The Hidden Work Audit
A briefing for everyone in the team · Adult social care · AmiHC
This is not about how hard you work, and it is not about your job. It is about the pile of jobs that has quietly landed on this team over the years because there was nobody else to do them, and nobody ever counted it.
We are going to count it. That is the whole exercise.
What we are asking you to do
We will go through a list of 36 tasks together. Things like topping up somebody's electric key, collecting a urine sample and dropping it at the surgery, sitting on hold to a utility company about a bill, arranging a funeral, feeding a cat while somebody is in hospital.
For each one you say two things: how often you do it, and roughly how long it takes. That is it. Six options for how often, seven for how long. It takes about twenty minutes.
Then, for the ones that are actually happening, one more thing: where did it come from? A hospital, housing, the benefits office, a utility company, our own systems, or nowhere at all because no service exists for it.
And then, as a team, we decide who should be doing each one. Not who does it now. Who should.
Who this is for
Everyone in the team. This work does not respect job titles, and the audit will not tell us anything useful if only some people fill it in.
That means all of these, and anyone else who sits in the team:
Social workers ASYE social workers Experienced and specialist social workers Senior social workers Team managers Occupational therapists OT assistants Wellbeing assessors and coordinators Community care officers Reviewing officers Assessment officers Support workers Duty officers Business supportIf your job title is not on that list, you are still in. The list came from one council and every service names its roles differently.
Why it matters that everyone answers
In the original audit this tool is built on, 23 people from mental health, safeguarding, learning disability, the front door, reviews and locality teams took part. Six of them reported doing none of these tasks at all. Seventeen reported doing at least one. The gap between those two groups is the interesting bit, and you only see it if everyone answers.
It also matters because the work distributes unevenly and unfairly. In that audit the median person was carrying about 24 hours a month of it. One person was carrying 405. Nobody knew that until it was counted.
What this is not
It is not a performance review. Nobody is being judged on their answers. There is no right number. A high score does not mean you are inefficient, and a low score does not mean you are not pulling your weight.
It is not a case for cutting posts. The work still has to be done. Somebody still has to top up the electric key. The question is whether that somebody needs a professional qualification and a registration fee.
It is not about replacing qualified staff with cheaper staff. If a task needs professional judgement, it stays with a practitioner. You are the one who decides which is which, task by task. Nobody else gets to make that call, including the tool.
It is not a time sheet. We are not asking you to record what you do all day. Only these 36 things, and only roughly.
Why we are doing it
Three reasons, and they are all honest.
1. Because this work is invisible
It does not appear on any dashboard. It is not a case, it is not an assessment, it is not a review, so it is not counted anywhere. It just eats the day. When someone asks why the allocations are backing up, the answer "we spent Tuesday afternoon sorting out a bulky waste collection" sounds like an excuse rather than a fact, because nobody has the number.
Once it is a number, it stops being an excuse.
2. Because some of it is a governance risk
Several of the tasks on the list involve going to the bank with someone, collecting cash on their behalf, topping up a meter, or handling their benefits and bills. That is a financial abuse risk whoever does it, and it should sit inside a written procedure with proper recording, not be absorbed informally because someone needed help.
Naming those tasks protects you as much as it protects the person.
3. Because it might change something
In the council where this audit was first run, the results led to six new team support worker posts being created inside a restructure, specifically to take this work off registered practitioners. That is not a guaranteed outcome and we are not promising it. But it is what happened once, and it did not happen until somebody counted.
What happens to your answers
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Will my name be on it? | No. The audit is filled in for a typical practitioner, or anonymously per person, depending on how we run it. See the guidance document for both options. |
| Where does the data go? | Nowhere. The tool runs entirely in the browser on the device it is opened on, there is no sign-in and no account, and nothing is sent anywhere. The results belong to the team. |
| Who sees the results? | The team first. Then, if the team agrees, the head of service. The whole point is to have something to take upwards, so it will not stay in the room, but you will see it before anyone else does. |
| Could it be used against us? | Be honest with yourself about this one. Any measurement can be misused. What protects you is that the tool shows hours by task, not by person, and that the "who should do this" judgement is recorded as yours. If the results are presented as anything other than that, say so. |
| What if nothing happens? | Then you will still have a clear, defensible statement of what the team is absorbing, which is more than you have now. Ask for a date to review it rather than accepting silence. |
How to answer well
Do
- Think about a normal month, not your worst week and not a quiet one.
- Count the whole task, door to door. If you drove someone to an appointment, the travel and the waiting count, not just the appointment.
- Include the failed attempts. The forty minutes on hold that got you nowhere still happened.
- Answer for yourself, not for what you think the team average is.
- Say so if a task is genuinely practice. Sometimes going to the bank with someone is the assessment. That is exactly the judgement we want recorded.
Do not
- Do not round down out of loyalty. The most common error by a distance is under-reporting, because people absorbed the task to get something done for someone and it stopped feeling like work.
- Do not round up to make a point. The figure has to survive a finance business partner reading it.
- Do not leave a task blank because you are not sure. A rough answer is far more useful than a missing one.
- Do not worry about the exact minutes. The bands are deliberately wide. One task being slightly out does not matter, the total is the number that counts.
The question that makes this worth doing
The one that asks where the work came from is the reason this audit is different from every other workload exercise you have been asked to fill in.
Counting how many hours we spend on this tells us something we already know. Naming where those hours came from tells the organisation that sent them something they have no other way of finding out, because at their end it looks like a job that got done.
Answer it from what you saw
If a hospital asked you to chase a result, the answer is the hospital. That is true whether or not they were right to ask, and you are not being asked to judge that. Nobody outside an organisation can know its internal processes, and the tool does not pretend otherwise.
If you do not know, say you do not know. There is a "not sure yet" option and it is a perfectly good answer. The tool will tell us how much of the total is unattributed, which is more useful than a confident guess.
It also separates three quite different problems that look identical on a timesheet. Work another organisation stopped doing, which somebody could be asked to pay for. Work our own systems create, which is ours to fix and which we should not ask anyone to fund. And work that nobody was ever asked to do, where the honest answer is that a decision has never been taken about who owns it.
The one question worth arguing about
The third column asks who should be doing each task. There are three answers: a registered practitioner, a team support worker, or another agency or service.
That column will produce disagreement, and it should. Two people can look at "supporting someone at a medical appointment where they would struggle and there is nobody else" and reach opposite conclusions, both defensibly. One sees an errand. The other sees the relationship that makes the next difficult conversation possible.
Have that argument out loud. It is the most valuable twenty minutes in the whole exercise, and it is the part no tool can do for you. Where the team cannot agree, leave it with the practitioner. The audit is stronger for being conservative.
What we will do afterwards
- Share the results with the team first, before anyone else sees them.
- Take the biggest three tasks and find out whether an existing service, a voluntary organisation or a different team already does that job. Often one does, and nobody knew.
- Take the money-handling tasks to the safeguarding lead, separately from the capacity conversation. That one usually moves faster.
- Take the totals to the head of service, with the team's judgement column attached, and ask for a decision and a date.
If you want to see how the audit is run before we do it, the guidance document sets out the whole method, including the capture sheets.