Policy & Practice | Winter 2025

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By Bill Bott

Keeping Up with the Workflow: A Lesson from the Chocolate Factory

D espite its first airing more than 70 years ago, the I Love Lucy tele vision series can still make us laugh and teach us a thing or two about how to help families. In September 1952, Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance per formed one of the most iconic comedic bits ever recorded when their char acters, Lucy and Ethel, took jobs at a chocolate factory. I am counting that this scene (https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=AnHiAWlrYQc) being so ingrained into our cultural DNA that it is playing in your head right now. In the scene, the ladies are introduced to their new job in the candy-wrapping department. At first, the job seems easy—wrap the candy that comes down the conveyor belt—but soon the chocolates come down the belt faster than they can wrap. The first piece not wrapped in time is simply pulled and put to the side to get to later, but in grabbing that piece, another almost slips by. Before long, for every one piece wrapped, four or five are being set aside, and the workspace is overcrowding. Chocolates pile up, fall to the floor, and poor Ethel is now eating one of every three to hide that she is getting behind. The once simple task now seems impossible, and panic sets in. The whistle blows, the belt comes to a halt, and the boss comes in to inspect won’t be detected: hats, shirts, mouths. Unfortunately, their reward for success fully hiding their failure is a quick pat on the back and a call to “speed up” the belt. The premise is brilliant, the perfor mances are art, and the message is both timely and timeless. In addition to the work. The women scramble, hiding chocolates anywhere they

a walk down memory lane, this scene reflects a common reality in human services. While our work is not nearly as simple as wrapping chocolates—it involves eligibility determinations, subsidy calculations, safety decisions, and more—the truth is, many of our tasks could be done in minutes or hours if we had just that one thing to do. Think about family safety assess ments. For 80 percent of cases that end without department interaction (meaning safe children), we know it takes between 6 and 14 hours to work with a family and complete docu mentation. If we only had to do one of those in a week, we’d be fine. We are also likely to be really good at it. But we don’t get just one; the conveyor belt delivers 3 to 5 of those cases each week in a lot of areas, and some areas see more than 7 cases per worker per week. We also know that on average, 2 out of every 10 assessments will require 24 to 32 hours of work due to

the nature of removing a child from the family. All of a sudden, the tasks become much more complex—not necessarily because the work changed, but because there is more work than time, and now we have to juggle all the chocolates we didn’t wrap, hoping we’ll get back to them before the deadline. Here’s another example. A SNAP/ TANF eligibility determination can take between 15 and 45 minutes, depending on how much technology a state employs for verification work. Collecting the right numbers for a set formula should be straightforward, but when lobbies are full and wait times on phones are unacceptable, we begin grabbing an application and moving it to a holding place every time we make initial contact, without completing the application and interview. The math shows that we should be able to make as many as 48 determinations per worker per day, but we find we’re lucky to complete an average of 10.

Illustration by Chirs Campbell

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