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Employee Performance Evaluation in Social Welfare Offices Norma M. Riccucci and Irene Lurie Review of Public Personnel Administration 2001; 21; 27 The online version of this article can be found at: http://rop.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/1/27

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REVIEW OF PUBLIC PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION / Spring 2001 Riccucci, Lurie / EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

Employee Performance Evaluation in Social Welfare Offices NORMA M. RICCUCCI IRENE LURIE University at Albany, State University of New York This study examines the status and operation of performance evaluation systems in three welfare offices across the country. Welfare offices provide an interesting and auspicious arena for such an examination because of the changes to the goals of welfare policy under recent federal mandates for reform. The study finds that although there is clarity around the performance criteria on which public employees in welfare offices are evaluated, the measures are not linked to one of the principal goals of welfare reform—“welfare-to-work”: moving people off welfare and into jobs.

ublic personnel and human resource management specialists continue to focus a good deal of attention and resources on evaluating the performance of public employees, especially as it relates to the goals of the organization. The information about performance can be useful for the organization in making decisions about pay, advancement, discipline, and training. Likewise, employees have an expectation and perhaps a cognitive need to receive feedback on how they are performing. The research on performance appraisal or evaluation systems examines a host of issues, including an organization’s ability to link pay to performance (e.g., merit pay), new technologies for evaluating performance, and the problems and pitfalls of using individual performance evaluations as a basis for disciplining or taking formal actions against poor performers (see, e.g., Daley, 1987, 1992, 1999; Gabris, 1986a, 1986b, 1987; Gabris & Ihrke, 2000; Ingraham, 1993; Kellough & Selden, 1997; Lovrich, 1987; Perry & Mesch, 1997). The research presented here examines the status and operation of performance evaluation systems in welfare offices in three states. Welfare offices

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Authors’ Note: This research is being funded from a grant by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Review of Public Personnel Administration, Vol. 21, No. 1 Spring 2001 27-37 © 2001 Sage Publications

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REVIEW OF PUBLIC PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION / Spring 2001

provide an interesting and auspicious arena for such an examination because of the changes to the goals of welfare policy under recent federal mandates for reform and the federal law’s financial rewards for high performance by welfare agencies. This study begins by taking a brief look at the shifting goals of welfare policy under the 1996 federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). It then looks at the practices of welfare offices in evaluating the performance of front-line staff charged with implementing the new goals and whether and how the performance evaluation systems are working. THE WELFARE REFORM ACT OF 1996

PRWORA was a reaction, in part, to a history of frustrated attempts to reform and redirect the welfare system. Although perceptions of the problem have varied over the years, the direction of reforms has been consistent for at least three decades. Beginning with the Work Incentives Program (WIN) of the 1960s and continuing through the 1988 Family Support Act, federal reforms have emphasized the importance of work and employment for clients of Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) (i.e., cash assistance). Despite these reforms, front-line case workers continued to focus their attention on eligibility determination rather than on the new employment-related policy goals. However, with the 1996 welfare reform, Congress took concrete steps to change the fundamental goals and policies of welfare in this nation. The 1996 federal law went much further in directing the welfare system toward encouraging employment and reducing welfare reliance. The most dramatic change was the elimination of federal entitlements for cash assistance (AFDC) and the imposition of a time limit on assistance. Under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which replaced AFDC, states are no longer required to provide assistance as an entitlement or to adhere to federal eligibility rules. This gives state officials substantial new authority to design and deliver their own cash aid, child care, and employment services. Along with this authority, Congress gave states very specific new performance requirements. For example, states are directed to impose more stringent work requirements on aid recipients and, at the same time, restrict TANF-funded assistance to a lifetime maximum of 60 months. By the year 2002, states are required to have one half of all TANF recipients placed in work or community services activities.


Riccucci, Lurie / EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

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NEW GOALS UNDER WELFARE REFORM?

Somewhat surprisingly, in light of the history of lackluster implementation of federal reforms by the states, the strong emphasis on employment and independence in TANF is reflected in states’ recent welfare reforms. Governors and state legislators have sent strong signals that a work-based system is a central goal for their state (see, e.g., Nathan & Gais, 1999). To encourage and support work, states are strengthening the linkage between welfare and work agencies and are devoting more funds to child care and transportation. Yet, despite the new goal of supporting work, or “welfareto-work” as it is often called, the former purposes of the welfare system remain. As in AFDC law, TANF’s purpose is to provide assistance to needy families so that children can remain with their parents or relatives. And when government distributes money, the demand for accountability leads it to focus on accuracy and scrutinizing clients’ income and needs. In these ways, the law maintains the old tension between the goal of assisting parents so they may care for their children and the goal of discouraging welfare receipt through pressure to work and a concern for accuracy. Because PRWORA seeks to embrace these dual and conflicting goals, it may have resulted in ambiguities and complexities over performance standards and measures for public employee performance. Critical questions that have arisen include, for example, Are the new goals of welfare reform reflected in the performance criteria on which public employees in welfare offices will be evaluated? Are the performance measures tied in any manner to the goals of the organization? Scholars who have studied performance appraisal have pointed to the importance of clear performance measures and of linking them to the goals of the organization (see, e.g., Daley, 1987, 1992, 1999; Gabris, 1986a, 1986b, 1987; Ingraham, 1993; Kellough & Selden, 1997; Perry & Mesch, 1997). Daley (1992), for example, stressed the importance of developing performance measures that are comprehensible, reliable, practical, and clearly communicated to the workers. He also pointed out that performance evaluation is critical to organizational systems and goals. He noted that Performance appraisal occurs in and is part of an organization. Organizations are themselves subsystems within society that mediate and translate society’s demands into the purposeful actions performed by individuals. . . . The process of performance appraisal is both influenced by and itself influences the organization. (p. 37).


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Perry and Mesch (1997) pointed to the importance of linking the performance of employees to the attainment of organizational goals, thus improving overall organizational effectiveness. This results-oriented philosophy of performance evaluation, they suggested, can enhance “customer responsiveness, speed, cost effectiveness . . . and productivity” (p. 22). One of the problems with linking organizational goals to employee performance, however, revolves around goal displacement, wherein the procedures and methods of performance appraisal overshadow or “triumph over”1 the actual objectives of performance measurement (Lovrich, 1995). In effect, attention is drawn away from the goals of the organization and placed on the details of employee behavior required by the rules. Ultimately, employees can become demoralized and their output severely curtailed (see Daley, 1992; Lovrich, 1995). Notwithstanding the various problems associated with performance evaluation, public personnel and human resource scholars and professionals will continue to focus their energy on them (see Gabris & Ihrke, 2000), because appraising worker behaviors is so instinctive and basic that it will remain a tool for organizations to make decisions and provide feedback to employees (Daley, 1992; Golembiewski, 1986) and/or, as Gabris (1986a) has suggested, to see which employee is the best apple polisher or the most capable of assimilating management’s values. DATA AND METHOD

Data for this study were collected through on-site, semistructured interviews with anywhere from 15 to 20 welfare officials, managers, and frontline workers at three local welfare offices in three states (Georgia, Michigan, and Texas).2 Data for this research were collected as part of a larger management study that examines the implementation of welfare reform.3 The three states were purposely selected to maximize variation in policy, administrative structures, and political culture. Within each of the states, to ensure a representative sample of each site (i.e., urban, suburban, and rural), data were collected to provide variation in community context, management practices, and client characteristics. For the analysis in this article, one local site in each of the three states has been selected for comparison.4 Through comparative case studies, we consider the following questions:



Table 1.

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Performance Evaluation Systems in Three Local Welfare Offices Identified Goals

Performance Measures

Rewards/Sanctions

Georgia

Finding jobs for welfare clients

Error rates/quality control; standard of promptness; participation rate

Rewards: recognition Sanctions: counseling, possible terminationa

Michigan

Finding jobs for welfare Quality control; stanclients; self-sufficiency dard of promptness

Rewards: recognition Sanctions: none

Texas

Finding jobs for welfare Quality control; stanclients; diversion (e.g., dard of promptness getting people off welfare, getting people into jobs, discouraging people from filing applications)

Rewards: none Sanctions: none

a. Termination was identified as a sanction only since the Georgia merit system was abolished.

1. Are performance measures for front-line staff in welfare offices expressed in clear, concrete terms? 2. Are performance measures linked to the goals of the organization? 3. What incentives/disincentives are in place to motivate front-line case workers in welfare offices?

Because the interviewees were promised confidentiality, responses to the interview questions are not attributed to any source by name. In addition, the local welfare sites are not identified by location. FINDINGS

Table 1 presents a summary of our findings. First, we discovered that in the three local welfare offices we visited across the states, the performance measures were expressed in a clear fashion and the workers understood what they were being measured against. However, as indicated in Table 1, we further found that in virtually every case, the performance measures were not linked to the new goals of the welfare organization. In the local welfare offices we visited, we were told by managers as well as workers that their goals under welfare reform were to get people jobs and in some cases to help people become self-sufficient. Yet, the


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workers were not measured against whether welfare recipients were placed in jobs or became self-sufficient. They were measured, instead, against such criteria as the food stamp error rate (i.e., the accurate processing of food stamp applications) and standard of promptness (i.e., completing TANF applications in a prompt, timely fashion). Only in the Georgia site was participation rate included as a performance criterion. Participation rate is the percentage of welfare clients participating in job or job-related activities (e.g., searching for a job). The federal government sets this rate; at the time of our study, it was set at 35%. So, 35% of a welfare office’s TANF caseload was required to be engaged in work (e.g., part-time work) or actively looking for a job. However, even in the case of this Georgia site, workers were not held individually accountable for reaching the targeted participation rate. Rather, the participation rate of the office as a whole was considered, and it was considered in conjunction with the other performance measures. In effect, if any of the performance measures were not met, including the participation rate, no worker was singled out and held responsible. One of the general complaints about the operation of performance appraisal systems in the public sector is that they do not accommodate or account for group or team work. Of course, a broader concern here from a public personnel standpoint revolves around the organization’s ability to develop a balanced set of performance measures that reflect service delivery processes and outcomes. In terms of organizational accountability, effective performance appraisal systems include organizational, departmental, group, and individual performance measures. It should also be noted that not only are the welfare agencies embracing the new goal of welfare-to-work but there are other organizations with the responsibility of moving welfare recipients into jobs. For example, the Michigan Jobs Commission and its local contractors are also charged with helping people get off TANF and into jobs in Michigan. In a number of other states, departments of labor, nonprofit agencies, or for-profit companies are performing the same task. An examination of these agencies and their performance evaluation criteria goes beyond the scope of the present study. Interestingly, there may in fact be very little incentive for front-line case workers to strive toward meeting the goal of finding jobs for welfare clients.5 And the lack of tangible rewards, which we found in all the welfare offices we visited, may have little to do with explaining this phenomenon. Rather, workers may not be motivated to meet the goal of welfare-to-work because, based on their interpretations of the new welfare law, it could put the welfare



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workers themselves out of a job. A worker in Michigan summed it up in this fashion: “I think we all really believe that if we did our jobs, we’d work our way out of a job. That our job really is to get people to where they don’t need us anymore.”6 This appears to be a dilemma even in Georgia, where the local welfare office seeks to explicitly link the performance measure of meeting participation rates to the goal of finding jobs for welfare clients. One supervisor in Georgia explained, It is to our advantage that some people still get TANF, because working counts as an activity if the worker is still on TANF. But, if you get off welfare because you are making too much money, then we can’t count you. So, the incentive is for the client not to get a good paying job. Diversion is striven for because the incentive is to get people low-paying jobs, where they still qualify for TANF; we don’t get rewarded for diverting clients. It’s the placement rate that is looked at. Thirty-five percent of our clients should be in an activity.

It should be noted that, despite the workers’ and supervisors’ interpretations here, the welfare reform law explicitly states that a drop in caseloads should help toward the participation rate. However, the workers and supervisors perceive that if welfare clients are moved off TANF, it will impair, in the long run, not simply their efforts to meet participation rates but also the future of their own jobs. It is also interesting to note that, despite the fact that the performance criteria are clearly known to the workers, virtually every worker we interviewed said that all front-line welfare workers are likely to receive the same performance ratings (i.e., the central tendency error). We were told, for example, in the Georgia site, that all workers tend to get a rating of “met expectations” and that they “have no idea” what it would take to get a rating of “exceeds expectations.” We also found that although quality control was a performance criterion mentioned in all three of the local welfare offices, standard of promptness or timeliness was in fact the key factor according to most of the supervisors. A supervisor in Michigan summed it up in this fashion: “We do case readings; narratives . . . [the workers] submit short statements of the outcomes, for example, ‘completed redetermination [for cash assistance].’ Later they will submit a narrative.” When we asked the supervisors if case readings meant that they read each of the narratives submitted by staff for quality control, the supervisors clarified that they did not check the quality of the cases;


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rather, “That they are done! We haven’t reached a level of sophistication with the staff. We don’t have time to look at quality of interactions.” In terms of reward/sanctioning structure, there is little if any tangible remuneration and virtually no disciplinary action if workers do not meet their performance expectations. This seems consistent with many jobs in the public sector (see, e.g., Kellough & Selden, 1997). In Texas, for example, when we asked supervisors what they do to reward good employee performance, we were mostly told, “Nothing. It doesn’t lead to a raise. Many years there isn’t any merit raise money. So even a superior rating doesn’t mean you get a merit raise.” Similarly, in the Michigan site we were told that “there are no consequences” if workers don’t meet the performance criteria. And, if they do meet them, there are no rewards. Employees never mentioned possible intrinsic rewards,7 but one group of supervisors, who laughed when we asked if there were any rewards, noted that, “We work for the state so there aren’t any merit raises. I do stickers: like happy faces [on evaluations].” This is considered to be a form of positive recognition, but the supervisor suggested that this does little to motivate employees. Only in the Georgia welfare office was the possibility of termination or discipline mentioned. Managers and supervisors told us that since the merit system was abolished in 1996, it had become easier to discipline and discharge workers for poor performance. However, we were further told that it is rare for a front-line welfare worker to be discharged and that poor performers would be counseled if necessary but not dismissed. In sum, although there is clarity around the performance criteria on which public employees in welfare offices are evaluated, the measures are not linked to one of the principal goals of welfare reform—welfare-towork: moving people off welfare and into jobs. And, as is the case in most public sector organizations, there are neither “carrots” nor “sticks” to motivate the workers. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Welfare reform in this nation has most recently emphasized the concept of welfare-to-work. From a public personnel perspective, this has raised interesting questions about whether the duties of eligibility workers have changed and whether their tasks and responsibilities relate to the goals of welfare-to-work.



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Through an examination of performance evaluation systems, this research suggests that the duties of the eligibility workers in welfare offices may not have changed very much. They continue to be measured against criteria around eligibility determination for cash assistance and not by whether they are helping welfare recipients find jobs. From the individual worker’s perspective, there is a clear idea of the factors against which performance is being assessed. But from the broader organizational perspective, worker performance in all three of the sites we visited is not linked to or aimed at meeting the new goals of the welfare organization. This runs counter to current efforts to promote strategic personnel and human resources practices geared toward a more holistic approach to public personnel, wherein the personnel function is organized to contribute more directly and effectively to the achievement of agency mission and organizational goals (Mesch, Perry, & Wise, 1995; Perry and Mesch, 1997). Obviously, if welfare organizations wanted to be more aggressive about meeting the goals under welfare reform, they would seek to link worker performance to meeting the new goal of the welfare organization: welfare-towork. Welfare agencies can go even further to strengthen their performance evaluation systems as motivational tools by addressing the central tendency error mentioned above. As noted, workers said that all front-line welfare workers are likely to receive the same performance ratings. It is also interesting to note that performance measures may be perceived by workers in a way that discourages them from meeting the stated goals of the agency. If workers do not understand the nuances of the federal law, such that a decrease in caseloads counts toward meeting the participation rate, the participation rate may be counterproductive. If they perceive that the participation rate is more difficult to achieve when people take jobs that get them off welfare, this performance measure may work at cross purposes to the goal embraced by all the local welfare offices we visited: getting people off welfare. When added to the workers’ concern about the implication of the drop in caseloads for their own job security, we see the need for more careful thought about the criteria for performance evaluation. NOTES 1. See Wallace Sayre (1948), who wrote the celebrated piece on the “Triumph of Techniques Over Purpose.”


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2. The qualitative protocol included approximately two dozen questions related to performance evaluation, performance monitoring, and reward structures. At the time of this study, there were anywhere from 20 to 40 workers and supervisors in each of the three sites. 3. We are conducting the larger management study through the Rockefeller Institute of Government. This study examines the implementation of welfare reform in four states (Georgia, Michigan, New York, and Texas). New York is not included in the current article because data collection is still underway in local welfare sites in this state. 4. For the sake of manageability, we include one site from each of the three states. Because a preliminary review showed that the performance systems of all the other sites also focus on eligibility determination instead of the new goals of welfare organizations, the sites we include in our study are representative. We should also note that each county develops its own performance evaluation forms specifically for welfare agencies. 5. Interestingly, welfare workers are provided virtually no training for their new responsibility of helping clients find work. 6. This may not be a widely held view, but it was expressed as a concern in Michigan. We are careful not to generalize widely from the small sample used in this research. 7. Consistently, employees did not mention any intrinsic rewards that might be associated with their jobs.

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