Last year, Community Care’s annual jobseeker research found that, of those looking to leave social work, 63% cited stress and 56% cited burnout as reasons.
As well as causing retention issues for organisations, poor emotional health can also affect how social workers practise.
This highlights the importance of social work managers and leaders promoting the wellbeing of their teams and services.
In a new article for the The Social Work Community, social work leader and consultant Clair Graham provides advice for managers on achieving this.
She highlights the skills involved in being a supportive social work leader, initiatives to help staff manage their wellbeing, and the importance of fostering “a culture of emotional intelligence”.
As she concludes: “By prioritising staff wellbeing, organisations can reduce sickness, enhance staff retention, and improve outcomes for the communities that they serve.”
Read the full article on The Social Work Community.
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Obviously this does not fit in to the prevailing narrative of unsupportive, overbearing, target obsessed, supervision dodging, incompetent managers safety blanket but could we perhaps also have some perspective on the wellbeing of managers and the stressful demands made on them? Whether by senior managers or, as is my experience in my team, the constant need for validation and affirmation of the exceptionalism of some of my fellow social workers. I can rip apart managers with the best of them too but actually choose not to. So at least from this social worker, how about interviewing or featuring managers and their pressures also Community Care?
In my experience managers do not meaningfully listen to Social Workers about the pressures they face. There is no respect for the 37 hour working week. Management preoccupation is with meeting targets and timescales to the detriment of the welfare of Social Workers. Hence the difficulty in recruiting and retention. Quite simple really. There are not enough bodies on the front line for effective social work practise in
Do Managers stop working once their 37 hours are up then?
My manager is really supportive, kind, offers good challenge but in a positive way. She works incredibly hard and is often last out. I know she has huge pressures and tries to protect me from those, and the reality is the targets that have to be met do not come from her but are needed, I know she too has many targets too, so I can’t really relate to those bashing their managers.
Dear Josie
Your manager needs to resist those unrealistic targets and timescales as should all Social Workers otherwise, as you say we will all be “often last out”. Hence the difficulty in recruitment and retention of staff.
And yet for all these useless and authoritarian managers recruitment is up by 2000 social workers. Such a conundrum is this social work.