Hack Your Bureaucracy

when COVID-related unemployment claims began to climb in California in 2020, the state moved quickly to hire thousands of new claims processors and call center agents. Many other states made similar moves. This seemed like the obvious first step: more humans could attack a backlog of unemployment claims faster, right? However, this solution was absolutely the wrong one. New employees now vastly outnumbered experienced ones, who had to spend all their time training new people instead of processing claims themselves. This meant that instead of thousands of extra hands, there were now almost no hands processing claims. When the State of California analyzed call center data, it became clear that the new agents could answer fewer than 1 percent of incoming calls;