Employee Retention

When our group conferred to brainstorm a relevant leadership issue, our challenge wasn’t thinking of an issue that we had witnessed, but rather to find one that we found to be universally salient, affecting multiple social service agencies on many organizational levels. Although each of us had a different professional background, an issue we have repeatedly observed surrounds the notion of employee retention within social service agencies. Too often we had felt the effects of rapid turnover rates and also witnessed the detriments of staff changes on client populations who may already be struggling with abandonment issues or disrupted attachment. Collectively as we shared our lived experience we concluded that there may be no greater
1) amongst social workers. Morse, Salyers, Rollins, Monroe-DeVita & Pfahler (2012) maintain the conventional definition of burnout as being comprised of three elements including “emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment” (p. 341). Symptomology includes fatigue, feeling overextended, cynicism, and a devaluation of one’s effectiveness at work. Reducing caseloads might be a viable means of reducing the burnout of social workers, but reduced funding and increased use of social services hinders this. The National Association of Social Workers (2008) states the need for agencies to provide appropriate supervision to social workers. Betteridge (2012) emphasizes that “literature on post-degree supervision consistently indicates that good supervision enhances job retention, increases job satisfaction, reduces turnover within organizations and protects practitioners against burnout” (p. 1). Yet, the provision of adequate supervision is hindered by a lack of funding and resources. Further to this, the high turnover rates reduce the number of experienced social workers to provide the supervision and
It reads as something that sounds nice in theory but may prove impractical in the workplace. Our group maintains however that not only is this approach relevant and dynamic, it is easily adaptable to a variety of social service agencies.
After synthesizing the data and research findings, we have isolated four concrete strategies that we believe would lead to greater empowerment in the workplace therapy lessening the effects of employee burnout, ineffective leadership and funding constraints.
Strength Based Management A key pedagogy to such an approach is the implementation of a strength based environment. This is an environment that values collaboration, uniqueness, self-determination, and “works with the whole [sic] while appreciating the interrelationships of the parts” (Gottlieb, Gottlieb & Shamian, 2012 p.41). This could mean that if you have two staff members with the same job title of child protection worker they have the autonomy to collaborate in provide optimal client support. Perhaps one of these workers thrives on third party advocacy and the other is passionate about direct client contact. In an empowered work place, both would have the ability to share and alter their daily tasks so that they might more closely align with their inherent skills and abilities. In this example, the rate of burnout is reduced because the employee notes a level