I'm hearing that Social Security Commissioner Saul is considering opening his agency's field offices to the public on Saturdays. Nothing is definite yet. This comes on the heels of a recent decision to keep the field offices open Wednesday afternoons.
I represent claimants before the Social Security Administration. I am extremely concerned about the level of service the agency delivers. If I thought this would help, I'd applaud it. However, I know it's going to have the opposite effect. Field office staff was already stretched almost to the breaking point before the decision to keep the offices open Wednesday afternoons. There is now no time for field office staff to deal with complicated time-consuming tasks because they're on a treadmill dealing with customers who want to be seen. You make the problem worse if you open the field offices on Saturdays. Opening the offices on Saturdays would be great for service if the agency had plenty of staff. With severe staff shortages, it can only hurt service.
It concerns me that many field office employees are eligible to retire. How will they react to being forced to come in on Saturdays to deal with claimants? My guess is that a significant number will decide to retire. Those experienced employees are the very ones who are most productive. A wave of retirements even if immediately replaced with new employees will mean worse service because the new employees won't be as productive and will make many mistakes.
It bothers me that the Commissioner seems to know little about what goes on in the field offices and isn't listening to those who do. Please go out of your office, Mr. Saul, and talk with field office personnel. Let them show you what they do all day.
43 comments:
What is the source of this? If it is true it will be a disaster. You are completely right that this agency which is already short staffed will break and the backlog will only get worse if this happens.
I would be interested in hearing where you heard this from? I don't believe the contract even stipulates adding a non-workday into the rotation. It would seem like that would violate the contract as it stands.
Hire more people to staff on Saturday either full or half day? Heck yeah!
Try to do it without hiring more? Nothing burger. Won't help and likely hurts overall.
Saturdays are for family. If he were to implement this nonsense, I would resign immediately. I imagine it would be widespread.
As a current FO manager with 23 years of service, I sure hope this doesn’t happen. The cost for guard service alone would be huge. We spend a lot of money on guard service. Over 40% of my staff is early out eligible and this will push them over edge. I’d join them as soon as I hit 25 years.
Under my Unitary Executive Manual, it states "The President has the right to order, and expect compliance with, any action that is not prohibited by the laws of physics."
Since Saul is an agent of the Unitary Executive, he can order SSA employees to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to the extent that such an order does not violate the laws of physics.
Presuming that a human needs at least 4 hours of sleep a night and at least one meal of 1,000 calories per day (biology being derivative of physics), this means that the SSA offices should be able to be open at least 19 hours a day, 7 days a week.
(The best way to look at this is to think of any regulation put into place after from about 1890 to about 1929 and then remove those limitations.)
Back in the SSI rollout days FO management in Chicago (at least) had mandatory overtime on Saturdays and we conducted (since discredited) group redeterminations. Getting permission to not work Saturday was difficult and held against you. That was bad enough, but the extra day of incoming paperwork added to the loss of a day of adjudicating and processing led to serious quality issues.
Any Saturday work would be overtime and I would expect that many field office employees would be happy to have it.
I work in the payment center and having a few hours of overtime makes a huge difference in my pay. Time and a half for a few hours makes a big difference. Also it would be good for the public who needs to access the Social Security office when many of them work Monday to Friday.
Saul should give everyone back one one day of telework per week along with the Saturday FO option, that would work.
Unlike Wednesday afternoons, Saturday overtime has long been very productive in getting cases cleared. Many employees take advantage of this true quiet time and productivity is generally very good. Wednesday afternoons slowly but surely became a time of extended lunches, office parties, non operations training sessions--mainly watching PC videos from CO including former Commissioners ego boosting sessions. Weekend public access has been tried before and failed. Mr. Saul I hope you read this blog...
This is the problem when your commissioner doesn’t know and doesn’t care to understand what the employees who give him his corner office and second pension do. Customer service is not simply intake, it is completing the back end work that gets the public paid properly and their business handled accurately. i am a claims specialist who cares about providing quality service to the public and Saul’s impulsive “management” is doing NOTHING to improve quality in the Agency. Opening on a Saturday will not help backlogs; it will only increase them. Slashing time to properly pay and process claims is foolhardy and a slap in the face to employees who are trying to focus on quality instead of quantity. Saul clearly doesn’t understand or care about Social Security at all. These programs affect real people’s lives and should not be managed like a cheap retail shoe store. He should be ashamed of himself for being so ignorant about the work we do on the front lines and for causing so much disruption to a program that has worked for 84 years before his mismanagement and focus on quantity over quality.
Anon@5:34pm,
As much as I hate to say it, there is no actual guarantee that there will even be any future early retirement opportunities. The agency has to request early out authority from OPM each year under guise of workforce restructuring. If the commissioner doesn't request VERA authority (and Saul seems exactly like somebody who might decide not to do it, considering his other actions to date), the agency can't offer them. This commissioner seems more the type to make employees so miserable that they quit rather than "reward" them with a retirement.
That being said, I see no way that they can do this without a huge hiring spree. And, even then, it would take years to get enough halfway competent employees to accomplish it.
Maybe he plans to hire contractors to do it.
re: Anon@10:14pm,
Field offices have been living on overtime the last several years and most field employees able to work it are simply worn down and out from working it. There is simply nothing more depressing than spending hours and hours and hours working overtime that doesn't even make a dent in your work backlogs.
Additionally, while it is good that you can work it and actually benefit from it, overtime isn't an option for all employees. A good portion of the agency workforce in the 10-15 year experience range are female employees with young children. I can tell you from experience that those employees often simply can't work overtime without major family complications.
Amen. Same in the Savannah DO. I finally refused Saturday OT. Why would you give extra hours, extra work to accomplish what an extra employee should be doing. And to loose 40% of OT pay to taxes? Hell no.
I would argue that there is a HUGE difference in a field office or other public facing office opening to the public on Saturday and a payment center getting Sat overtime. I'd leave the speaking for or against it to those directly affected.
Saul comes from a retail sales background. Working on weekends is part of that environment.
The fact is that there are many people who cannot complete the online process of dealing with Social Security and either work, or require someone who does work, to assist them in dealing with Social Security. Saturday openings, even for just a few hours would be perfect for them.
And I get it that Social Security Employees would not like Saturday work. But if service to the public is the goal, then this can and should be implemented.
Provided, of course, that it is adequately staffed. The last is, I know, a very big if.
I am actually for it with these stipulations:
1. The current SSA employees volunteer to work the extra day w/ more pay.
2. Hire some contractors for the 1 extra day. Then those could be groomed for full time positions.
This could work if handled properly. But not confident Saul is doing this to help his employees. It seems like kind of an old-school way in dealing with employees. Like they must work until they die and should be lucky to have a job kind of mentality. Pretty sure this is Saul's mindset.
Or maybe it is more dishonest in a way to make SSA fail so they can privatize and get 1 of Trump's buddies to run the system.
What makes you think it would have to be OT on Sat? they could simply give you Tuesday off instead and you still only work your 40 hours. They could spread it out over M-F amongst the staff. This is a train wreck waiting to happen.
anon@9:59am,
The proposal being floated includes both additional Saturday hours PLUS later closing hours during the week. I've been told by folks who know that AFGE is literally having a screaming fit over it right now.
Given that many offices barely have enough staff now to operate on a 5 day workweek, it isn't feasible for them to operate another day at that level of staffing without forced overtime or massive hiring that isn't happening.
An additional complication is the infrastructure. Over the last 15 years, the agency has continually squeezed itself into smaller and smaller spaces to save money on rent. They based this on the agency definition of what constituted "fully staffed" for an office, a definition that has never been near the realm of reality. Many offices don't have the space to accommodate additional employees even if they could hire them.
And, without major changes to SSA security policy, contractors aren't an option as contractors are never allowed direct access to SSA systems (this is true even for contracted software developers hired by the agency and is one reason its software modernization process sucks so badly).
Finally, there are the systems issues. Systems does a lot of work on Saturdays behind the scenes. Sometimes the work they do is minimally disruptive with only minimal staff working overtime but would be disruptive with full staff. There are other activities performed (like archiving, for instance) that can prevent systems access for half the day.
But, now for the good news! This won't affect Mr. Saul at all -- after all, he has minions to cover him when he goes to play golf (or to ride his bicycle in prohibited areas).
@7:35, it's clear you have no real understanding of what it's like in a local FO, so i'll give you a pass, but Saturday is not an option for public interaction.
A quarter of my office, my self included, are eligible to retire and should this nonsense come to fruition we would all retire immediately. Then the office would be staffed by mostly rookies that are still learning their job. Good luck with that.
The idea sounds good if one thinks about the person with a job that wants to file for Medicare and can't do it online for some reason. Rather than taking time off work, he or she could come in Saturday and file. Unfortunately, this is a tiny minority of the folks that come into an office. A substantial number of people that come in are on SSI--check reduced, check stopped, redetermination needed, change in living arrangement, spend down, etc.
The number of people that need to come in on Saturday is a tiny percentage of the people who do come in to SSA offices.
If you worked in the fo and actually dealt with the people I'm sure you would be singing a different tune. Im surprised that you feel this way especially when PC is already backed logged and unable to process current workloads in a timely manner.
Worst decision ever! First telework, the vision program, then wed afternoons, now this! All this will do is cause a wave of retirements, and destroy the morale of those who cannot leave. Saul is terrible and needs to go!
Do you seriously think they are going to give you overtime? Wake up, theres no funding for overtime. This would mean they would have to create schedules, similar to retail markets, giving you sunday off plus a day during the week off to cover opening on Saturdays. This isnt for your(employees benefit) or the publics benefit. If the agency doesnt hire more staff, then its not going to work! Botton line is the agency needs more staff!
This is a terrible idea. Nobody says Saturday will be OT. It could become schedule shift work, where the work week for some people becomes Tues-Sat. It would be interesting to see if there will be weekend differential pay or if everyone will be told that if they offer OT to employees on a Sat. then the office will be open to the public.
There is no way that hiring new employees will help with this problem. New hire training takes 16 weeks still plus close to a year of case reviews in ePAD to be proficient. Time spent training takes away from production too, so a new hire today won’t help anything for 6 or more months. And that’s assuming mass retirement doesn’t just offset the new hires.
Has anyone confirmed this is an actual proposal being discussed or just a rumor about Saul?
am concerned about bill of rights because some of worship on Saturdays will we be in trouble because of our reglion?
9:20am: SSA can't hire contractors for 1 day's work per week. What would untrained new hires do if working on a Saturday? Call numbers? and then do what? It takes years of training to learn the complicated programs. Training itself takes lots of time, which cannot be spent on clearing cases.
With Wednesday afternoon gone, anyone who works Saturday will be trying to process the backlog and that’s assuming morale is still high enough that people will come in. Saul has no idea how bad this will increase the backlog. From my brief interaction with him and hearing him speak to us and answer questions he is completely out of touch with day to day operations and what the field and PC actually do.
I retired in 2011. If i were still working now, I would retire rather than work forced Saturdays.
If you want to compare it to a retail environment, at least when you call the hardware department at Walmart, someone actually answers the phone. You dont have to leave a message and hope someone calls you back in 3 weeks to tell you about the screwdriver, if you ever hear anything ever at all. Or imagine going to the front buggy area at Walmart and filling out a paper to see the screwdriver and being told someone will call you back but you can't even get a name of who is going to call you. And when you ask for a manager at Walmart, a manager gets on the phone and resolves the problem. It isn't the worker at the next desk who got handed the phone, or another voice mail that never gets returned.
A field office employee recently told me the letter I had faxed and mailed in August had to be sent again with her name on it because management divides up the workload by reviewing the mail and faxes and assigns them, and they are three months behind.She said the same thing happens to any documents generated or received at the window. There are two problems. One is that the people at the window don't actually solve the problem or put you to the window of the person who can either 1) solve it while you are there, or 2) tell you what to bring and make an appointment for you to bring it back to that same person so you can get it resolved on the second visit. The second problem is there is no tracking of incoming contact and how quickly ir correctly the incoming contact is handled to resolution. There needs to be an identification of the issues and a check off that the issues were resolved, not just a phone call was made and a message was left, and the whole process has to start over. That would reduce your backlog.
anon@11:03am,
That was bull. The Worktrack system the agency uses to track unworked workloads like your letter can easily be searched by SSN to find things.
She just didn't want to look for it.
Maybe he plans to get re-employed recent annuitants to do it.
Who knows? I predict this will die quietly in the end.
Comparing SSA to retail is a mistake. Perhaps the better comparison is with a financial manager. I say that because while SSN cards seem to be simple commodities, they have requirements in order to be "sold". And benefits aren't "Walmart" simple (find item, pay money, take item). It's a false analogy to look at SSA field offices in a retail lens.
What I think might work instead is to hire more people for a second Tues-Sat shift. Hire people who are specifically willing to work Tues-Sat (adjust pay rate as needed) and supplement gaps with OT. I would then set the schedule like this: each employee has 4 days in the office/dealing with the public (the days depending on what shift they are hired for), and one day telework (no Mondays or Saturdays as these days have less staff working) to deal with backend work and to provide phone support only if backend work is complete. The telework day would be staggered to ensure adequate staffing.
The bottom line here is that, if Saul wants better customer service, there are ways, but he's going to have to pay for it.
The comment above that comparing the SSA to retail is what one would expect from a government bureaucrat. This translates to, because we are the government, we shouldn't be expected to provide good customer service. The bureaucrats are almost always going to resist change and advocate for the status quo. I would ask this commenter, is it your position that the SSA should not try to improve customer service simply because it is a government agency and not a business?
@12:38 - This is a ridiculous question. As a 20 year bureaucrat with SSA, I can say I don't think I've met a single person who didn't want to improve customer service. What most of us take exception to are political appointees who want to make a quick show of what they are able to "accomplish" based on optics and without regard to overall impact. The reality is Social Security's issues are deep and complicated and there are not easy fixes. They mainly revolve around old, antiquated computer systems and lack of sufficient staffing. Many executives, career employees and event the occasional political appointee know this and some will acknowledge it. Others, knowing the truth, will still look for creative window dressing so they can say, "look what I've done to improve service." The scary ones are the ones who haven't taken the time to learn the truth and yet charge ahead on some quixotic quest. I'm afraid this may be Saul. Time will tell.
I"m not opposed to working on Saturdays. The reality is I doubt we get substantial traffic on Saturdays and unless we hire additional employees the end result will be reallocating staff from weekdays when we have lots of customers to weekends when we will have fewer. Doesn't sound like a recipe for better service to me.
@927 You do realize that Monday is the busiest day of the week?
Saul is trying to make customer service a priority the way it should be like he did for TSP. SSA for to long has made other goals a priority. Employee engagement, work-life balance, diversity, etc. These are important but at the end of the day we need a quality workforce willing to roll up it's sleeves to get the job done. Public sector has always been a tough place to work. It seems alot I read is resentment that a boomer is the commissioner for the next 6 years.
@ 9:59 Bingo! Current employees will begin to work Tue-Sat thus eliminating all OT.
Then there are the mysterious 500 yet to be named hires the COSS has said are to be hired for Operations in 2020. These will be 1-3yr NTE GS 5's with no path to status.
@6:02PM I thought your comment was going to make sense and then you started spouting off "employee engagement" and "work-life balance" as though any real energy has been put into these that takes away from customer service at all. "Integrity Workloads"-- that is the one thing you could cut back on in order to focus on customer service, but I doubt you or anyone else like you supports that.
@6:02, you're completely incorrect. When you welcome yourself with a statement which essentially craps on the employees and then kicks them when they are down by removing a program that has been in place for years, you are going to reduce, eliminate, destroy morale. There barely ever was a push towards work-life balance.
Or rehires! I'm sure there are some that would like to return to work part-time!
Post a Comment