Micromanaging and box ticking at the Probation Service

The Justice Select Committee has just published a report about the probation service. The service is described as having a ‘tick-box, bean-counting culture’ and they say that probation staff spend just a quarter of their time face to face with offenders, MPs said.

Is filling in forms bad?

The rest of the time is spent filling in forms, sending emails, and complying with official targets and dictats.

Is this a bad thing? From what has been said so far it would seem that there might be some inappropriate and time-consuming measures that probation officers have to comply with. And this means that they don’t spend the time needed with their clients.

The trouble is it is very easy to underestimate the amount of time it takes to do all the admin compared to the ‘real job’.

A chef

Let’s take the example of a chef. In order for the chef to be able to cook wonderful meals here are some of the other tasks that need to be completed:

• Buying the food
• Furnishing the restaurant
• Keeping the place clean
• The washing-up
• Replacing broken and old equipment
• Hiring staff
• Marketing the restaurant
• Serving the customers
• Planning the menus
• Doing the laundry
• Dealing with any staff issues
• Doing the accounts and book-keeping
• Redecorating
• Training the staff
• Designing and keeping up to date the website
• Answering emails

In a well-run restaurant you would like to think that the chef spent most of his or her time cooking the food. But you would also like him or her to have a say in the menu, the food that is bought, the wine, hiring and training staff, dealing with customers, what equipment is needed in the restaurant to cook and prepare the food

How much time do you spend on your job?

Pretty soon, your chef is not spending anything like 100% of his or her time preparing food.
The true measure of the skill of the chef is the taste and quality of the food, but that doesn’t mean he or she spends every minute cooking it.

So it is with the probation officers. Any manager should be making sure that his or her team are able to produce the results required to the level of quality required and needs to be taking away obstacles in their way.

Badly set objectives

Badly set objectives around how much time you spend on particular tasks do not help. It’s very easy to assume that the amount of time spent on a task is what’s important. But that’s not the way to measure it.

It would probably be better to have 10 minutes with an exceptional probation officer than two hours with one who does not know the job.

Alcoholism

Sheila Hancock tells of John Thaw, who for part of his life suffered an addiction to alcohol. Somehow she found an expert who saw him for six sessions over a week. He never drank again.

I would love to know what he did during that time.

I imagine quite a lot of his time was spent honing his skills.

I mention this because a customer of the probation service was interviewed today and explained how his probation officer had helped him recover from his addiction to alcohol.

Probation objectives

In researching this article I tried to find the objectives of the Probation Service. The closest I could get was this – from Ireland.

The Probation Service works with offenders and others to reduce offending and to make communities safer places. We work closely with the Courts Service, the Irish Prisons Service, An Garda Síochána and many organisations in the community to achieve those aims.

The more I looked into it, the more it seemed that much of the job of the probation officer is about preparing reports, making assessments and dealing with the courts. If this is the case, it’s not surprising that they spend apparently so little time with their clients.

The job of a good manager is to ensure their team is able to achieve their objectives and do whatever they can to remove all the unnecessary stuff from them – but the trouble is there’s always someone creating more of that unnecessary stuff (often the government) and very often the objectives for it are unclear though it seems reasonable at the time.

You need to review and update objectives and measures and make sure they are SMART quite frequently, or you end up in this kind of situation very easily.

The question is – what are they really there for? Once this is clear then you can decide how to measure it.