The FAMCare Blog

According to estimates, the United States has over 680,000 social workers affiliated with various non-profit organizations. Social workers play an important role in the American social fabric, from juvenile justice to veteran services, senior services, and child welfare.
However, in their pursuit of doing good for humanity, social workers occasionally make mistakes that add to their workload and stress. So, if you're a new caseworker about to embark on your journey, this article is for you.
Continue reading to learn about the five rookie mistakes that caseworkers make that can add stress and make their jobs more difficult.

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.

In the beginning, pioneering social workers responded to the most critical and immediate needs of the destitute, the homeless, and orphans. But as the 20th century wore on social services recognized a more nuanced and complex catalogue of vulnerabilities. Social workers, aid organizations, government agencies, and communities began to support people presenting a complexity of needs like poverty brought on by addiction and child abuse resulting from mental illness or homeless juvenile offenders fighting to escape the drug culture they were raised in.

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.

For those working in child services, an understanding of family situations is vital in being able to help improve child welfare. Fortunately for those agencies, utilizing the right social services software can help streamline processes and effectively “humanize” the various situations.

The goal is to always be improving child welfare through various services, responses and interventions, and with the right social services software on your side, the tasks can become easier to track and perhaps even more simple.

Case notes are an essential component of case management. Indeed, social work is heavily reliant on record keeping, which includes case notes.
They assist in making decisions and planning by helping to make sense of the details in a case. This is why most social workers are trained and strive to keep high-quality case notes in order to better assist their clients.
Furthermore, modern case management software for social workers assists caseworkers in creating better case notes.

According to The Sentencing Project, over the past four decades, the number of incarcerated women increased by more than 475%, rising from a total of 26,326 in 1980 to 152,854 in 2020. Also, over half (58%) of imprisoned women have a child under the age of 18.

Being effective in social services necessitates excellent time management abilities. Social workers have witnessed tremendous change over the years, including changes in the frequency of work and the nature of the tasks. The number of social workers and clients has increased in recent years, as has the amount of documentation and client coordination.

One aspect that hasn't changed is the amount of time required to complete a large number of tasks. As a result, time management is essential for any social service worker. Continue reading to learn a few tips on managing your time as a social worker.