A department of two, Assessment & Research supports evidence-based decision making at EPL by assisting staff in data collection and analysis, ensuring that activities align with the business plan and that outcomes are both measurable and measured, where appropriate. The department manages the data, ensuring that EPL is able to demonstrate success of its business plan and its key strategic initiatives. The work done ranges from assisting in system wide program reviews and analyzing staff workflow, to locating and presenting data to support the 10 year Capital Plan. An area of particular challenge relates to staff workflows and evolving staffing needs across branches. It can be challenging for EPL (like many libraries) to be able to offer all of the services at the level of excellence that is desired, with existing staff complements. At the same time increased staffing budgets are rare, so how can we make the best use of existing resources? And how can we help staff understand workflows and how their activity impacts strategic directions? EPL’s Assessment & Research department developed key innovative tools to assist with this understanding. Twice a year, staff members either complete a time audit or undertake the Activity Assessment. An additional pioneering instrument, the Activity per Hour per FTE, is informed by the Activity Assessment results.

These vital tools allow for a comparison of tasks before and after major operational initiatives, and provide an overview of system workflows. All librarians and library service coordinators complete 2 one-week time audits. These contain pre-determined categories that reflect the expected activities of each position. For example, community librarians strive to spend 70% of their time on community-led activities, and we use the audits to measure this. Our customer service and paging staff undertake an Activity Assessment, twice a year for one week. They log their activities into 5 pre-determined categories (circulation, customer service, branch, programming, collections and other -appointments, HR, meetings, training), which cover 44 activities, in increments of 5 minutes to 4 hours. This tool allows EPL to track changes in activity over time. Finally, the Activity Assessment per Hour per FTE instrument is applied several times per year to investigate staffing levels across all locations. This tool is actually two calculations, one for staff primarily involved in customer service and the other for staff chiefly involved with materials handling. Using the data that we collect to demonstrate our acitivity, we calculate the relative units of activity for each branch per hour per FTE. This places each location on an even footing for comparison. Customer service is calculated using checkouts performed at the customer service desk, questions answered, visits, and programming provided. Materials handling is calculated using check-ins processed manually, holds placed on-shelf, and total items checked-in as a proxy for sorting/shelving. Each of these is weighted according to the amount of time that the system spent on it in the Activity Assessment, meaning that the value of a program is higher than the value of a checkout.

The Activity per Hour per FTE has enabled us to implement changes to both quantity and classifications of staffing at our branches. It has facilitated the case for increased staffing levels at some branches and for decreases at others. It is also a tool that clearly demonstrates why staffing changes are being made in a neutral evidence-based fashion. Our time audits have empowered staff to become more aware of where they are spending their time, how well they are fulfilling the mandates of their job, and where there might be room for improvement, all through their own self-reflection. Using the activity assessment, we are able to measure the impact of staff time saved with the implementation of RFID and redirect those FTE’s to the creation of new community librarian positions, allocating a librarian to every single branch. There are limitations to these tools: data entry isn’t always accurate, we don’t directly capture the physical size or the general socioeconomic status of neighborhoods served by a branch in the Activity per Hour per FTE, and based on our ongoing results we suspect that these may have an impact. Altogether, however, these tools allow us to identify problematic areas before they become significant impediments to service excellence. Furthermore, they contribute to the early identification of impacts of ongoing changes, be they policies, procedures or new technologies.