FCE: Preparing Staff

PREPARING STAFF

Preparing WDB staff for success with FCE

Preparing Staff with tools and resources to enable their assistance to job seekers. 

Train WDB staff on Family-Centered Coaching

How it works, why it is important and how WDB staff can use it. Leverage The Prosperity Agenda’s “Overview of Family-centered Coaching” and “Building a Family-focused Mindset”. Their toolkit includes additional information about child well-being and parenting, legal, financial, health, and food/housing/transportation needs

Lack of Skills or Experience

WDB staff often don’t have the skills and experience to work with job seekers about the needs of their family. Some will be uncomfortable with a conversation about family needs at first. Training, preparing, and supporting your employees, with new tools and techniques, is important. It will help staff make the transition from case management to coaching, from being transactional to transformational, and developing strong relationships with the job seeker and their family
VIEW HOW
Leverage Tools of Others
Maricopa has training that others can leverage, and they enable their employees to utilize tools such as the Barriers to Success Inventory and the Wheel of Life. They have enhanced The Prosperity Agenda’s training, breaking it up, adding materials and additional guides, including role plays and other hands on activities, and making it more specific to WDBs. There is a total of 12 hours of training and it is recommended to have about 20 people per training. They have delivered this to many Case Managers and have seen significant improvements in outcomes 

The pilot sites identified that training is needed at the beginning of implementation as well as a few key refresher or additional information points throughout the first year or two

Develop an Understanding
WDB staff must develop an understanding that removing key barriers (including family-related barriers) will improve employment outcomes. In addition, understanding the current family and employment situation for a job seeker helps identify the services that will be most impactful, and those that won’t be impactful. Examples are:

Is the job seeker interested in addressing their whole family needs and identifying and preparing for career advancement, or do they just want the next, open job?

How do their children impact a job seeker’s potential work schedule and transportation needs, including potential time off for childbirth?

Training will likely be needed on broader issues that many case managers aren’t familiar with, such as the drivers of systemic poverty, the benefits cliff, and the science of how the brain works, all of which are potential barriers to success.

It is important to develop and nurture the relationship with the job seeker. Staff can’t say “that isn’t my area” to a job seeker. If they don’t have knowledge of an area, they need to find someone that does and work with them to help the job seeker. An example of a strong relationship paying off in Maricopa is when a former job seeker called their coach when they realized they were going to be without child care for a week. They worked it out together and they were able to keep their job
Significant Change
This is a significant change that will cause concern with many employees. It is important to effectively manage the change, letting them know you understand and support them, and then supporting them through the difficult/scary parts. It can help to be upfront that the change is difficult, but you know that and will be there to support them
New Tools/Solutions
WDB staff will need to be familiar with a broader range of programs/services available to job seekers. They won’t need to be experts in them, but they will need to understand the basics and know how to contact the experts. This is part of what enables the shift from talking about specific programs to working with the job seeker to identify the right services for them
A black and white drawing of a cup on a white background.

Services Navigator

El Paso used a tool called servicesnavigator.org to help support resource/service navigation and provide information directly to the job seeker. It includes an asset map that took time to build upfront and the data is updated by WDB personnel. It is online and job seekers also have access to it
A black and white drawing of a medal with a ribbon.

List of Services

Maricopa pulled together a list of services available to the job seeker along with the information for how to access them as an aide to support each coach. They weren’t able to create this with technology, but it worked having the information available manually
Maricopa implemented several changes to meet the job seeker where they are. They extended the hours of some of their centers to help job seekers that couldn’t meet during normal hours and they enabled their staff to reach job seekers via text (seeing a much greater response rate among younger job seekers than with phone calls). They also enabled home visitation (going with their Human Services partners) to help ease transportation and child care issues for the job seekers, which also helped develop a trusting relationship much quicker than if they were only seeing job seekers at a Workforce Center. This also resulted in staff better understanding the needs of the job seekers and working more effectively with the job seeker to come up with the best solutions for the family. El Paso mentioned the need for flexibility around when job seekers are required to come into a Workforce Center (such as with TANF participation) and when a call will work, reducing child care and transportation issues for the job seeker
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