 My name is Darius Lind, I'm from Just Tech. I'm joined today by Anna Steele. So today's training is on, or presentation is on leveraging technology to improve supervision. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Prior to joining Just Tech, I was an attorney at a legal services organization, and I was a supervisor. So I spent a lot of time supervising. And now I'm a senior consultant at Just Tech, Anna. And so my name is Anna Steele, I'm the director of consulting here at Just Tech. Prior to joining Just Tech, I was also at a legal aid organization. And for me, kind of why this, why I really wanted to talk about this today is on one side, Right Just Tech is a distributed team. We have folks all over the country. And I wanted to make sure, and this is something that we're using regularly and talking about regularly, how we can best use technology to kind of work together. And as a supervisor, how I can supervise the folks on my team by using technology. And then also the work that we're doing with legal aid providers around the country. And looking at what folks have been doing and has been working really well throughout the community and kind of translating that into this presentation today. So the kind of techniques that we're talking about today are both from our own experiences and experiences of folks that we've worked with. And hoping that folks will find this useful. If you have any questions, feel free to enter them into the questions box and go to webinar. And SART will help facilitate those throughout. Yeah, the other thing I wanted to say that I think is interesting about this type of topic is that I think it helps us bridge a little bit of the gap. And like I said, I was a practicing attorney at a legal services organization. And sometimes, not always and not with every program, there is a separation. So on one hand, we have our case handlers who are just trying to handle cases. And then for most almost every organization has a technology team or works with technology providers. And sometimes those processes are working in parallel and they're supporting each other, but they don't necessarily integrate. And so what I like to think about is how can we maximize and integrate those experiences so that we can get a better outcome? That's sort of the other sort of a twining of my two backgrounds here. So again, from the legal side of it, I was thinking about this topic in terms of outlining the case for using technology and supervision. So we have a professional and ethical obligation to supervise. It's not just that we want to be good supervisors, but we have to. And if our hope today of what we can sort of outline is some ways that we can start looking at technology that we use already, that we could be using with relatively simple adaptations or changes, and think about ways that it can help us improve the supervision that we're doing and improve sort of the organizational structure that a lot of the supervision functions in. So I sort of started to outline this sort of the places that our obligations come from to be good supervisors. So we have a professional obligation to do this. As a supervisor, I care about the work that I do. I care about the work that people working with me and around me are doing. But I think if we do a good job, we also have to be thinking about these bullet points here. How are we passing along the institutional knowledge from our organization? So all of the people that Anna and I see in our work and I saw when I was practicing where there's these organizations that have years and years of experience, sometimes how we communicate what people in the organization know and how we share that knowledge can be challenging because it's not as easy as sitting down and having a conversation. And sometimes we can, in this environment, we can find some tools to bridge those gaps. Another sort of part of our professional obligation is to improve those outcomes on cases. So I want to make it's really important that we are not just putting people in roles where they do the work, but that we're giving them the best tools to succeed. Another good reason that we need to be looking at supervision is that we need to build relationships that are meaningful with the people that we work with. It doesn't mean you have to be best friends. It doesn't mean you have to even talk all the time, but we do have to have a strong relationship. So moving to the next couple of points here that we're making sure that we have best practices. We're making sure that people are handling cases the way we as an organization or as supervisors believe they should be handled. And that if or when something isn't working the way it should be, either in that supervision relationship or even just something went wrong, right? Somebody's not available. There's an emergency that we have the structures in place to understand what's going on, why it happened, why something is going sideways. And that we have a plan or we can implement a plan. And that's where the technology piece comes in, that we can more quickly identify issues and more quickly plan for solutions. And so the final point and it kind of goes back to the point at the top is continuity. So we have a lot of institutional knowledge. We have some people who are experts in their field who have a really good skill set. And the more we can sort of spend time looking at why people are successful, how they've acquired their knowledge and identify ways that they can share their knowledge to the extent that we wanna improve that, we can foster and encourage better continuity. And that means better outcomes for our clients and more stability for organizations. So beyond a professional obligation, when I was supervising, this is sort of where I started. Now every, there's a sort of a note at the bottom. Every state obviously has their own rules of professional conduct, but it was ingrained into me when I started that, when I supervise people and I ingrained into them as well, that the people I supervise, it's not just a question of their sort of professional license, it's a question of mine too. So as someone doing a work, my supervisor needs to, is on the hook for the professional ethical work that I do. And then as a supervisor, the people that I supervise, if they do something that violates any professional rules of conduct, I'm on the hook. And I think that's, when at least working with on the legal side of the work in legal services, that's about as serious of an incentive as there is. It's really important that we understand our obligations, that we don't just sort of point people in the direction of a courthouse or a client and tell them to check in with me next week, but that we make sure that they understand what's going on. This goes a little bit back to professional obligations, that we orient them, but also that we put people in a position to succeed, because if we're not doing that, we are at risk of violating our ethical obligations. Excuse me. And then on the next level, we have an organizational obligation. So I sort of spending some time looking at like where these ethical obligations have filtered up to organizations. And I was looking at the LSE performance criteria, which outline this item here that we're looking at effective supervision of legal work, which includes regular and detailed supervisory review of cases, that's an indicator of a program meeting their success. So if you paired that with what the ABA standards are for use of technology, which is that technology should be implemented in a way that increases the efficiency of internal operations. I think if we look at those two factors, beyond the professional and ethical obligations, I think as an organization, there is an obligation to develop and implement technology into supervision standards and protocols. So those are like the frameworks that I think we're operating in when we're thinking about why we need to get better at this. So I then sort of started thinking about, well, what's the pitch? Because why should people go about adding new processes, adding new or changing their jobs beyond those obligations? How do we convince the people that we need to go talk to that they need to change what they're doing? So these are sort of the talking points that I was thinking about. I think the bottom line is that we're not trying to add work to what they're doing. A lot of what we think about when we're trying to improve supervision is to look at what already exists, what frameworks, processes to go to the next point are in place. And really it's about adjusting some of those processes, adjusting some of those technologies that we're using to help us make supervision a little bit more easily done. We have the opportunity now with better technologies to automate some of these processes, as we'll talk about later, to make the job, essentially make it easier. I think the key point I wanted to make sort of in this preamble is that you're not gonna use a technology tool to make somebody a good supervisor, right? So that is a personal project. People can become good supervisors through training, through work. You're not gonna purchase some sort of application that's gonna suddenly make someone a supervisor. But what we can do is help get people the information that they need to make those decisions, to make choices that are gonna foster better supervision. So turning towards some of the specific applications, In and I are looking at today two different ways that we can start to utilize technologies that we have or could have in our organizations to meet these obligations that I'm talking about. So the first part of this process, I think is looking at case management systems and other systems that we have and the data around it and optimizing that. The other is using some of that information we get from the first part of this presentation. And other tools that we have available to give folks more flexibility and give supervisors other tools to keep, I wouldn't say keep an eye on, but supervise and monitor work that's being done. So first sort of subtopic is data as a supervision tool. And I'm gonna turn it over to Anna for this conversation. Great, thanks Darius. And so, yeah, right, I think Darius set the context really well for this, right? And the first step is data. So if you wanna go to the next slide. Right, so why did this matter? I think that Darius got into that really well. So how can we make this work? I think, you know, most, if not all of us are using case management systems, whether it is an access database or are doing some sort of case management, right? Whether you're using an access database or a full-fledged case management system, like Legal Server or PICA, we have a ton of data in there, right? We also have data in other systems. I'll talk a little bit about phone systems and the way we manage documents as well. But how do we have the information we need and now we just need to figure out kind of how to manipulate it. And I think it's important to just remember that the data points us toward answers. It's not necessarily going to give us the answer, right? It is not a crystal ball. The data is not something that we can just look at once and make all sorts of conclusions based off of, right? It's a piece of the puzzle and can help point us towards what we want to do. And I think one thing to kind of keep in mind throughout this is that we definitely don't want people using data strictly as a gotcha, right? We don't necessarily want to be using it just for finding underperformance or just for finding overperformance, right? We want to use it to help get a full picture of what's going on in the unit you supervise or in the office you supervise or the organization you supervise and be able to not only make sure that people are working at the top of their practice but also make sure that the work that folks are doing actually aligns with the strategic plan of the organization or the goals of the organization or the grant obligations of the organization. So this is just kind of giving us a little bit more of that feedback. Yeah, and if I could piggyback on it, I think it's a little bit, when we're looking at legacy data in case management systems and trying to sort of inform supervision and best practices, I think it's almost a little bit of a third rail that you have to be really careful with, right? I mean, we're not, and it's important to emphasize, this shouldn't really be used. I mean, I guess organizationally you can decide this, but like our point is not that it should be used for that gotcha analysis, but rather that we can plan a little bit better if we understand the casework that's going on and we can identify places to improve, both by looking at successes and looking at things we wanna do better. But I almost think that on an individual basis, it's probably less helpful than it is on a large scale basis. I know that, and I'm just gonna switch to the next slide here, but I know that with case management systems, we have, let's say 20 years of data, a lot of programs have at least. So you're not really looking at what an individual's work might be, but more like what do we know about our organization and how it does this type of work? I think that's tremendously informative. Yes, yes, definitely. And I think right that the LSC funded folks on the call today, right, this is all very much baked into just general operations, right? Case management systems are second nature to all LSC programs. And I imagine many, many of the other providers out there as well, but the requirement to have these case management systems lays the groundwork really nicely. So when we look at the case management systems, just because we have one doesn't mean that we are fully leveraging it for supervision purposes, right? So places that we wanna think about having either policies or robust development in our case management system include timekeeping or ways to keep records in a case, whether that is for like your day to day timekeeping or only fee generating cases or attorney's fees, right? So there's many organizations are keeping regular time, right? And that is a treasure trove of information as far as supervision goes. Ticklers are minders in calendaring, right? Again, there's a lot of great information that can be pulled out of the tasks and deadlines that people are setting for themselves. And so, and while obviously a lot of this information can be found in folks calendar, Outlook calendar or Google calendar, right? Being able to leverage the case management system to be able to aggregate some of that data can be really useful as well. SMS messaging and other communications, we'll talk about that in a little bit, but making sure that again, if you're using your case management system as a way to communicate with clients or other staff members that we have really good data, even if that data is just the text messages themselves and the fact that they have been sent. And then you may also wanna consider, right? How do we automate or reporting and how do we get the data out to folks, right? I think that an important piece of this, this entire conversation regarding data and supervision is transparency, right? So as a supervisor of a legal unit, if this is something that I'm addressing with my team at our regular case acceptance meeting, right? I wanna be able to share out the aggregate data about how our team is doing as far as our goals or outcomes or closing cases this month or it's the end of the year, how many cases do we have to close before the end of the year, right? So making sure that we figure out either some way to automate or display the information so that we're transparent and it's regularly available. Yeah, and along that line, earlier I was speaking about sort of the divide between tech administration and legal work. And I think you sort of see that a little bit between legal work and sort of grant management or reporting. And I think this is another way to bridge that gap because ultimately all three of these things need to work in concert with each other. So as a case handler, you know, ultimately our number one, the number one obligation is to provide excellent legal work. But having information about the work that's happening in as close to real time is gonna be informative in terms of how you handled that, let's say case acceptance meeting or planning meeting or supervision, checking meeting, right? So I think getting some of these, all of these systems in place that Anna's talking about are sort of a baseline to understanding what's going on. And so I wanted to, today I really want to address some of the kind of low hanging fruit in our case management systems as far as data goes, right? Like we all have some sort of time keeping our activities or notes that there's something happening on a case, most, it's not all systems have open and closed dates for cases, right? Types of cases or your problem code, cases have people who are assigned to them as a handler, right? There are many different ways to track this, but cases have outcomes levels of service, closed reasons, case goals, right? So what happened as a result of this case or is expected to happen as a result of this case? Funding codes, what practice group or unit or office that case is assigned to, right? There's nothing special or crazy about this list, right? This is a very, very standard list of data points that are available in a case management system. Again, whether you're using access or a full-fledged kind of enterprise level case management system, right? This data is most likely available to you. So I wanted to kind of walk through some examples on what we can use this data for. Before we switch to the next one, to sort of emphasize or piggyback on that point, I think when we're talking about sort of our history of data, because this is where I got interested in this initially was that I would know that we have years and years worth of records about cases, but I knew very little about what we could glean from that. And so what I think is interesting here is it's just a reminder that you don't need detailed time notes and timekeeping notes on every single case to start to learn about what has happened and what you could improve on or what you're doing really well, because all of these data points can help are ways that you can slice and dice the data to help you understand a little bit better what's going on. And so just as a... So all of the data that you'll see here is all made up. I didn't pull these from anything in particular. I messed around with some numbers in Excel. So just wanted to throw that out there. So again, starting with the basics, right? Most of us in this training today have probably done something similar, right? To this, in a given time period, how many cases have we closed in each of the standard legal problem code categories? This is not crazy. This is not innovative. This should not be shocking to folks, but have we used this as a supervision tool? Have we looked at this data in the context of supervision? Obviously we've reported it to our funders and hopefully we're using it for priority setting as well, but to what extent have we looked at that basic data that we're collecting regularly to figure out how we're meeting those goals and what some of the trends are in the way that our staff is closing cases or opening cases or doing intakes, right? The fact that in this example that we're closing more housing cases than anything else, how does that line up with the funding that we have? How does that line up with the size of our housing unit? Or was this just a particular month where there were a lot of housing counsel and advice cases that got open and closed real quickly, right? So again, back to the point that both Therese and I were making earlier, this single chart is not the end all be all, but it points us in the right direction of other places that we might want to go as supervisors to investigate what's going on further. Yeah, I mean, I think it's all about context. So this is obviously a pretend data set, but it's not crazy. And if you worked in an organization that had this sort of outcomes closing cases, what it really does is it starts pointing towards the question. So just sort of quickly looking at it, you would think, right, we have more housing cases than other cases. Why is that, right? Is it because of our funding like Anna mentioned? Is it because administratively, somebody in the housing unit decided to close all of their cases just now? Or is it because that's how our cases are designed? There's all sorts of factors. And I think this is what you start to see when you look at data is that it's just, it points you in directions. It doesn't, unless you do some next level analysis, we don't really know what's happening from looking at this data set, but we know the questions we should be asking. And if we're oriented in our organization, we know what to expect. So if we're expecting to see a bunch of housing cases, that's a good thing. If we're not, now we know, all right, we should be asking some questions. What's going on, no matter what. And this sort of report, it's very basic, easy to run, easy to get your hands on. It's probably something that people should be reviewing periodically, right? For these exact reasons that you might have something out of the ordinary that might point you in the direction of something really great happening, something undesirable happening. Who knows? So I think for all of these, you can sort of do these little exercises, like what would you start thinking about when you see this? Yeah, and so the next three slides here are all addressing the same issue, right? Again, nothing is kind of crazy here. So we have our closed reasons for a case or level of service, whatever your program calls it, from council on advice to extensive service, and again, that case type, right? So any of our family law attorneys on the call, it's no surprise that extended service, family law cases are, there's a lot of time being put into those, right? But again, kind of aligning that back with our individual goals. And if we look at the next one here, breaking this down a little bit more, right? Because on that last graph, the council on advice bars were getting dwarfed. So if we look at our just council on advice cases, right? What is the average number of hours that our team is spending on council on advice cases? And in this particular one, right? We see that education has a little bit of an outlier. And again, that could be for a number of reasons, right? We could have an education advocate who spends a lot of time really getting to know the clients and on the phone with the clients, even though it's a council on advice case, right? We could have an education advocate who may not necessarily be overly familiar with those closing codes. So has been closing something with council on advice which may have been supposed to be brief service, right? So again, just a quick snapshot of something as basic as how, what is the average number of hours that our advocates are spending on these types of cases can help make that judgment? Yeah, and when I look at this, I think it's all about those questions that it makes you ask, right? To assess the point from earlier, which is just, again, if you're oriented in an organization and you know, okay, our education cases, that is how they work, then that makes sense. And if not, you know, you start going through your sort of list of questions that it would have you ask. Yep, and the same with the next one as well. This is just only your extended service cases, right? So then again, gives you a good idea of where things are at with extended service cases. And again, also allows you to continue to acknowledge the good work that the people you supervise are doing, right? And making sure that they, because that's one of the many things that's important about being, a supervisor is making sure that people know that the work that they're doing is appreciated and it's good work, right? Especially in the field that you're all in, right? So I think that I'm just being able to continue to reflect that as important. Yeah, I also think that in a rubric or a report, sorry, like this, this is where you really need to look at like your program priorities and your funding, right? So let's just go with the assumption that I don't think the family law cases would be quite that long, but let's just go with the assumption that you're spending an inordinately long amount or a high amount of time on contested family law cases. So then you're gonna, then I think it's the exercise is to go back and look at like, okay, is that the plan, right? Or is that straining our organizational resources or my, or the staff members that we supervise, is it straining them, right? Is, did we plan on this, right? So if we know that we're spending a lot of time on these types of cases, like, did we plan on that? And if not, how can we make those adjustments? And that's the sort of supervision that really needs to start happening. And we have that data. So that's what sort of the exciting idea about it is that we can start looking at, and we can say like, oh, okay, I know that this one case and that's why this data is so high. And so we can filter it a little bit, right? You could throw out, you know, if you do some more statistical analysis, you can start to adjust those numbers a little bit to get a sense of like what is normal versus what's an outlier. But if you do notice, you know, once you've done that sort of other common sense filtering or you've done some actual statistical analysis, now's the time for action, right? If you're noticing something isn't consistent, this is the time to start thinking about what changes need to be made or what changes can be made. Now, I know that as a case handler, on the case handler side, you have an obligation on a case where you can't just say, well, we're spending too much time on it so we can't do it. So we have to be aware that like adjustments on the work that we're doing based on like the data we're seeing aren't necessarily gonna show up in real time. We can't just drop cases, but we can start to make those like programmatic changes to push it towards where we needed to go. But, you know, the reality is there's always gonna be the case or the situation that throws all this out the window, but part of it is planning for it. So the next one as far as kind of low-hanging fruit for data points that are easily accessible, we've got an average number of hours on a closed case with a particular type of outcome, right? So in this report, we can see how much time, right? So you can do an average or you can do a total, right? How much time are our case handlers spending, preventing eviction? How much time are our case handlers spending getting people through bankruptcy, right? And again, just two very, very common, very easily accessible data points that you can use to match those priorities. And, oh, do you have anything else on them? Okay, yeah. And then, so away from cases, right? So we do our case reviews with our unit, right? We talk to folks about how the cases are doing, what the different statuses of the cases are, and kind of can look at some of the data that I just kind of went through, but then the next kind of place where we can look at someone's timekeeping and activities, right? So again, really accessible data, right? How many hours someone worked in a given week or pay period, right? And what types of time they logged. And this can give us, as supervisors, right? This can give us a bunch of insight because if somebody is a full-time case handler, right? Should they be spending half their time on supporting activity rather than cases, right? It's at least worth a conversation, right? They could actually be spending that time on cases, but maybe they're not the most contemporaneous of timekeepers, so they do a lot of bulk time and supporting activities just to make sure that everything gets in, right? But this at least is a quick snapshot of a time distribution of how it's all laid out. And again, regardless of what case management system you have, right? Maybe you can do develop reports and charts and tables within your case management system, right? Maybe you have to export it out and use Excel or Crystal Reports or another tool to actually manipulate and build up the data, but being able to create these little kind of snapshots can be really useful. And I wanted to just use this one as an example of kind of taking it beyond the cases and looking at how people are using their time internally. Yeah, and I think that this is also an opportunity to go back to the organizational obligation where I think there can be some conversations about what expectations are, right? So I think in a perfect world, everybody's reporting all of their case time, but what we maybe don't always articulate is like, what is the expected sort of ratio of supporting time and case time and obviously leave time is prescribed. What are our expectations and what's reasonable, right? So I think on the administrative level, you'd love to have like people on 100% of case time, but like that's just not really realistic. People have to like get up and get something to drink, whatever. And so you start to have percentage loss on your time. I think there's an opportunity here to be realistic about it and sort of set goals and objectives in terms of like, what do we wanna be measuring? How do we want people to put in their time? We know we're not gonna capture everything. We know sometimes something gets under reported or over reported, what's reasonable? What do we sort of expect from the average staff member and what do we know are like the deviations? What do we know are the reasons for that? And then when we, so if you have that as an organizational priority and I'm not saying anything hard or fast on it, then you can start to sort of have objectives around that. So I think it's a good and easy report to take a look at. And so for the next one kind of along those similar lines, as a supervisor of a legal unit, you probably have some sort of meeting where you're deciding what cases are going to be taken and what level of service are gonna be provided and who's going to be taking those cases. Some organizations have just kind of a rotating wheel of folks who take the next kind of major case that would involve litigation. Some organizations have kind of complex formulas that they use to assign cases, but all of that just starts with knowing what the caseload of your team looks like. And so again, something that is really accessible and really easy to get out of your case management system, what is everybody's caseload look like right now? How many open and active cases do they have? And then taking that to the next level and looking at, okay, well, let's break that down between brief service or counsel and advice and extended service cases because that can give us an even better idea of where we're at and what you could potentially even do with this is with some manipulation in Excel or with some very, very lightweight Python scripting. You could build those formulas and how you assign cases into some sort of very basic tool or Excel right where you could say, okay, look at the number. Put your data into Excel or into another tool. Look at how many extended service cases this person has. Look at the last time they did major litigation and look at their calendar for availability and then decide what you're doing with this case, right? So all of that fun automation is possible and isn't that big of a lift if you kind of have some either mid-level Excel skills or some basic programming skills. But again, right, that all starts with the raw, easily accessible data. And I think this is a tremendous opportunity for sort of active supervision. So I think depending on your program priorities and how you assign cases, I see the role of a supervisor as sort of being a gatekeeper here. And so if you have the knowledge about what people, what types of cases we have, so right here the case acceptance and also the information like the previous slides, I sort of know from personal experience, I would have certain staff members that I worked with who just like had it ingrained in them that they wanted to help people. So if they were meeting with people that day, they would come out with a higher number of cases that they absolutely wanted to have opened versus another staff member who maybe just has a different approach to it. I'm not saying one is right or wrong, but you could then end up with a disproportionate amount of cases being assigned to somebody because they just feel really passionate about it. And part of what we needed to do and what I would do if I, when I had this type of information is I can look at it and I can say, okay, well this is what I know about your current case load and to go back, way back to the beginning in terms of ethical obligations, like you wanna make sure people aren't overburdened, they have to be able to effectively handle their cases. So we can't always say yes. And as a supervisor, you have to use this information to sort of help you be the person who says no to a case or no to an assignment or a special project because we have to, what I would say is our ongoing obligation is to our existing clients. We have to provide the best level of service that we can to meet our obligations. So this is the sort of information that you should be providing supervisors and supervisors should be reviewing to help them make that decision when they're deciding where a case goes or how you reassign cases. It's really important and maybe the most important thing beyond just all the other sort of like day to day things, but in terms of like programmatically, I think it can make a huge difference. And sometimes it just ends up happening organically which can sort of be like a personality driven process. And isn't as friendly to these charts. And so the last one here is kind of that taking it to the next level that we were both kind of referencing. And so this is a screenshot out of legal servers help documentation on their forecasting tools. And so what they have done, right, is they've taken some of the guesswork and need for more sophisticated data work out of the hands of our supervisors, right? And then created tools within the case management system that help us figure out kind of where we're at in a particular case and how it's working. So this particular example, right, is looking at how this particular set of cases stacks up to similar cases as far as the number of hours that have been spent. So again, kind of taking it to that next level past that like standard kind of, this is the information, right? Manipulating that information and working with it, right? So fortunately legal server has these tools built in. Feel free to reach out to them if you have any questions or wanna get a little bit more information about that. They also have documentation on their help site about their new forecasting tools, right? Because not all of us are lucky enough to have data analysts or data scientists on our team. And while I definitely would say that it's not a requirement to have folks, data folks on your team, it can definitely be useful to talk to some or contract with one for a discrete research project and kind of look through your data quality and what you can do with your data and getting information out of it and doing cool things like the forecasting here. Yeah, the last thing I'd say on the data is I know everyone's got different sort of setups, different programs and different sort of capabilities of their case management systems or databases. But and some of the refrains that I've heard when I've had these conversations is just that like the data is not good enough. And I think it's important to just remember the point that we've made earlier that like there's, it's not just a matter of certain, whether or not you have time entries, right? There's other ways we can pull it out. And the other thing is you can also like apply some sort of again, common sense filters, right? Okay, we think historically we've under capture time. So we really wanted to know case time, let's assume 20% under reporting. What does that look like? What are our hours look like then, right? You can do some real basic manipulation of that data that might start to like, I always think about like, does it, when you look at it, does it make sense, right? And so if you play with that a little bit, you can start to see, you can make some assumptions and see what might make sense in that. And then it becomes another piece of the puzzle. It's not many answers, just a piece. Next. Yeah, so outside of our case management, so outside of our case management system, right? There's places that we can go to start building out the data more, right? So we have our case management system data right now. What additional information can we layer in with that to tell us an even better story, and to paint an even better picture of how folks are getting their work done, right? Many phone systems include pretty sophisticated call logs, so you can look to see how long people are on the phone. We're not looking at listening in, right? We're not looking at tracking who they're calling, right? Just simply like, how long does it take this person to make an intake call, right? And comparing that back with some of the data we're collecting from the case management system. And the same thing applies for text messaging, right? If you're text messaging through your case management system or through some other tool, right? You have that data available to you in aggregate, so you can look at how folks are using it and layer it into that case management system. And if you're not using your case management system or another kind of enterprise level text messaging tool, you should definitely consider doing it just simply for the quality assurance for building that case record and for the data that's available. And in, oh, did you have something to add there? Very sorry. Yeah. It just reminds me that when I was supervising that, I had one staff member where they're like the call time because you could see how long people are on the phone. They were just like the front desk in that person. And they got amazing results. So like they were doing something really effective, but it always jumped out of me. Like the amount of time on the phone was so disproportionate to everything. So I guess my point is like it's not a good or a bad fact, but you gotta look at it in context and you can get some interesting information there. Yeah, definitely. And kind of the final place that we can look at is our document storage and our document management, right? To layer in with both of our communication logs and the information that we're getting from our case management system. So not only do we want to make sure that people are complying with our existing policies, right? That they're supposed to be putting their case-related documents in a shared workspace as opposed to a private folder on their desktop, right? We can look at the content, generally, right? Look at the contents of the folder, right? Not what's in there, but how much is in there, right? SharePoint, Box, and Google Drive all have different kind of reporting levels as far as that goes to see what the makeup is of directories, so how many files are in those directories and how often they're accessed and things like that. Again, all to different degrees. But again, that can be a really interesting set of tools and data that's available for creating that kind of full supervision picture. And so before we kind of get into some of the pieces, right? Just to kind of highlight some of the tools that I've talked about in this section that you may want to look at more. Tableau and Power BI are both kind of big data analysis and business analytics tools, both of which can be highly discounted through Tech Super, at least for at one point, and I believe Power BI at one point it was also free. I'm not sure if it still is for nonprofits, at least their basic version. The legal server I discussed, Salesforce, of another platform that can be used for case management that has kind of strong data and dashboarding tools built in it for that transparency and SharePoint as well. So once we have all of this data, right? And once we're kind of working with this data, we can really use this data to kind of create a more positive work environment. And I'll let Darius talk a little bit more about that. Thanks, Anna. So I think that first part of this conversation is like getting the picture, right? Starting to fill out what we think we know about the work that's happening in our organization. And then the next piece is like trying to implement it, right? So better data can help us supervise differently, right? We can look at what we have done in the past, right? Because data is capturing past activities. But now we need to sort of come up with a way to implement that, to plan for it. So we can use that information and the directions that it gives us to improve our supervision and address sort of real-time issues and make changes. So one of the things that I think we can do differently with better information about what folks are doing is improve supervision, in sort of non-conventional supervision relationships. I think traditionally we're thinking about I'm in one office, you're in the office down the hall, I go talk to you. So the need for data is helpful, but I don't necessarily need it all the time, I could just go talk to you. I think that is always gonna be true to an extent, but I think also the reality is as supervisors and staff members, we're really pulled in a lot of directions. And so we need to be thinking about supervising differently. So it could be, it's not just like remote supervision, I think there is a lot of organizations I know are looking at remote policies, but I also think it's about thinking about supervisors who are staff members that work in other offices, that circuit ride that are in the field or people who are just at core all the time or meeting with clients all the time. It's often the case you could be in an office with one person and because the nature of the work that's going on, you might never see them. So I think it's important to start thinking about the technology tools that we have available and how we can deploy them to help keep those communication channels open. And, oh sorry, Anand, did you have anything to add to that, Anna? No. Okay, good. So at the same time, in these sort of changing supervision landscapes, we do have these challenges, right? How do you know folks are really working and how do we balance that, right? How do we do that without micromanaging and how do we make sure people are sort of working in the best collaborative way? I think this entire conversation is a balancing act. And I said this earlier, right? We don't want to micromanage people. Everybody's different. Everybody has different habits. What worked for me, I didn't, the person I supervised and I talked about earlier was on the phone all the time, it's not my style, but it worked really well for them, right? So it's not apples to apples, but we can put in some tools to help us understand what's going on and have people be on the same page. So, you know, to do that. So the question here related to the challenges, when you're putting in place a new telephone system or something that is going to collect a lot more data, how do you really set that up to be successful from a change management perspective so that your staff doesn't feel like you are becoming part of a surveillance group on that? Like, how do you do that effectively? Yeah, I think that's a great question. And so I think part of it is just having sort of open conversation about what we're trying to do, right? And what the objective is. And I think it's about framing as much as we can, framing these conversations in terms of like better outcomes for our clients and not micromanaging and really acknowledging that, like what I said earlier, you know, it's not apples to apples. Well, work for one person doesn't necessarily work for another person. You really, really don't want to get into the world of like policing individual work styles. I mean, that sounds nightmares. That's not supervision. That's not good supervision at all, right? You know, there has to be room for individuality. I think there has to be acknowledgement in a legal environment that there's an art to it. It's not a science. There's not, it's not input A and B. You know, there's an alchemy to it. So I think acknowledging that off the top is important. But, you know, I think there is gonna have to be that little bit of that reconciliation between, you know, maybe just making people aware that that is happening. I think that's important. You know, you don't want people to be surprised after implementation that people have a different set of data. Anna, any other thoughts on that? Well, I think in just setting the boundaries too, right? Like this is the data that we have and this is what we're not going to be doing, right? Like we are not going to be popping into your phone calls unexpected, right? We are not going to be reviewing transcripts of your phone calls, right? Like this is strictly for, to be used for X, Y and Z reason. And at any point if you're interested, like you can request to see it. Like you can request to see the data that we have. And just, you know, in making sure to have like any technology implementation that you're getting a good spread of people in the room to make the policies and have the discussions around this around the implementation. Yeah, I think you have two really good points there. Make sure that the individuals that are gonna be using the new technology are directly involved in the implementation and planning and the transparency. Definitely. Yeah, thanks, Hart. So I think in terms of, and this actually segues nicely, in terms of setting expectations, right? I think we need to, when we talk about this is not a gotcha practice, right? This is about like saying, whether it's the data or the tools that we use, it's when you onboard staff members or you implement that new technology, you sit down and you incorporate it into the work that you do. And you say, this is how we wanna see you using this. And, you know, it's a collaborative discussion. This is what we know about the casework we do. This is what we know about these systems. And this is how we wanna use it. And I think that conversation needs to happen not like once you've collected the data and you wanna tell people what they have to change, but like as you're implementing it. So I guess I sort of stepped on this slide, sorry. So we have to incorporate that data. We wanna be very specific in these work plans. We wanna include a reference like the right protocols and steps that people should be taking. And in a supervision relationship, organizationally or one-on-one, we wanna regularly update these plans. So it's not enough that, you know, every five years we overhaul our plan to update new technologies or new data that we have or incorporate this or that. It needs to sort of be an organic process that's reviewed regularly. And that needs to be part of like an organizational priority. Otherwise it doesn't happen, right? You get it, it happens once. People sort of pay attention and then there's attrition after that. And that's almost worse than doing it at all in my view. So when we talk about like the tools that we can use, especially when people are in the field or not like right in the office next to you, these are some of the tools that we see folks using. So I'm sort of talk about it sort of specifically, but one of the advantages I see and that Ann and I see for our clients is that there's a lot of emails that people get during the day and it becomes like the one place that people communicate about everything. And it can be very difficult, especially if you're busy and you're not just sitting at your desk reading your email day, it can be difficult to filter through those in a way that effectively identifies what's announcement about somebody's birthday and what's like an emergency, right? Cause it's just that they're all sort of buried in there. You can do some stuff with priorities or folders or filters, but like it's not the slickest solution. Having said that, looking at this list, you probably don't want to implement every single technology at once to help address these cause that's going to be just as confusing as a really, really cluttered email box. So one of the things that we've seen is moving to some chat applications, whether it's Slack or Microsoft Teams, where people can have dedicated channels for those communications. And that can help cut down on sort of trivial communication chatter. And it'll be sort of more of a opt-in situation where people can go access it when they need it. And of course, the way all of these tools are leveraged is dependent on how folks and how organizations set those priorities, right? So again, it's about setting the expectations. If we decided that we're gonna use Slack in our organization, we need to tell people when they should be using Slack and how they should be using it. It's not just that we have it, right? When should I be sending email? What sort of communication should be in Slack? Reference, how should I use, like I showed up here, these different icons? There's all sort of ways that we can think about it, but it needs to be inclusive of your entire staff because you're gonna have better results and it needs to be communicated clearly. Anything to add on that, Anna? No, I don't think so. I think just one really kind of creative use that I've seen of Slack or that similar kind of messaging is there's a software company called Glitch and they are very transparent about their policies, which is why I've seen this. And what they do is they have a designated Slack channel where you check in and check out. So if you go into the day, you drop in a custom emoji that you're in and then when you leave, you drop in a custom emoji that you're out. And I think that's a really cool, fun way to say, yes, I'm here, I'm available to chat or no, I'm out of the office or I'm at court or something. And so thinking of kind of creative ways to use these tools to even simply indicate, yes, I'm here, I'm at my desk, I'm working and I'm ready for you to contact me, which is half the battle sometimes as far as remote supervision goes. Yeah, especially as a supervisor, because we didn't talk about this or maybe a little bit at the beginning, but if you have your own cases, you have a trial, like you may not be available and your staff might not know. So having some channels where you can communicate that sort of information is good. So briefly tools that we've seen deployed in this manner, different chat applications, teams, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zoom, all of them used. I should have done go-to meetings. I'm sorry, sir. Let's see, different project management tools. I think the key thing here, and I touched on it earlier and Anna and I get a kick out of this is we don't wanna do it all at once, right? Like just pick some of these tools and implement them. They're not, all of them are not gonna solve all your problems and they're probably just gonna create more. Anything else on this one? I hope you can jump in and just try two of those tools in an organization that really doesn't use any of these, what two would each of you recommend? So I would say, I really like, well, I like Slack a lot, but if you are using Office 365, Teams is a pretty good solution because you can do those sort of side conversations. You could have dedicated sort of like practice group conversations. You can have one-on-one conversations. You can do video conferencing. It's all sort of built in there and you can access SharePoint and documents through it. Like you can share them, interact with them. So I really think that would be a good answer and that kind of goes with SharePoint. Skype, I think Skype for business is going away soon. So, I know a lot of folks use it, but they say it's gonna get phased out. I don't know, we'll see how that goes. Guess that would be my answer, Anna. I agree with Teams and then looking at the integrations that are available in Teams. So, I imagine that a number of folks on this call are Microsoft shops. Teams is included with most 365 or with a set of 365 implementations and then looking at other integrations. So Microsoft has its own version of Trello called Planner where it's like the Kanban style board of cards for task management. You can integrate your OneNote into Teams for note taking and everything like that and it can be a really streamlined way to manage that. I do definitely recommend if you are wanting to experiment with it, pull together a pilot group or start with like one of your practice area units and like work through what some best practices are and how you want it to be used because it can be a little bit of a bear and there's a lot of different features and a lot of different components. So definitely kind of pick a pilot group to work through it and identify what some of the priorities should be for folks. All right, and Anna's also agrees. Final thoughts, so I think I said this earlier, but like, and this goes to that communication piece that Sartre sort of asked about is look, these are tools to help us do our jobs better, right? They are not gonna replace the work we do, they're not gonna replace the individual qualities that staff members have and you shouldn't, right? That's not the point. We wanna sort of maintain this healthy balance between not being a surveillance organization at all, but still like, I think there is room to dig a little bit deeper and be a little bit more thoughtful in how we implement and collect information to help everyone maintain that healthy balance and then continue to look at how tools are changing, how data is changing to make sure we're innovating and we're doing the best we can do. Any other thoughts? No, I think that's great, go ahead. Nope, I think that's a great way to end it. All right, thank you, thanks everyone. Thanks everybody. Thank you, Just Tech for putting this together. As a reminder, the recording for this will be available on our YouTube channel here within a few days. We've got three more webinars coming up through the end of the year. They can be found at ellsantap.org slash events. Thank you and have a wonderful afternoon.