We are a part of the whole
The reality is we are a part of the organisation in which the social work we do takes place. Being part of it and knowing how it functions is an important aspect in what we need to do. Hughes and Wearing (2017, p 80) observe that social workers need to be ‘competent, strategic and ethical organisational operators’, so therefore need to be an active part of the organisation and understand it. I feel that sometimes some social workers take up an anti-organisation stance. The problem with this is that it creates an environment in which hostility can breed. While conflict, in the broadest terms, is an inevitable part of any relationship, it should drive consensus rather than produce a stand-off. Having a negative attitude to work saps your psychological well-being, generates stress and demotivates. This then restricts your productivity. Netting et al (1993, p 123) state that ‘social workers with little or no idea of how organisations operate, or how they are influenced and changed by both outside and inside are likely to be severely limited in their effectiveness’. Or, put simply, you need to know how to work as part of the system with all of its flaws in order to be productive. You need to work with it and challenge it to change rather than be in conflict with it.
Emotional labour
The emotional labour that social work is comes with inevitable tensions. Organisational strategies and the reality of limited resources often feel in stark contrast to social work values and this can have a strong demotivating effect. It seems to be a fact that there has to be some level of acceptance of the bureaucracy that is inevitable in large organisations. We have seen above that the things social workers report as being stressful are the bureaucratic elements. Hughes and Wearing (2017) describe the stress in organisations as resulting from the intensification of work and I’m sure that anyone working in social work can attest to this. Does this intensification come from the face-to-face work or from the paperwork? The answer I hear most is it is the latter.
Providing professional social work support in such an environment can still remain a significantly rewarding profession. It does involve dealing with, and often trying to change, people’s emotional responses to situations that are frequently born out of trauma. Such work clearly does come at an emotional cost to the practitioner (Adams et al, 2006). This emotional component can easily manifest itself as stress, which can be acute (short term) or chronic (long term). The impact of the emotional nature of the role is compounded by workplace demands like case conferences, report writing and tight deadlines as well as stressors of everyday personal life that can seriously impact on the practitioner’s overall well-being and performance (Grant et al, 2014). There is a relationship between work life and personal life.
The focus on the well-being of you as a practitioner is important given the emotional cost of practice (Adams et al, 2006). This cost has the potential for both short-term and long-term stress leading to illness, absence from work and people leaving the profession. The Health and Care Professions Council (2016) reported an increase in turnover of social work staff from 12 per cent in 2014 to 16 per cent in 2016 with vacancy rates up from 3 per cent to 11 per cent in the same period. As Sánchez-Moreno et al (2015) point out, social workers are an ‘at risk’ group when it comes to work-based stress as a consequence of the complex nature of their role and exposure to the distress they often witness.
Stress
Professional work is demanding, and stress is not in essence wholly negative. The Guardian (2019) has recently reported that research shows that stress can improve resilience. When we encounter some pressure, we are motivated to meet the challenge of the circumstances in front of us. It is when we become overwhelmed and our usual coping strategies have run out that we become stressed and ultimately distressed. This has significant connotations for our emotional, mental and physical well-being (Grant and Kinman, 2014) as it would appear the avoidance of stress is also not wholly positive and can lead to inertia. A balance is required. Some of the problems associated with stress can be mitigated through positive self-care and indeed resilience is felt to be something that can be developed and can positively influence physical and mental health (Stacey et al, 2017).
While the people we work for do have a responsibility for our well-being, self-management is also key. Grafton and Coyne (2012) tell us that what does us harm is not the stress itself but our response to it. So, we have to take some responsibility for ourselves. Often in the caring professions we are so busy helping others that we neglect self-care and then are not able to fully engage in the day (Bent-Goodley, 2018). We need to step back and think about what we are doing to ourselves and consider seriously how better to care for ourselves and encourage an ‘attitude and practice of having compassion for oneself’ (Iacono, 2017, p 454) rather than saving it all for others.
A balanced life
It can be difficult when feeling stressed to compartmentalise the impact of work-based stress and personal life stress to figure out where the stressor lies, as each can have an impact on the other. That’s why what we propose in this book is a whole-life approach to well-being and self-care. The separation of ‘work’ and ‘life’ is socially constructed and unhelpful in terms of well-being. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi states:
Once we realize that the boundaries between work and play are artificial, we can take matters in hand and begin the difficult task of making life more liveable.
(Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p 190)
It is true that in order to establish and maintain well-being we need balance. As you will see through this book, how we balance the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of our life is important as they all interact and have an impact on each other. To try to separate these aspects into things that happen during ‘work’ and things that happen during ‘life’ is artificial and misses the point of how connected all of the things in our lives are. The term work–life balance is a fairly recent one. It didn’t really appear in our vocabulary until the 1980s and coincided with an increase in women joining the workforce in large numbers. Work–life balance was then about how women balanced their traditional role in the home with their new role at work. It took men a little longer to catch on to this idea (it usually does!) and it wasn’t until the 1990s that men started talking in these terms. A study of the top 100 newspapers and magazines showed a paltry 32 mentions between 1986 and 1996, rising to a high of 1,674 mentions in 2007. The idea had become firmly rooted in our language (Keller and Papasan, 2014), but it is not a wholly helpful concept.
The problem with the concept of