Evaluation of a shared-work program for reducing assistance provided to supported workers with severe multiple disabilities.
Split the job so each worker keeps only the steps needing least help; coach minutes drop and output stays high.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Three adults with severe multiple disabilities worked in a community job.
Each worker needed heavy help from a job coach to finish every step.
The team split the job into parts. Each person kept only the steps they could do with the least help.
They called this new plan a shared-work program.
What they found
Job-coach help dropped right away.
Productivity went back to the high levels seen before the change.
The workers still finished the whole job together, just with fewer prompts.
How this fits with other research
Olsson et al. (2001) tried a different fix one year earlier. They trained the same workers off-site first, then moved to the real job. That cut coach minutes too.
The two papers do not fight each other. They show two tools for the same goal: less staff help.
Parsons et al. (2016) adds a third tool. They let new staff play a short game with the workers before the shift. Worker compliance and happiness rose.
Taken together, you can prep the worker, prep the staff, or prep the task split. All three lower support without hurting output.
Why it matters
You can use shared-work tomorrow. List every step of the job. Give each worker only the steps that need the fewest prompts. Check that the whole task still gets done. Coach time falls and productivity stays high. No extra training space or tech needed.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Concern has been expressed recently regarding the need to enhance the performance of individuals with highly significant disabilities in community-based, supported jobs. We evaluated a shared-work program for reducing job coach assistance provided to three workers with severe multiple disabilities in a publishing company. Following systematic observations of the assistance provided as each worker worked on entire job tasks, steps comprising the tasks were then re-assigned across workers. The re-assignment involved assigning each worker only those task steps for which the respective worker received the least amount of assistance (e.g., re-assigning steps that a worker could not complete due to physical disabilities), and ensuring the entire tasks were still completed by combining steps performed by all three workers. The shared-work program was accompanied by reductions in job coach assistance provided to each worker. Work productivity of the supported workers initially decreased but then increased to a level equivalent to the higher ranges of baseline productivity. These results suggested that the shared-work program appears to represent a viable means of enhancing supported work performance of people with severe multiple disabilities in some types of community jobs. Future research needs discussed focus on evaluating shared-work approaches with other jobs, and developing additional community work models specifically for people with highly significant disabilities.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2002 · doi:10.1016/s0891-4222(01)00088-9