.) This was in addition to the 5 percent COLA provided by the legislature. This was before the economy caved and our legislature actually had some money and they had committed to give us 5 percent COLA. So combined this resulted in an 18.75 percent salary increase for our VR counselors. And all of those benchmarked to the VR counselor position, which would include supervisory counselors and district directors among other positions. What did we do for other people? On Slide 28 we were able to, on top of the 5 percent COLA provided by the legislature, give an additional 1 step salary increase for administrative staff not benchmarked to the rehabilitation counselor position. So those people would be our secretaries and support staff, and they ended up getting a 7.75 percent salary increase. So I told you HR would not work with us, I told you they dumped us into that great big group, I told you that we did market comparability studies and they didn't work and nobody wanted to hear us. Slide 26: How Did We Do It? So what did we do to finally get our message across and to save our people's pay? We went out and we found a sympathetic legislator and we said to her this is what's happening within our agency and we need you to help us. It had gotten so bad that we would read -- and we shared these with the legislator -- we would read consumer satisfaction surveys that said things like, "I was sort of ambivalent with my first counselor. I didn't get to spend much time with them. My second counselor was all right as well, but you know, they were only there a couple months. I didn't really get to know them. My third counselor was fabulous. I really loved her. She was there for almost a year. She seemed to know what she was doing. I She was sympathetic. I got so much from her. And by the time I got to my fourth counselor -- I mean I'm not exaggerating. We had consumer satisfaction surveys filled out at the end of services where they talked about their four VR counselors. That's what turnover was doing. We always say within our agency that it takes three years to learn to be an effective VR counselor, and we couldn't keep people a year. We were getting complaints not only through consumer satisfaction surveys but through our state rehabilitation counselor, through CAP, and anybody and everybody that was talking to us was saying you need to do something about turnover. You're not effectively serving people. And we went to that legislator, we gave her all those complaints from multiple services, we talked about how the remaining staff stuck doing the extra work were suffering so that even the people who had been there a while and maybe had the skills probably weren't providing a level of service that was effective because there was such a burden on them, and even those people were talking about leaving. We told her we can't get human resources to listen and we got her to sponsor a bill. Slide 27: Legislative General Counsel And what the bill said at the state legislature -- and Slide 30 give you just barely the beginning of the bill, and we can get it to you if you want. But basically what this bill proposed was that the Utah State Office of Rehabilitation will be taken out from under the State DHR system and be allowed to manage itself in terms of pay and all of those other things that go with -- you know, our human resources handles everything from complaints to appeals to benefits to all of those things. This bill would have pulled us out from underneath the Department of Human services. So the bill being proposed was enough to make human resources listen to us. It did not pass, and we did not think that it would, but we were willing to bring it up over and over again until they were -- I don't want to say scared enough, but until they were getting our message about that even if we have to go build our own system will get people to help us do that until you listen to us. It was enough to get them to listen to us about how they were comparing us against counselors who did not need anywhere near the education or experience of the ones that we were required to hire because of our federal certification and federal regulations. It was enough to get a new market comparability study against those places that we were losing people to, those private rehabilitation agencies, and human resources came back and said oh, my gosh, guess what, you are making 20 percent less than the private market. And we said, you think? You think? And that was enough to get them to sponsor and get by the State Board of Education and these other administrative people to get behind us to do this one time administrative salary increase. Slide 28: Effects to Date So what happened? We increased everybody's pay 18 and a half percent. Productivity went up, 26 closures went up 5 percent in the first year. Part of that was due to caseloads being filled and fewer people leaving. I do not think our closures per counselor went up that much, but as an agency we got more 26s because caseloads stayed down. Voluntary terminations have been reduced to almost zero. I can count on one hand to you the people who have left us since we implemented that raise. And those people have not left to go work somewhere else since we implemented that raise. We have lost some people who for example had to move to a different location and take care of ailing parents. We lost a couple to medical issues. We lost a couple who had children and decided not to come back and work for us. But we have not lost, to my knowledge, a single person because of salary since we implemented that raise. We have gone from 11 percent below in the market comparability to 2 percent more than what the market is paying. And we have had open positions where our applications for those positions have increased by more than 600 percent. Now, in the last couple of years some of that is due to the economy. We are seeing record numbers of applications like we have never seen before, but we are not losing counselors to more pay. Slide 29: Effects to Date (cont.) And if you look at Slide 32, we're actually now stealing people from other states, for a change. We lost people to Colorado to Wyoming to many other states. And we are actually seeing applications from people who want to come back to work for us who left us to go work for more pay during that time period. So we have had a couple instances where people have come back and applied, in those few positions where we've had openings, for positions they left before to go elsewhere and make more money. One of the other things that we have seen is that the people who are asking for promotion are more likely to actually want to be a supervisor instead of just competing just to make more money. We had a timeframe where it was so sad. We actually had counselors who qualified for food stamps because they had a certain number of children and made what a VR counselor made and they qualified for food stamps. That's how poor our pay was. And we went through a timeframe where everybody applied to be a supervisor whether they wanted to be a supervisor or not because it meant a pay increase and they needed that money to support their families. So what we are seeing now is that the people who apply for the jobs actually want the jobs, but we've actually seen a couple of places where people who were supervisors come to us and said I really can't do this supervisor job because of medical reasons or other reasons it's really not consistent with what I wanted to do. I just took the job because I needed more money, and now that I can make it on a counselor's salary, I want to go back to being a counselor. And that is really what we hoped for, because those people weren't happy supervisor and they weren't very effective supervisors, frankly. They just took the job for more money, and now they want to go back to being a counselor and we let them do that. What are the down sides? We wanted more retention and we got more retention. One of the things I think we're seeing is that when we had a lot of turnover, when we were having problems with people, when they were experiencing performance problems, or when we were having disciplinary issues with them, once those people kind of knew they were in trouble they started looking elsewhere for work. Several people left our agency who were in the process of moving towards termination, and they went to work for some of these other private agencies. So rather than getting fired by VR, they went to other agencies to make 20 percent more money instead of staying and being disciplined. So now those people are not leaving us so in the long run we are seeing more disciplinary actions and more long-term tracking of performance issues, that we did not see for awhile because those people left. So we have some people that are finally seeing all the way through the process and finally moving towards termination. These are processes that we did not have to do for very long time. It is certainly worth it. Everything we have been through is certainly worth it, but you know there are effects on the other side. Slide 30: What Else Are We Doing? Let's talk just for a second about some other things going on in Utah. Slide 33 talks about our new state licensure. We pushed to have a new state licensure because we thought it would increase our argument for paying people more than other people who did not have that state licensure and who did not have that level of education and expertise. Because of the economy, that has not turned out to be true, we have not been able because of significant budget cuts in the last few years to increase people’s pay proportionally to getting that new state licensure but that is our intent that we will provide a salary increase to those counselors who attain that state licensure and we feel justified in doing that because they have a certification that other generic employment counselors do not have. We also kept one type of incentive that we started towards the incentive program even though we got rid of all of the other ones. We have one incentive that is based on closures per quarter for counselors and supervising counselors. For counselors the level is when they started out if they did more than seven or more closures in a quarter, successful closures, 6 closures, they would get six hours of administrative leave. We have recently increased that, they asked for an increase, our supervisors said we’re willing to increase the amount that we give you in administrative leave but we’re going to ask back that you do an additional closure and they said okay. So we have recently increased that amount to eight closures and they get eight hours of administrative leave. So if you are a counselor and you do eight or more closures successfully in any quarter in you are given a certificate for eight hours of administrative leave in the next quarter. Under the rules that would obviously apply to something like that which means that you need to get approval from your supervisor just like any other leave and you need to take it at a time that is convenient and all sorts of things. So there are rules around that but they get eight hours of administrative leave for eight closures. Supervisors specifically asked that we keep this incentive and they think that it is more effective than all of the others and we have talked quite a bit about why it is a better incentive and why more people are getting it than got the old incentive and why they are motivated to get it. One of the biggest things is that it is seen as attainable for all. When you have an incentive that follows a year’s worth of performance, I don’t know if you all have seen this, but when I was a supervisor, every counselor that I had thought that their caseload was the hardest caseload. Every counselor that I ever had thought that their caseload was harder than everyone else’s and it was harder to get successful closures and they have to spend more time with their people and all of those things. So we had this group within the incentive program that thought that other people’s caseloads were easier to manage and maybe if I had more transition students or maybe if I had more correction clients or maybe if I had more closures and then you have those people running transition closures saying maybe if I had more [inaudible]. You know, everybody thinks their caseload is the highest. Everybody thinks their caseload is the highest. But it was a very high number and it required a consistent effort throughout the course of the year, and there were some people who were just not thinking it was worth reaching for. And if you got halfway through the year and had some sort of problem with your caseload or you ended up having to take a leave or you lost a handful of closures or something, or whatever, you know, you were sort of out of the running for the rest of the year. With this incentive is over every three months, so even if you had some sort of downturn or your transition counselor doesn’t your closures seem to go down a little or you have a big employer you know if your rural area closed, you lose some closures. The clock starts over in three months. So everybody thinks well maybe I didn’t get it in the last two months but I’m going to get it in this three months so maybe if I can just carry over a couple closures for this one that I wasn’t able, at least they’re counting towards the next year and I don’t have to wait another year to start over and try to get an incentive. It is a more immediate reward because they're getting it the last day of the quarter that they just served. Psychologists to do research on rewards and behavior modification and all those things will tell you that everything from people to pigeons respond to more immediate rewards. The closer to the time of when they do the behavior you give them the reward for that behavior, the more likely they are to repeat it and the more effective it will be. And it is seen as a more equitable distribution, like I talked about this before. People see many others getting it on multiple types of caseloads. You do not get more leave if you do more closures if you do eight of more you get eight hours and that’s it, it doesn’t matter if you do eight or fifty, you still get eight hours of administrative leave. So it’s seen as more equitable within the counseling ranks. It’s been very effective and that’s the one incentive that we keep. Slide 31: What Else Are We Doing? (cont.) What else are we doing? Slide 34. We still do some rewards. We do quarterly rewards within districts. We have plaques that we put your name on. The employee of the quarter. We do yearly rewards. We have an annual conference once a year where we recognize multiple staff and the most productive districts, and we also do something called the best of the best where we do peer nomination rewards. We do tough 26 rewards and recognition for people who submit their cases for the toughest closures they’ve done during the year. We evaluate those and give people rewards for accomplishing the most. So, we try to find some sort of balance between quality and quantity is always the argument but we do some recognition along those lines. There have been a couple of times in the last few years we have purchased shirts with embroidered USOR logos on them for the entire agency for example. Just something to make people feel like they have identity and they’re part of a group and they’re recognizable and that helps justify those and marketing sort of branding and we haven’t had any trouble purchasing those things. We also buy a certain number of incentives that we try to have available here and also out in the districts just to recognize something that comes up for one person on one day. Here’s what you did today that impressed me, some little thing. Or here’s what you did last week that I’m really impressed with to try and answer that question of that immediacy and not always have it be about numbers or performance in relationship to some other standard. So those are some of the things that we're doing. Slide 32: Questions Slide Number 35 is questions. You have my direct line at my desk and also my e-mail which is interestingly [inaudible] and that’s a long story. Are there any questions or any information that I can share with anybody about what we've been through and what you'd like to hear? What is our starting salary for counselors? That is a very good question. I'm going to have to try to find that answer for you because I do not know. It has gone up and it's just gone back down. We have three different starting salary ranges, so when I send you the information I will send you information on all three. We under fill our counselor positions. We give preference for CRC and the state licensure now, but we do have three different levels. So we have the trainee level and rehab Counselor I and rehab Counselor II, and those people with a state licensure or a master's degree or have a couple years of experience get hired into a higher level. The lower ones work their way up through experience through the course of a couple years. So I will send that to Steffany -- I am sorry I don't have that for you -- I will send it to Steffany for her to forward to you or post it somewhere after the power point and it will have three different ranges. How did we find a friendly legislator? This is a legislator that knew about rehab and had been friendly to us before. Our administration is very committed to working the legislature. We have a long history of advocating very strongly within our administration and also within our public policy groups and the Center for Persons with Disabilities. We have a legislative coalition that advocates on the Hill continually throughout the year for the issues of rehabilitation. We knew this person was someone that had listened to us before about what rehabilitation can do. That is a year long never-ending process. The more you learn about politics the more that you learn how political it is. It is true. It is about getting to know people on an individual level. It’s about finding those legislators who know someone with a disability or have a child with a disability or have a grandchild with a disability or know someone who went through rehab who are willing to listen to you. And this is someone who had been friendly to us before, has been willing to sponsor bills before, and has sponsored bills since. So we had a long standing relationship with her and we went and used that relationship built over 15 to 20 years. We have a very strong administrative commitment to maintaining relationships with educated legislators and we have a big program every year where we send people out to talk with them and watch the committees and that’s a big deal at any job. What was the impact on productivity of the administrative leave incentive? We have not been able to determine that yet. What we have started to do in the last year and a half is keep track of numbers. It was easy when we gave out the incentive program at an administrative level to monitor how many people got it. It’s immediately becoming more difficult adding in the districts because those are given out by districts and they send in a list of everybody who got them to human resources who got the incentive each quarter. What they say is that first people and every quarter that we have done it, supervisors have seen an increase in the number of those certificates they have given out. So I can't give you any concrete numbers, but what I can tell you is we're in the process of gathering those numbers and that supervisors will tell you that the number of certificates they give out every quarter compared to when we started this has gone up in every district. Supervisors tell us that they hear from counselors that say I'm not sure if I can do this, I'm not sure if I can do this. Well, then they start thinking maybe if I have a really good quarter. I can't do it all year, but maybe if I have a good quarter. So, they’ll have some success in one area or another and for whatever reason they will get the incentives for that quarters and then all of a sudden they get that light bulb goes on and they say if I can get that maybe if I just spend a little more time doing this and this and this on my next caseload, I could get enough twenty-sixes to get it again. And you see an increase in closures. What I can also tell you what we’ve seen stateside is to help…one of our goals in continuing this incentive was to spread the number of 26s through the years. For a long time in VR we would close 75 percent of our 26s in the last three months of the year, which is just crazy. That can create problems that I am sure you all are aware of. So this is helping us to spread out through the year and get more done each quarter instead of waiting to the end of the year. One of the things that we have seen with this incentive is not only are we giving amount to more people than we expected and getting the increasing closures overall but we hope that, and we are seeing that, people close their cases throughout the course of the year and are not leaving them all to the last quarter of the year. So we are seeing that, and we did have an increase in closures overall last year. But I can’t divide that out for you and tell you that that didn’t have something to do with having all those caseloads finally and not having turnover. So I will have to let you know in a couple of years when we have better data. Anecdotally, you would think that would only make sense that the number of closures would increase, but I do not have any hard data to support that yet. Utah is not under an order of selection. We are trying very hard to keep that the same. I think that is a very good question because obviously that definitely impacts the type of clients that you are serving. Yes, satisfaction has improved a little bit. We are still waiting for a year's worth of increased satisfaction, but we have looked at -- quarterly we look at those consumer satisfaction surveys. So it is up a little bit, and we have stopped seeing those narratives when we look at the comments at the bottom of those surveys we stopped seeing those kinds of comments where nobody knows their jobs and they were transferred around to five different counselors, et cetera. So we are not seeing the complaints that we did from the SRC. So overall, I guess we're not seeing the complaints anymore. If you look at our consumer satisfaction rates so far much of that is kind of hard to see it yet, but we just did a new consumer satisfaction survey and we put a pen in the envelope to see if that would increase our response rate. It did not seem to affect it on the first quarter, but so far in the second quarter we have a higher response rate to our consumer satisfaction survey than we have had in several years. You are welcome to anything in this presentation. I will talk to Steffany afterwards and find out how that works. I will ask Steffany what the best way to do that is. If for some reason that does not work, you can e-mail me at the e-mail address on the screen and I will get you a copy of it. I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. I gave you all the data in the presentation. And there might be some specific permission I can share with you about the kind of jobs people are looking for that they're not looking for any more. Could you please give me a little bit more information about exactly what you're asking for and I will absolutely get you what I can. I will just tell you that you know people are struggling and you feel bad for them, but it's easy sometimes to get caught up in an administrative level and forget what it is like for those people who have four kids and -- I had a counselor who one time -- I live in a small rural town outside Salt Lake city. And I went into town to get a pizza for dinner for my family one time, and I walk into the pizza place and there behind a counter was one of my rehabilitation counselors. I was field chief at the time and there is one of my rehabilitation counselors behind the counter serving pizza. And he was talking to me and telling me this is what I have to do at night because I have four kids and I cannot make it on the money that I make as a counselor. So this is what I have to do is work nights and weekends at the pizza place to make ends meet. I then felt horrible. Sometimes you feel like there's so little you can do and I just felt horrible. So after we implemented the raise I got an e-mail from that counselor that said he just worked his last shift at the pizza place and he thanked me. I still get choked up just thinking about that. Sometimes it's easy to say that pay is not everything. And I think that when one gets to a certain level of pay maybe pay isn't everything, but the when you are only making a little money pay does mean a lot and can make a big difference between making ends meet and not making ends meet. Are there any more questions? Thank you all so much. I hope that anything I provided to you was helpful and you may have learned from what we have tried and what has worked and what has not worked. Please e-mail me anytime with any questions and I'll help you with whatever I can. >> Steffany: Thank you so much, Stacey. That was a wonderful presentation as we can see with all the questions that came up in our public chat area. Again, Stacey's information is there, and if you have any other questions please be sure to send me an e-mail at tacesoutheast@law.syr.edu, which is also on the screen. This will be posted on our web site and all the materials will be posted for you so you can listen to this as well again. Here are the education credits for this listed on the board. So after the Webinar please be sure to apply for the credits. And also please be sure to fill out your evaluation survey as we like to get evaluations for each of our Webinars. And with our presentations we offer so much information, so if there any questions that come up afterwards please be sure to contact us or Stacey and we will get answers to those questions for you. And with that I will go ahead and bring this session to a close. Have a great day and thank you for your participation.