The Leave & Care Weekly: a divisional newsletter

I celebrated my one-year anniversary with Leave & Care in May. Over the last year I’ve been fortunate enough to build fun and amazing relationships with a lot of you. There are many more I haven’t had that good fortune with yet, but I look forward to it.

The only thing I knew when I accepted this position was Commissioner Cami Feek believed in the way I lead. My aim then is the same as now: to promote the environment that allows all of you to work at your absolute best, one where you are allowed to make mistakes and be honest about it because you know you will be supported in learning and growth. Lucky for all of us, we do this together.

In my time here, I’ve witnessed inspirational people, high-trust relationships, and incredible leadership (whether you’re officially a leader or not). I’m moved by your desire to take care of the people around you and those reporting to you.

This is not to say that we are perfect, because we all have room to grow. In fact, improving our leadership skills is one area we’ll focus on in the coming years. Employee engagement is a hallmark of both our divisional and agency-wide strategic plans, and I see skill building as a critical part of our employee engagement plan. I want to ensure all our supervisors and people managers have the support and skills they need to contribute to our collective environment.

I also know there are areas where our people have low trust due to past harms. But that’s why I am here and am committed to this division. I know with time and attention we will build trusting relationships in all of Leave & Care. I want to keep building on our momentum — acknowledging our truth, being honest about our circumstances as a division, and knowing that it is safe. (For a great video on building trusting teams, check out this talk from Simon Sinek.)

In addition to maturing our trust and our leaders, it’s important to mature our processes, too. We’ve already begun that work. Sometimes I sense frustration — we want our division to be the best, and we want it to happen now. Patience can be difficult. But it takes time to shift from the chaotic, reactionary, necessary thinking of our start-up days (during a pandemic!) to the thoughtful, mature, process-based decisions of a five-year-old division.

Making that shift is going to take all of us continuing to be flexible, adaptable, and supportive. We will, as always, address needful situations as they arise, but we’ll do it in a framework that is ready for change.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to lead you all in our time together. Here’s to many more great years to come!  

From Operations Manager John Mattes

I have some bittersweet news. Our compliance manage Shanna-Mae Cullen-Oden has accepted an amazing opportunity at a different agency.

I’m super happy for her and her new opportunity to serve the state in a different capacity and her ability to grow a new team there.

This also makes me sad as she’s done some amazing work for our division, and I will miss her on our team. Shanna-Mae joined our team in mid-2020 when our compliance team was just forming. Her previous experience in audit, investigations, and serving employers has been incredibly valuable for our program!

Her experience has been invaluable in our process design and structure building for all our compliance functions. She was instrumental in making sure we could respond to our first fraud cases and conduct employer misconduct investigations. She also helped resolve a variety of employer issues.

I can’t thank her enough for her experience. In addition to the formal compliance functions, she’s also helped me whenever I had questions with areas like privacy, internal controls, and accounting procedures. I also appreciated her TV show recommendations (which were many).

Please join me in thanking her for her work on our team and wishing her the best at her new agency! 

Applications

Incoming: 22,125 | Processed: 20464 

Application submission to first payment: 29.2 days (average) | 22 days (median)

Phones

Total incoming calls: 61,678  

Calls presented to queue: 50,838  

Calls answered: 30,623

Connect rate: 60%

Average speed to answer: 14 minutes, 57 seconds

Median queue time: 9 minutes, 54 seconds

A few observations: We’re very popular. The end.

Okay, I won’t end it there. Here are some actual observations that show how popular we are and the difference Paid Leave is making!

• It’s amazing to see how many customers are applying for benefits. This is the 3^rd month this year with over 22,000 applications! WOW
• We also received over 22,000 emails and secured messages.
• The 61,000 calls to our team is the most since October of 2021, which for those of us that remember that was the exemptions launch. That launch had a large number of calls and some outages that followed.
• WA Cares exemptions: GREAT JOB, TEAM! I forgot to ask for stats by month so I only have the daily/weekly stats, but May was a very busy month for exemptions. The last day of May we had 2,300 exemptions come in (about 10% of total for the year).

Thank you all for your work and helping our customers!

Check out open positions in our division. Reach out to the point of contact for more information.

• Customer Service Specialist 2

Know someone you think would be a good fit? Pass it along. Thinking about taking a new position? Give it a go.