Making a Case for Numbers

Data that measure an employee’s performance can appear ominous. But Gerald Ray, an administrative judge and 37-year veteran at the Social Security Administration, believes people should overcome that fear. He thinks eyeing a meter on one’s productivity can enrich expertise and improve agency efficiency. 

As deputy executive director of the Office of Appellate Operations in SSA’s Office of Disability Adjudication and Review, Ray has drawn on data analytics to educate 600 analysts, who process appeals from people whose benefits claims have been denied, as well as  some interested administrative judges.

The result: Productivity rose for 23 straight quarters from 2008 to 2013, and the portion of cases remanded for further review dropped from 22 percent to 14.4 percent in 2014. 

A fringe benefit was that Ray won a 2014 Presidential Distinguished Rank Award, and his SSA team over the past five years earned two W. Edwards Deming Awards from Graduate School USA.

Such improvements are needed. The Social Security Disability program is feeling pressure from a funding shortfall and under fire in Congress for a hearing backlog and payments to undeserving claimants.

“I built things in-house using software available for data analytics, using [computer language programs] SAS and MatLab and Microsoft Excel to map the disability process,” says Ray, who started at Social Security as a claims authorizer in 1977. “You’ve got a lot of business rules, law and regulations, and we mapped those to each of the policy outcomes affecting disability claims. Then we built tools for structured data on whether people followed that correct path and on the quality of the work. We then could home in on training where the policy problems were, based on heat map visualizations.”

Armed with quantitative reports on each employee’s case completion rate, Ray’s next challenge was to convert that data into direct feedback to change behavior. “This improves the quality of the work, which saves money because you don’t have to rework the cases and send them back on remand,” he explains. “Getting the right answer in the first instance means better quality service that is both cheaper and faster.”

Not everyone shares his enthusiasm. “People are somewhat skeptical when you start out in terms of measuring how fast, how well and how timely their work is,” says Ray, who works in the SSA office in Falls Church, Virginia. “They don’t like to be under performance standards, to have to hit some level, and they’re concerned that quality will drop off if productivity rises. They want to go as fast as they can, but the most important thing is to be fair and accurate.”

Inevitably, even the best make mistakes. Ray aims to create “a learning culture, where people want to learn to do the work better,” he says. “Research shows people are highly motivated to become subject matter experts.”

The problem is adults often resist training. “If you’ve been doing something for a while, you naturally think you have expertise,” Ray says. “But if you’re not getting feedback in terms of how you learned, you may have learned things not completely consistent with the law. Some people had developed a model of how to apply the business rules but not always in a policy compliant manner.”

Ray consulted Princeton University psychology and public affairs professor Daniel Kahneman to gain insight into adult learning. Ray wanted to get through to employees who’ve spent years developing an assumption that they know the law. He learned that the job is done best when the process is stable, when employees are immersed in the work and when feedback comes regularly.

“We wanted to find a way to get people up to a new level of expertise more quickly, so we changed our entire training methodology,” Ray says. “Adults learn differently than children—they need more context.” Rather than presenting business rules in front of a class—in which people understand when they hear the material but don’t retain it—the office shifted to “a more interactive, immersion process, in which people began looking at cases on day one,” he says. What had been an eight-week class that examined no actual cases became a six-week class reviewing 30. The time for developing expertise was cut from 18 months to five. 

“We developed a “How Am I Doing?” tool so that when someone makes an error, we push training directly to them, in tiers,” Ray says. “Here’s a description of the policy, here’s the mistake, here’s how to avoid it. To get past that, we focus on saying, `You’re not a bad person, we just want to help you do a better job.’” That helps get past the resistance, and the employees become more receptive, he adds.

When errors go down, SSA saves money. Ray does not feel pressure to make economizing the main goal. “We want to do the work as timely and efficiently as possible,” he says. “But we’re either paying people who are disabled or paying people who aren’t, which is worse. My job is to make sure we’re getting it right.”

Even so, his team’s analysis allows the agency to target training and feedback, and that’s saving a lot of money.

SSA has evolved considerably since Ray walked into the Baltimore office in 1977. His technical mind and law degree eventually helped him progress to hearing and appeals analyst, civil actions analyst, branch chief and, in 1996, an administrative appeals judge. In 2000, Ray chaired the Appeals Council Process Improvement Initiative, for which he helped develop an electronic case analysis tool implemented in 2008.

“One of the core changes was the move toward electronic folders from a system where it was all paper-based,” he recalls. “Now you can electronically send files rapidly back and forth, and claimants can submit directly into our files.” Capturing data helps SSA formulate policy and create structured data. “We’re getting smarter and better at what we do,” he adds.

On the downside, the staff doesn’t grow with the workload, says Ray, who had to preside over furloughs in 2013. “It’s a budgetary issue,” he says. “The cases are stacked up waiting for work, which is unfortunate from a public service perspective. We can’t do much about it.”

As for Ray’s success, he says it’s not about recognition. “What drives me is making the agency more efficient. I wish more people understood how government works. It’s not often talked about outside the Beltway, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s going right.”