Today's blog is written by guest blogger, Sharon Wagner, from Senior Friendly.  We truly appreciate her for sharing these wonderful insights for social workers to help avoid burnout.  

As a social worker, you’re dedicated to your job. You’ve chosen the path that God meant for you, and you truly love what you do. Yet it can be hard for you to set boundaries between your work and your life, which can quickly lead to burnout. If you’re struggling in your career, Global Vision Technologies has some tips to help you avoid stress and heal from burnout.

Performance anxiety can often add to the high stress experienced by social work case managers. After all, social worker performance isn’t about how many widgets you make or how much profit you brought to the bottom line. It’s about helping real people deal with real life problems. If your performance is lacking, it could mess up someone’s life or even end it. That's the mindset that leads to social worker performance anxiety.

We understand that being a case manager can be extremely stressful. There is never enough time, money, or resources to complete all of your goals. And the work that you do is critical. People's lives are affected. As a result, our case management software is designed to help alleviate some of the stress in your daily workflow.

Louise, a crusty journey-woman social worker had three pairs of glasses hanging from tiny chains around her neck and a sharpened yellow number two pencil plunged into her beehive hairdo. How unlikely that this woman would teach us how to use humor in social work.

Burnout

Over the course of the 20th century, as American society became ever more complex, industrialized, urbanized, and a safe haven for the world's most vulnerable, our society gradually became more socially conscious and the case worker's burden more laden. The paperwork required for patient safety, privacy, accountability, and continuity has grown algebraically alongside documentation to secure funding. More vulnerable clients with more complex problems requiring more complex documentation have begun to overwhelm the modern caseworker and "burnout" is becoming epidemic. Social service professionals are particularly susceptible because of the high levels of empathy required by their jobs. Striving to ease the suffering of clients who are often in crisis leads to emotional and physical depletion, and case worker burnout is the primary cause of the high turnover rate in social services.

Nobody understands your stress and how to deal with it better than those in the trenches with you. In previous blogs we have shared ideas on both physical and mental ways to create some level of case manager stress relief. But for today’s post, we talked to case managers and mental health professionals who deal with the stress of the job every day and asked them to share the best ways they find stress relief.

We know that being a case manager comes with a lot of different stressors. It's just part of the job. But we want to help ease some of that stress. This is another post in our ongoing series of blogs on case manager stress relief.

In the past we’ve discussed the many benefits of nonprofit software solutions and how they can help you in your day-to-day functions. For example, the correct software package can help make data easier to get to, utilize and learn from, affecting strategy and funding. This helps contribute to a more positive workflow. But nonprofit software solutions can also bring about positive change in another way- the people in the organization itself.

This is the fourth in our series on case manager stress relief. In the first post, we discussed the physical things that can be done to relieve stress. The second focused on ways to find mental stress relief and the third focused on identifying and lessening exhaustion factors. In this post, we will examine how case manager burnout can be prevented with good supervision and mentorship.

This is the third in our series on case manager stress relief. In the first post we discussed the physical things you can do daily to relieve stress. The second post focused on ways to find mental stress relief. Today, we look at how to prevent burnout by identifying and lessening exhaustion factors.