"Work" just took on a whole new meaning

A month ago today, DWS decided to streamline all of our operations. In some ways we now run like a large corporation or enterprise. Prior to streamlining we all had specific job duties; I was on a team that completed the "intake" process. (I interviewed all new applicants, requested the needed verifications for the programs that they were applying for, determined if they were eligible to receive expedited food stamps, educated customers on various community resources in our area, and then I would transfer their case to the appropriate processor, 10/hour shifts on the phone).

The processors would wait for the verifications to be submitted and approve or deny the application, they would also keep their cases for as long as they remained eligible- reviewing them every 6 months to see if they are still eligible. Processors also have to deal with many changes, new income each month when a person quits or start a job, child support increases or decreases etc. It wasn't unheard of to have over 40 voice messages on a Monday morning to return, this job was very labor intensive. Each processor had about 300-350 cases to manage.
But they had an entire 40/hr work week to do it in....

Starting June 18th, we now do it all, they have specialized to an extent; we have teams that handle all of the Childcare and Financial cases. I am on a team that only works with Food Stamps and Medical cases. I inherited a caseload of almost 200 from across the state, from many different workers, with many different ways of "handling" their cases. I don't know the history of any of these families or their personal situations. And if that's not hard enough....

We have adopted a team concept... there are 15 people on my team including myself, each team is responsible for all of the cases on their team (sort-of), -- we have our own cases but our teams numbers reflect us as a whole. Now that's 3000 cases on average for each team!

Now a typical day for me consists of 7am-12:30....
Registering new applications (30 or so minutes)
Proactive Reviews- calling customers reminding them of upcoming review times (30-60 min)
Processing Alerts (alerts are our notifications on each case of new information, i.e. verifications submitted, changes reported, case closures, etc.) (every minute we have... remember processors use to have 40/hr work weeks to complete this, but i usually only get about 3-3.5/hrs day)
Lunch (1/hr)
12:30-6:15pm telephone shift (status calls, interviews, assisting customers the best we can considering we are probably a 6hour drive from each other.) Each call I receive is for a case on our team, it could be my customer or one of my coworkers. Originally, they (some higher up with all these bright ideas) thought if a customer called and all of their verifications were submitted ... those of us on the phone shift could take the time and “process” the case. Yet they also want our hold times less than 10 minutes. *note* the easiest case to process takes more than 10 minutes....

We have so many programs that we have to run on each case, last week everyone got a second monitor installed on their computers. YEP!! 2 monitors x 10/hour days = one hell of a headache!!

So that’s my day in a nut shell, I’m still “paying it forward” … it’s just a lot harder and more frustrating than I think it has to be :D