Performance evaluation

Incorporating monthly goals into caseworkers’ job descriptions and yearly evaluations was management’s way of encouraging the deployment of the valued actions to improve DAFS’ performance. With newly hired employees, supervisors were required to inform them of their monthly quotas as a matter of protocol. Although new employees were not held accountable for those numbers during their probationary period, they were used as a basis for their ‘progressive improvement’. As Alyssa explained,

Supervisors are required to give them the performance standards so they can sign off and have an understanding of what they’re gonna be evaluated on… So, as soon as you come on board, you’re receiving a copy of an evaluation and you’re getting the performance standards that say how many widgets you must meet every month. But, that’s in writing.You’re supposed to

communicate and tell them, ‘you’re new, these numbers will come along; our goal is just to say that you’ve progressively improved over and over. (Alyssa, InterviewManagement)

Reviewing the job description of enforcement caseworkers, it is clear that performance standards featured heavily in the document. Goals were explicitly stated and exerted a sense of discipline (Espeland and Stevens 2008) on those who were subject to them. As stated in the 2012 version of their “Duties and Responsibilities”, Enforcement caseworkers must adhere to certain standards and failure to do so could lead to disciplinary measures.

In order to meet goals on the Enforcement federal performance measures each year, each member of the Enforcement Unit must fully understand their major duties and responsibilities in terms of critical Unit priorities as well as

necessary work volumes and quality of work to be maintained at all times…. Failure to abide by these priorities, work quality and work volume

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Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). Compliance (or lack thereof) by the case manager with these priorities and requirements shall be a part of all annual evaluations of case managers by Supervisors, the Unit Administrator, and the Assistant Director. (Enforcement Unit, Duties and Responsibilities, revision 06/11/2012, emphasis added)

Immediately following the introductory section of this document is the ‘Specific Priorities and Volume Requirements’ section. Listed in this seven-page document are the monthly quotas for the specific actions that Enforcement

caseworkers are expected to accomplish. References to these actions and quotas are made to stand out through formatted text (e.g. boldface and underscore), thus further emphasizing their significance by incorporating additional semantic elements. This document, therefore, is an important actant in the framing of the measures. It is a mechanism for delineating the actions of caseworkers and establishing the link between their actions, the measures, and the valued good.

When numbers were used to define the actions that mattered, they became a convenient referent (Dambrin and Robson 2011) for the actions that caseworkers had to carry out. Such referencing, however, required the monitoring and reporting devices so managers could track, count, and measure their activities and determine whether monthly goals were being met. These devices, therefore, were indispensable in providing ‘objective’ representations of the outputs that caseworkers knowingly and deliberately produced. Without them, caseworkers’ good performance would have been non-existent. As John explained,

So, if I go by…pull a case on John Doe 1, it’s gonna tell me on the very top, last action taken was a phone call on this date to tell him to make a payment. And I know to look at the notes on that day, what happened on the phone call. And then let’s say I decided to suspend his license. On the bottom there’s a whole list of actions I took. And, I’ll select that I called him, ‘hey, make a payment’, and then I’ll select, you know, suspended his license. And that automatically notates under my name on the file. And at the end of the month, my supervisor’s able to go and pull from day 1 to day 30, how many calls I made, how many licenses I suspended, how many contempts did I send to the

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court. And then that’s what they’ll put on my final record, so that way when it comes time for my review, they’ll look at all my months and they’ll say, ‘you made each month’. (John, InterviewCaseworker)

With the monthly goals and devices in place, caseworkers focused on performing the actions that count, thus enabling the measures to perform. Their engagement with the tools further reinforced the valued actions because they (i.e. the tools) knew exactly ‘how many orders we established, how many people we served, how many cases we touched’. Caseworkers, therefore, became strategic in their approach to case management. As Kathlyn said, ‘[t]hese are all targets and tells me what to do next. So, these numbers, when they’re coming through on our reports, I’m knowing where to look’. At the end of each month, the reporting devices gave them a snapshot of their progress to inform them of how well they performed. Meeting their quotas not only meant meeting the standard of GP; it also indicated their level of competence that the assemblage of actors and devices successfully established. Hence, for John, knowing where he stood was all that mattered: ‘My thing is I look at the last month and this month. I went up, that’s all I care about. That’s how I look at myself’. This ‘emotional attachment’ (Espeland, 2016) triggered by the numbers, which served as ‘powerful symbols of belonging, identity, and status’ (p. 288), propelled the making of GP at DAFS. Emotionally attached to them, caseworkers began using numbers as proxies for their good (or bad) works and as vehicles of investments for directing action (Espeland, 2016).