DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Workload Issues Plague Caseworkers
(Originally published October 2024)
Policymakers, advocates, scholars and others who have never worked in child welfare often have difficulty grasping the effects of overwhelming workloads on child welfare staff and on agency practice. In addition, they sometimes become irritated with child welfare staff who use excessive workload as an all-purpose excuse for bad practice. Nevertheless, in many states and large cities, it is impossible to understand the deficiencies of child welfare practice, or engage in effective reform initiatives, without addressing workload issues that may have existed for years or decades. Washington is one of these states, despite workload studies conducted in 1993, 2000, 2007, and recently in 2023.
The public policy commitment, or lack of commitment, to adequately staffing a state or large city’s child welfare system is arguably the best indicator of policymakers’ concern with child welfare. Apart from salaries and benefits, nothing is more important to sustaining a well-supported and experienced workforce than staffing a child welfare agency to reasonable workload standards. Allowing a child welfare system to be grossly understaffed for years or decades is a clear indication of the low regard legislatures and Governors have for the quality of the child welfare workforce and, by implication, child welfare services as a whole.
There is a large body of research regarding the relationship between caseworker retention rates and workload demands. However, research studies often lack a qualitative component that sheds light on how unreasonable workloads undermine caseworkers’ commitment to sticking with challenging jobs. When child welfare agencies are understaffed for lengthy periods of time, caseworkers are unable to perform their jobs in full compliance with policies. As caseworkers are forced to routinely compromise program standards, many of these standards (e.g., completing risk assessments or making collateral contacts during a CPS investigation) become aspirational at best, and may eventually be completely forgotten. For conscientious caseworkers (the great majority of child welfare staff), to perform work understood by agency standards to be inadequate creates hard to tolerate tension, as well as sometimes endangering a child’s safety and efforts to support troubled families.
The inability to comply with program standards also leaves caseworkers and supervisors vulnerable to negative internal reviews, audits and other assessment of performance, and possibly worse when a child has been seriously injured or dies due to child maltreatment. It is hard to defend the failure to make a required home visit, or mandatory contact with a medical professional or treatment provider following a child fatality or near fatality.
Most child welfare supervisors and middle managers have the common sense and good judgment to adjust their expectations of casework performance to workload demands. Competent supervisors and middle managers also accept responsibility for clarifying priorities when caseworkers must decide which policy directives to maintain and which to ignore. However, some supervisors and managers refuse to acknowledge that workload demands are unreasonable (or impossible) and resort to bullying staff to enforce compliance with all or specific program standards. Some states (such as Oregon) have tolerated or endorsed managerial bullying of caseworkers, according to published reports, and I have heard stories of this type of managerial misconduct in Washington. Bullying, in turn, creates an incentive for fraudulent recording in case records, instances of which have led to criminal indictment of caseworkers in a few states during recent years.
Excessive workloads that continue for years have a profound effect on child welfare programs by narrowing the on-the-ground understanding of child welfare mission. Child protection systems (such as Washington’s) that have adopted the mistaken idea that a child is ‘safe or unsafe’ at the point of initial CPS contact with a family have done so under intense pressure to narrow the grounds for CPS intervention, partly (but not solely) due to workload demands. CPS caseworkers in these agencies tend to prioritize making initial contact with families during a strict time frame and conducting an immediate safety assessment; but rarely invest much effort in follow up contacts with a family to reassess child safety, conduct risk assessment, or implement intensive safety and service plans. Much CPS contact with families is “one and done,” with more attention given to documentation than to contact with family members or community professionals. Once inexperienced caseworkers have learned this approach to child protection, it is difficult to change their practice, even when reduced workload pressures make this possible.
Similarly, overwhelmed foster care/kin care caseworkers usually focus their attention on legal case management, including visitation requirements, resulting in minimal contact with the foster child or foster/kin care caregivers, who are left without support to manage the challenges of caring for a behaviorally troubled child or sibling group. This can be an embittering experience for foster parents when they realize that the caseworker of a child in their home resents or ignores their requests for concrete assistance or emotional support.
Workload studies
In order to develop defensible workload standards, some states and large counties have conducted workload studies, while many others have depended on workload standards developed by the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) or other organizations, presumably after reviewing workloads studies and surveying child welfare staff for their views re reasonable workload standards.
The great majority of workload studies have utilized the same methodology: cases in various programs that correspond to case assignment, e.g. Intake, CPS investigations, Family Assessment Response, Family Voluntary Services, Family Foster Care, Licensing, are divided into tasks such as (for CPS) interviews with family members, documentation, case staffing, etc., a large sample of which are measured by surveying assigned caseworkers to find the average time they require. The studies arrive at two averages: (a) Measured time, i.e., the monthly average number of hours caseworkers in a specific program worked on open cases and, (b) Estimated time, i.e., the number of hours required to be in full compliance with agency policies.
Calculating the average monthly hours worked on CPS investigations, voluntary service cases, etc. is straightforward: add the total hours caseworkers reported working on CPS investigations and divide by the number of CPS investigations or voluntary service cases in the sample. However, these workload studies arrive at ‘estimated time’ needed to fully comply with agency policy in ways that may not be intuitively obvious; and not all studies have used the same methodology. The approach used in the 2023 DCYF workload study was to calculate an average time for each program task, regardless of sample size, and then add these averages together to calculate an estimated time needed to complete all required tasks for cases of various types.
Some earlier studies utilized a committee of agency staff to review the data gathered in the workload study, and estimate how many additional hours would be needed to meet agency standards for each program. There are pros and cons to both ways of estimating the hours needed to fully comply with program standards.
All the workload studies I have reviewed since the early 1990s agree on one major point: caseworkers spend close to 50 hours per month (almost 30% of hours worked during a month) on non-case activities such as training, meetings, breaks; and have approximately 120 hours per month to work on cases. I am not aware of any public child welfare agency in the U.S. that has been able to exceed this limit on case activities for caseworkers who do not work overtime.
Every workload study I am aware of has found a large difference between the average number of hours per month caseworkers work on various types of cases and the average number of hours required to fully comply with agency policies.
For example, the 2007 workload study in Washington found the following:
Unit Measured Recommended
Time Standard
(hours per month, except intake, a one-time unit)
Intake 1 2
CPS Investigation 7 10
Family Voluntary 4 10
Services
Family Dependency 5 10
DLR FH Licensing 3 6
In 2023 the differences were even more extreme:
The 2023 Department of Children, Youth and Family (DCYF) workload study reflects a 56% to 92% increase in the time required to assess or investigate CPS reports according to agency standards since 2007, and a 20% increase in estimated time needed to comply with agency policies for foster care and voluntary service cases since 2007. The study found that the difference between the hours per month caseworkers work on cases and the hours needed to fully comply with program standards increased dramatically for CPS and FAR caseworkers while decreasing greatly for caseworkers who carry foster care/ kin care cases since 2007.
In 2023, CPS and FAR staff averaged less than one-third of the hours per case needed to fully comply with agency policies, according to the DCYF workload study. However, child welfare services (CWS) caseworkers who manage cases of children in foster/kin care almost doubled the hours per month they worked on each child’s case since 2007, which makes sense given the large decline in the state’s foster care population since 2019.
The 2023 DCYF workload study indicates that, given current program standards, the workload standard for CPS investigations should be six new investigations assigned per month, or less when there are investigations carried over from the previous month; for FAR staff, eight new assessments assigned per month, or less, when cases are carried over from the previous month; for Family Voluntary Services staff, a maximum of eight family cases open during a month; for caseworkers managing foster care cases, no more than ten children on open cases at any one time.
According to the DCYF 2025 Annual Progress and Services Report, CPS caseloads in 2023 varied from 12-20 among regions, resulting in a caseload 2-3 times higher than needed to fully comply with CPS program standards. One might assume that a workload study that found CPS caseworkers averaged 6.55 hours per case when they needed 19.2 hours per case, and that FAR staff averaged 4.55 hours per case when they needed 15.6 hours to comply with policy would recommend an increase of several hundred additional casework positions to current CPS/FAR staffing levels. Surprisingly, the 2023 DCYF workload study concluded that only 28 additional positions were needed to allow CPS/FAR caseworkers to triple the hours working on open cases. What could be the rationale for such a seemingly preposterous recommendation?
The 2007 (Washington) Children’s Administration workload study recommended a huge increase in casework positions based on the difference in actual time worked on case activities and the time needed to meet program standards. Legislators on key committees viewed the recommendation for a minimum of hundreds of new positions with derision (to put it mildly). The report’s recommendations were politically DOA, which may explain the 16-year gap in workload reports in Washington.
The 2023 DCYF workload report takes a different approach: For each program, it multiplies the number of cases open on May 24, 2023 by the number of hours required to fully meet program standards, and then divides this total by 119.8, i.e., the number of hours available monthly for case activities. For example: 1855 CPS investigations open on 5/24 X 19.2 = 35,616 hours, divided by 119.8, equals 297.3 casework positions. The study’s authors then compared this number to the number of CPS investigators on June 1, 2024 as reported by DCYF, i.e., 277. According to this methodology, DCYF needs only 20 additional CPS caseworkers to nearly triple the hours worked monthly on CPS investigations, while FAR units would need only eight new positions!
This flawed analysis 1) does not take vacancy rates into account; in 2023, the DCYF caseworker vacancy rate varied from 11-21% among the six DCYF regions; actual caseload averages are determined by filled positions, not allotted positions; 2) uses a one-day count of cases as a proxy for cases worked during an entire month. The most important factor for understanding or managing CPS/FAR caseload is the number of new investigations/ assessments assigned per month, not the number of open cases on any one day.
However, the 2023 DCYF workload study suggests another possibility: that a large number of casework positions indicated by budget allotments have been assigned to various non-case carrying program manager positions, e.g., as coaches and consultants. If so, one of the ways of relieving workload pressures would be to reduce the number of these positions and add to the number of case-carrying staff. It is also apparent that a significant part of the blame for overwhelming workloads in CPS and FAR should be directed at management teams that have steadily added to workload requirements, sometimes due to changes in law, but more often due to external pressures to improve specific child welfare practices. Giving into these pressures leads to short term political gain at the cost of increasing workload pressures, an old story in child welfare agencies. At the very least, any increase in funded casework positions should be accompanied – and be contingent on – a large reduction in prescriptive requirements in all programs. The idea that the only way or best way to improve child welfare practice is by adding to program requirements is false. In fact, the opposite is usually true for experienced staff.
Weighting formulas
One of the most important findings of the recent workload study is that some categories of cases require more time than average, and should be given additional weight in case counts. Indian child welfare (ICW) cases, CPS investigations of families with three or more children and cases of children with disabilities averaged 25% to 70% more hours worked monthly than other cases of the same type or, for ICW, non-ICW cases of all types. For example, cases of children with disabilities averaged more than three additional hours per month than cases of children without an identified disability (4.94 hours vs. 8.11 hours). These types of cases should be given additional weight in order to fairly assign work within units and among units. ©
References
2025 Annual Progress and Services Report (APSR), Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Family Services, revised
August 24, 2024.
Public Consulting Group, Child Welfare and Indian Child Welfare Workload Study: Final Legislative Report, Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Family Services, June 2023.
Walter R. McDonald & Associates, Washington State Children’s Administration Workload Study, Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, Children’s Administration, November 2007.
Wilson, D., “Workload Management in Child Welfare: Supervisor’s Training PowerPoint, Casey Family Programs, March 2014.
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©Dee Wilson
