James Macon, M.Ed., BCBA

With the proliferation of ABA service providers in recent years, BCBAs, their staff, and families have significantly more options to choose from when considering services and employment. There are often significant differences amongst service providers though, with some companies taking a more behavioral approach to the management of the business. If you are a Behavior Analyst considering companies to work for, here are 3 things you should examine, taken from our OBM friends.

1. Performance Management

There are plenty of good companies to work for. Great companies, however, can be harder to find. One distinction that separates good from great is whether or not the company has a Performance Management system (PM). PM combines goal setting, feedback, and rewards to help motivate and reinforce important employee behavior. PM has been used successfully across many, many industries. A little reward goes a long way for employee satisfaction. Management is happy to, as the average return on investment is 4:1. PM also serves to tell employees what is needed to do a good job, and who doesn’t like knowing the “secrets” to success at a given company? If you’re interviewing prospective employers, feel free to ask what kinds of “OBM”, or PM do these use for their staff. Be warned though, sometimes PM goes by different names. If you see goal setting, systematic feedback, and rewards, you’re probably in good shape.

2. The Right Systems

Any company can be thought of as a “system.” In Behavioral Systems Analysis (a subset of OBM), Behavior Analysts analyze the primary purpose for which the organization exists. If we’re talking about an ABA company, the primary purpose might be to provide industry leading ABA therapy to kiddos and families with autism, using evidence based interventions. They then look at who receives that service, and identify ways to measure whether or not the company is achieving their mission for existence. Taking it a step further, they would identify feedback loops that tie back into their mission, and measure ways to improve quality of services and the impact they have on those receiving services. And it gets much, much more interesting! Any system has a primary “processing” system, and several supporting sub-systems. In an ABA company, the primary processing system would be ABA technicians and BCBAs. The support departments might be HR, billing, client service managers, etc.

But why should a prospective job seeking Behavior Analyst care whether or not a company maps our their systems? Simple. If a company does not map their systems out correctly, you’ll more often than not find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place. Chances are that many of us have worked for companies like this at some point the past. Leadership, in a misguided attempt to improve the company’s standing, perhaps has stacked the company with a whole lot of mid-level managers, and nothing you communicate ever seems to find its way up the hierarchy. Or perhaps training for ABA technicians is horrible. Maybe the company spent too much time building up a support system, and the primary system has suffered. The problems can really start to stack up, and unfortunately often lead to a “campaign of the month” mentality, where the company attempts to fix the problem by adding a new intervention. When they do, that intervention breaks a different part of the company, thus requiring another “campaign of the month.” Employees get tired of these new initiatives that never seem to work, and eventually stop listening.

So what’s the takeaway you ask? Talk to people who work at the company. And not just 1. During an interview, you can ask how different departments communicate and function together. Ask what the company’s mission is, and how they measure success against it. Speaking to front-line staff, or even across departments can also be very valuable. And don’t be bashful to ask. Interviews are a 2-way street, as you should be evaluating them just as much as they are you.

3. Quality and Feedback.

Related to our last point, if a company maps out systems correctly, they should have robust ways to measure quality and deliver feedback, both to departments and individuals. As a prospective employee, you want to know how the company measures (and rewards) good performance. And if there are issues along the way, what does the feedback mechanism look like?

Some companies might only value labor, in terms of how many hours are you working per week. While this might be an important metric, it neglects quality over quantity. The company may have a workhorse employee producing tons of behavioral assessments, programs, and trainings per week, so much that the employee might even earn a bonus… but if their training produces very poor ABA technicians, and their behavioral assessments are horrible, and the programs are so bad that they need to be rewritten (which now takes productivity away from other people), should they really be getting a bonus?

The answer is of course not. And yet it happens. A good company will have feedback loops in place to assessment quality and to deliver feedback though. They would want to measure the quality of ABA technician, BCBA, and management performance. Taking it a step further, a great company will have a 2-way feedback loop, so that management can communicate feedback down, and direct staff can communicate feedback up.

Summary

Depending on where you live, there is no shortage of ABA companies you can work for. When interviewing with them, make sure you are asking the right questions.   Your goal is to find out if they’ve embraced the same behavioral principles that they use with their clients within the organization as well.