The project covered four key social service areas – delivered at municipal level but typically regulated by central level legislation:
- Primary Schools
- Vulnerable children and youth
- Home care for elderly
- Disabled adults
The basic idea behind the project and the overall programme was two-fold:
- ”From cold hands to warm hands” – free more public sector resources to core, frontline welfare services
- Empowerment – give frontline personnel and institutions more freedom to organise their work
The project delivered an enlightened basis for the further debureaucratisation plans of the Danish central government and the municipalities. It did so by providing novel quantitative and qualitative data on:
- Administrative tasks for frontline institutions and personnel
- Who does what? » List of all tasks per employee type
- How? » Mapping organisational set-ups and work processes
- Why? » Mapping regulatory origin of tasks
- Time usage across types of tasks for frontline personnel
- Average time spent per task per employee type
- Difference in time usage between types of institutions and municipalities
The results were achieved by applying a stringent method (AKVA) for mapping and measuring administrative tasks among public sector front-line personnel. For the mapping, the project applied in-depth interviews and workshops to map tasks and their regulatory origin. For the measurement, the project used web-based or paper-based questionnaires to register time-usage among several hundred front-line personnel in each service area.
Back to the better regulation site
- Perception of administrative tasks among frontline personnel