Month: July 2022

As a social worker, it can feel like you’re being pulled in several directions at once. With so many high priority tasks, knowing how to work efficiently and manage your time can make or break your ability to stay on top of your cases.

Of course, efficiency and effective time management shouldn’t mean leaving a job half-finished or cutting corners, especially in a field as important as social work. Instead, whether you’re working independently or as part of a team, your time management strategies should maximize the limited time and resources you do have to ensure your most pressing tasks always get completed.

This article will explore four time management strategies specifically for social workers to help you work more efficiently:

1. Use automated tools.
2. Organize tasks based on priority and efficiency.
3. Block out your time.
4. Stay on top of your data.

Deliberate, quick, and thoughtful case management is essential to your clients, and staying on top of your workload is essential to managing your own stress levels and ability to plan for the future. So do both yourself and your clients a favor by taking purposeful steps to improve your time management. Let’s get started.

1. Use automated tools.

It’s easy to feel like you need to do everything manually to manage your cases correctly. However, one of the fastest ways to save time and reduce your overall workload is to set up automated processes to handle administrative work for you.

Social Solution’s guide to social work case management walks through the four core aspects of case work and potential ways to automate each process:

1. Intake. While your first meeting with a client is essential for determining their immediate needs and establishing a connection, you can speed up the process by minimizing the amount of information you need to collect during the meeting. Consider setting up self-service tools that allow clients to enter their essential information such as their demographic and contact information when they first reach out. This way, you can keep your meetings to the point and jump straight to figuring out each client’s core needs.
2. Needs assessment. A thorough needs assessment can take time, but you can set up tools to identify a client’s core needs more quickly. Create standard assessment tools that you can reliably use in most cases to help gauge how pressing a client’s immediate needs are and what services you should assign to them.
3. Service planning. Your service plan is your roadmap for each client, defining what goals you have for them and what steps need to be taken to achieve those goals. You can keep your service plans organized and up to date by using a streamlined database or case management platform that allows you to easily update each client’s plan.
4. Monitoring and evaluation. Ensure you are always monitoring each client’s progress toward their goals to determine if and how well the services you assigned them are working. While you should talk to clients to understand their perspectives on their progress, you can also use reporting tools to generate reports with quantified data that can help you assess your overall progress at a glance.

Additionally, automated tools can provide timely alerts to keep your team on top of key details that could potentially fall through the cracks. This is especially important with teams with several members working from home, as information can get lost or simply not communicated to team members working remotely.

If you are working from home, consider if there are any tools you can use to speed up your own workflow or better manage your time. Working from home can have the side effect of blending your personal and professional life, making it unclear when exactly you are on and off the clock. Take advantage of work-from-home tools and strategies to create an office environment in your home to help you stay focused while working on your cases.

2. Organize tasks based on priority and efficiency.

How you manage your daily tasks is essential to how well you’re able to maximize your time. While it can be easy to fall into a habit of tackling tasks as they come up or even handling things based on when they were added to your task list, these strategies can leave you putting out fires and delaying important cases.

Be sure to take a moment to assess your current list of tasks and organize them by two key factors: priority and efficiency. Here’s what these factors mean:

• Priority. How important is each task? This can be influenced by time sensitivity, urgency, and overall importance. Emergencies do come up, and your task list should allow you to prioritize them as necessary. Tasks that need to be completed at some point but are not of immediate concern or importance will be low priority, while those with an immediate deadline that require urgent action are high priority, with everything else falling in between.
• Efficiency. How quickly can you complete a task? Often, many small tasks can get pushed off and add up to create a significant time sink later on. Identify which tasks will take more time and which you can complete quickly. Then, when you finish your high-priority tasks, you can knock out several quick tasks at once, such as assigning or referring clients to services. Doing so can help boost morale as a seemingly insurmountable task list can be cut down significantly by prioritizing quick tasks.

Another trick some social workers find helpful is color-coding tasks based on priority and efficiency. This approach can help you organize your daily schedule at a glance, though be sure to regularly refer to your main organization and scheduling platform as your source of truth for all tasks. After all, it’s not uncommon for a high-priority task to suddenly come up that wasn’t initially penciled into the schedule you already set for the week.

3. Block out your time.

As mentioned, you should assess your to-do list for tasks based on how quickly you can complete them. Estimating how long each task should logically take can help you block out your calendar, creating a schedule that’s focused on giving you the time you need to handle specific assignments and check in on everything else later.

Blocking out time is especially important for meetings with clients and your team, which can easily go over time without someone watching the clock. While it’s always a good idea to be polite about ending a meeting, your time is valuable, and it’s your responsibility to protect it, even if it means cutting small talk a little short. On busy days, set hard stops at the end of meetings to allow you to keep moving through your schedule and avoid getting overwhelmed.

Additionally, consider choosing a “protected” task each day. While it’s normal to rearrange your schedule as other assignments come up, look at your to-do list and choose one high-priority assignment that you will assign an unmovable block of time to complete. For example, at the end of the summer, you might need to create several protected tasks each day for a week to get your youth program ready for the start of school.

4. Stay on top of your data.

Re-entering the same information about each of your clients can get tedious, and it’s not uncommon to make an occasional mistake. Human error is natural, but unfortunately, mistyped information in your schedule or team’s case management system can result in confusion and slowdowns.

While it can sometimes feel like busywork, you can improve your overall efficiency by staying on top of your data. NPOInfo’s guide to nonprofit data hygiene outlines a few steps you can take to keep your database functioning properly:

• Audit your database. Auditing your database is the first step to cleaning up your data. Determine the main issues you’re facing related to your data to help you take a more targeted approach to organizing your data.
• Remove unnecessary information. Look for and remove or archive any information that is either incorrect or irrelevant. For example, a duplicated client’s profile, or you may be able to safely archive a former client’s information.
• Standardize your data formatting. Self-service intake forms can significantly free up your time, but leaving many individuals outside of your organization to figure out how they’ll fill out your forms can lead to incomplete or inconsistent data, making compiling reports difficult. Standardize your data formatting and adjust your form fields as necessary to steer clients into filling out your forms as correctly as possible.

Taking the time to regularly clean up your data can save you time in the long run. Data errors and inconsistencies tend to accumulate over time, and leaving many errors unfixed can create a far larger problem down the line than if they were addressed immediately.

Social workers have a wide variety of important tasks to get to every day, and it’s easy to feel like there isn’t enough time to get to everything. Use the tools available at your disposal to automate tasks, stay organized, and ensure your schedule prioritizes high-priority assignments.

Tre Cabrera, MRP, MSW

Tre Cabrera is a Community Development Executive on the Portfolio Marketing team at
Bonterra. She joined Social Solutions in 2021 and is a professional urban and regional planner with a 16-year career in economic development, community planning, and educational equity. She earned a Master of Regional Planning from University at Albany and a Master of Social Work – MACRO community practice – from University of Maryland School of Social Work in Baltimore.

In the field, Tre’s fundamental goal is to connect people and places to vital resources that strengthen community and elevate impact. Tre has led research, program development, leadership development, strategic planning, advocacy, policy, organizing, and fundraising; and her career has given her access to work across sectors, industries, and partnerships in major urban centers, suburban cities, and small rural towns.

The long-term success of any association depends on delivering value to members so that they remain engaged, loyal, and happy to renew. But how exactly do you know what your members find valuable?

The answer is association membership surveys. Read on to learn:

• Why association member surveys are valuable
• How to create an effective membership satisfaction survey
• How to determine what questions to ask

Why are association member surveys valuable?

Associations exist to represent and unite members around shared interests, often professional. Everything you do needs to be in service of that; it needs to be member-centric.

Member surveys are the perfect tool to help you achieve this. They let you collect member feedback and information on members so you can learn what’s important to them. You can then use these surveys to identify current programs or activities that aren’t delivering value and learn more about the programming and benefits that will attract members.

From there, you can address issues and optimize what’s working to drive long-term membership and renewals.

How do you create an effective membership satisfaction survey?

An effective membership satisfaction survey needs to gather the right information about your members so you can understand what they value. To create one, follow a structured approach where you:

1. Set clear objectives. Review the results you want to achieve and work backward to create questions to get those results. For example, to learn why meeting participation has dropped, create questions that cover potential barriers to engagement.
2. Keep surveys short and questions concise. Short surveys take less time to complete, so you’ll likely get better response rates. Straightforward questions also make it easy for respondents to answer. Consider providing specific choices like multiple choice questions, yes and no questions, and rating scales.
3. Test the surveys. Test your survey draft on a small engaged sample of members, e.g., your board of members. Review their answers to see if the questions helped you get the information you wanted. Also, talk to the sample group to get feedback. Was there any ambiguity? Was the survey the right length?
4. Get your timing right. According to research by Survey Monkey, Mondays are among the best days to send surveys as they receive a 13% higher response rate than the average, whereas Fridays are generally the worst.
5. Promote your surveys. Promotion helps you get good response rates. You can post your survey to your website and social media, encourage members to promote it, and send an email newsletter that links to the survey.
6. Share the results. Share the results with participants and your general membership for transparency. Take the time to thank participants and inform everyone how you’ll use the results to improve.

These same best practices apply to any type of survey an organization might conduct, like a nonprofit HR team learning more from employees or a business learning more from customers. With a basic blueprint for creating an effective survey, let’s look at what to ask.

How do you know which questions to ask?

Your goals and current priorities will guide the types of questions you’ll ask. For example, if improving retention ahead of renewal season is vital, ask questions relevant to retention.

Similarly, if some members have expressed interest in a particular type of event and you want to test how it might perform, ask questions about the event.

That being said, most questions will generally fall into specific categories. Knowing these categories and the types of questions you can typically ask to assess members is a good starting point for creating your survey. Here are eight categories to consider:

• Occupational. These include questions about demographics and professional background. For instance:
  • What industry do you work in?
  • What is your role in your company?
• Benefit offerings. This category covers questions about benefits you currently offer or that members want. For example:
  • What benefits do you currently use? Why?
  • What benefits would you like us to add?
• Education and training interest. Members join associations to network and learn from others, so it’s important to ask questions to gauge their interest in certain programs like seminars and online learning. You also want to determine what new programs and topics members may want. Example questions include:
  • How interested are you in our seminars (rate on a 1-10 scale)?
  • What topics or continuing education offerings would you like to see added?
• Committee and volunteer interest. Members who join committees or volunteer are more likely to become long-term donors. So, ask questions to gauge their interest, including:
  • Are you part of a committee? If not, why?
  • What would make you consider joining a committee?
• Communication preferences. Members enjoy different communication channels. Some like email, while others prefer social media. Use this category to determine how to communicate with various members and show you care about their needs. Here are some questions to ask:
  • How do you prefer to stay updated about association news?
  • What platforms do you use to follow our association?
• Availability. Use this category to understand when members are available for meetings and prefer to receive communication to improve attendance. Questions to ask include:
  • Do you currently attend meetings? If not, why?
  • What day of the week would you prefer to meet?
• Satisfaction. This category can help boost membership renewals if you act on the feedback. Ask members if they’re happy and find out why if they’re not. For example:
  • What are you most happy about as a member?
  • What should we improve?
• Advocacy. Include this category if your organization currently participates in any advocacy activities, or plans to. Questions to ask, include:
  • Do you partake in our advocacy initiatives? If not, why?
  • Is advocacy important to you?
  • What issues do you care about the most?

Use member surveys to boost membership renewals

Membership surveys are an excellent way for any association to collect member feedback so they can understand what’s important to members. When creating your survey, pay attention to key areas like your objectives, survey length, timing, and promotion.

But remember: an effective survey is pointless without action. Act on the feedback to make improvements that will add value to your members and grow membership.

Kerry McCreadie, MemberClicks, Senior Content Marketing Manager

What matters most to membership organizations? As the Senior Content Marketing Manager for Personify’s Wild Apricot and MemberClicks products, this is the question always on Kerry’s mind. Their goal is to help nonprofits, associations, and clubs discover the solutions that solve their most frustrating pain points—while growing and retaining their member base. The CEO and Founder of their own nonprofit organization, Kerry is passionate about nonprofit and charitable work—especially in the arts.

As with our review of 2023 compensation budgeting in the last Astronology®, predictions on how variable compensation will unfold next year are challenging. The challenge comes from the on-going talent shortages, as well as the continuation of remote work options. In this Astronology®, we explore the impact of these challenges on the use of variable compensation in the 2023 total rewards mix.

In the following sections, we’ll share extracts from key surveys just coming in, as well as our own insights on variable compensation use in 2023.

Issues that are Impacting 2023 Compensation Planning (From the Willis Watson Towers 2023 Compensation Planning Survey: https://www.wtwco.com)

“According to the survey, attraction and retention challenges continue to plague organizations, although fewer respondents expect those difficulties to be at the same level next year. Over nine in 10 respondents (94%) are experiencing difficulties attracting talent this year, but only 40% expect difficulty in 2023. Similarly, 89% of companies reported difficulty retaining workers this year, but that number is expected to drop to just under 60% next year. In fact, many companies have taken or plan to take non-monetary actions to attract talent. For example, 69% of respondents have increased workplace flexibility, and 19% are planning or considering doing so in the next couple of years. Six in 10 respondents (59%) have placed a broader emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and 24% are planning or considering doing so in the next few years. Additionally, 49% of companies continue to enhance recruitment offers with sign-on bonuses and equity/long-term incentive awards, while over 21% are planning or considering doing so in the next few years. Efforts to retain talent are also under way. Almost three-fifths (58%) of companies have broadened their emphasis on DEI to retain more talent, and over 26% are planning or considering doing so. In addition, half (50%) have increased the flexibility for remote work, and 25% are planning or considering doing so in the future. Almost 40% have changed their compensation programs (e.g., base salary and short- and long-term incentive plans), and another 35% are planning or considering. Over 36% have made changes to improve their employees’ experience, and 45% are planning or considering doing so.”

Variable Pay Projections

A Look at What Has Happened in 2022 (Empsight 2022 Policies, Practices Survey https://www.empsight.com/)

“In 2022, we are observing significant changes relative to last year’s budget, policy and practices and findings. In 2022, key areas of change included larger structure movement percentages, richer budgets, and richer short-term incentives. Last year, Empsight’ s participants indicated their organizations were coping and responding to workplace and market changes, largely due to COVID -19 related uncertainty. As compared to last year, there a notable increase in the number of specialized salary structures designated for geography, or distinctions for Classification or Job Function categories. In qualitative comments, many mentioned shifts in budget control to achieve better flexibility in response to a fast-moving competitive hiring market. Some organizations noted some budgets have been consolidated or have shifted from Centralized to Decentralized management control, or the reverse. There was a significant rise in Promotion and Adjustment Budgets, whether they are carved out separately, or combined. Organizations have made changes to 2022 Policies and Practices to be nimbler, more strategic, focused, and responsive to business needs in this highly competitive employment marketplace. 2022 Empsight findings reflect not only the richer budget forecasts organizations are planning to deploy to become or stay competitive, but findings also reflect the various policy and practice methods, tools and strategies being employed to achieve their business objectives, along with key Compensation actions and decisions.”

Short-Term Incentives

Comments about STI Payouts that were higher in 2022 than in 2021:

• Higher in 2022 because 2021 payouts were much lower than normal
• Used operational vs. profit measures because some industries haven’t fully recovered from the pandemic
• Improved business performance led to higher payouts
• Higher funding pool for payouts
• Payouts resulted from pre-determined business goals
• Actual performance outperformed target performance

Comments about STI Payouts that were lower in 2022 than in 2021:

• Performance was good, but not as good as during the pandemic year (2020)
• Impacted by increased cost of materials
• Negative impact of winter storms
• Poor operational results
• Not meeting target criteria
• Comments about STI Payouts that were about the same in 2022 as in 2021
• Some companies who had poor performance in both 2021 and 2020 had STI payouts that were about the same in both years
• Business Unit Performance was consistent

Long-Term Incentives

Comments and Summary findings on Long Term Incentive Awards for 2022:

• A few participants commented that new and more discretionary approaches are being employed.
• Only a few participants noted their companies had revised performance measures or redesigned targets and vehicles.
• 2022 findings suggest there has been an increase in eligibility for LTI Plans, particularly for Professional Individual Contributors, Support, and

Other Comments:

• Increasing LTI target % for all levels
• LTI Targets are based on dollar amounts, not percentages
• Using more RSU’s to substitute for performance unit awards that will not be paid out
• Discretionary eligibility for those not normally eligible
• Expanded use of one-time equity grants and ad-hoc RSU awards
• Increasing use of RSU’s and PSU’s and movement away from stock option awards
• Increased LTI eligibility down to lower levels in the organization, specifically directors
• Eligibility requirements changed to provide greater equity amounts

WorldatWork 2022 – 2023 Compensation Budgeting (https://worldatwork.org/)

The recently published 2022 – 2023 Compensation Budgeting Survey from WorldatWork shows the following in variable compensation 2023 budgeting and, 2022 actual paid:

WorldatWork is showing little difference between 2022 and 2023 variable pay budgeting.

Astron Solutions’ Perspective

The following are four key trends Astron Solutions has been tracking in 2022 that provide insight into planning for 2023:

1.  First, we have seen a marked increase in the use of variable pay for non-profit executives and department level managers. The trend has been to set targets between 15% and 30% of base pay, with actual payouts varying based on performance.
2. Organizations’ increased use of discretionary bonuses is helping to offset current inflation levels. For example, some of our clients are providing a one time 3% bonus in lieu of a second base pay adjustment in the course of a 12-month period.
3. Rather than focusing on performance, some clients are linking the level of incentives to employee competency. For example, learning level employees do not receive any incentives, fully competent employees receive a target level incentive, and advanced level employees are eligible for two to three times the budgeted target amount.
4. There is an increased use of the “scorecard” approach in determining “goal-sharing” incentive awards. This approach provides transparency in how incentives are determined and paid out, beneficial in our world demanding increased transparency in pay.

Of course, there are many factors outside our control that can impact actual incentive payouts within an organization. The continued COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, supply chain disruptions, and the war in Ukraine are but four that come to mind immediately. While we cannot be certain of any incentive plan’s payout amounts in 2023, we can be mindful of internal and external considerations, and weave them into the plan’s design.

What plan design approach is your organization using for 2023? Please share some high-level thoughts with us in the comment box below!