The FAMCare Blog

Since the worldwide onset of COVID-19, social workers are burning out and leaving the profession at an alarming rate. The shocking trauma of 1 million American deaths in under three years and the mantle of grief this slaughter draped over the everyday life of surviving family members was followed by a lingering threat of severe illness, economic uncertainty, and chronic under staffing in social services. Unsettling conditions are the exhaust fumes left behind by the pandemic as it fades off into the distance, and case workers are left to calm everyone’s nerves and guide them back to a semblance of normal life. Dedicated case managers continue to show up for work, day after daunting day, but are beginning to feel - “the faster they go, the behinder they get.”

With the introduction of Chatbot/GPT to the public, artificial intelligence, like every other technology introduced since the beginning of the 20th century, is making some people nervous.

The American social service sector employs over 680,000 caseworkers. As the industry expands, record numbers of new caseworkers join the ranks. There will always be a learning curve, but in an industry, that's experiencing large numbers of job burnout and turnover, tips for newcomers can be a lifesaver. Let's share some diehard tips for the newbie case managers and a refresher for our brilliant veterans.  

Social workers are mission-centric personalities who join the profession to do some good. For the most part they are idealists who gradually get caught up in the minutia of the large bureaucracies they work within, and their vision of a better future gets a little blurry. Every year we like to take a step back to help refocus the collective vision of the ideal future that inspired social workers to join the profession in the first place. We interviewed four caseworkers of varying years’ experience working in diverse specialties and asked them why they became social workers.

Employee burnout exists, and according to a recent survey, 23% of full-time workers in the United States experience burnout the majority of the time during the work week. So, if you're a nonprofit leader and you notice that your case workers aren't as enthusiastic as they used to be or are falling behind in their daily tasks, it may be time to look into whether job burnout could be the issue.

While there are numerous traditional methods for motivating caseworkers, we have compiled a list of steps that social service agencies can take on their own. This is to ensure that your case managers are not neglecting themselves or their mental health while serving their communities.

How we care for the most vulnerable among us is one of the great challenges of our time. As Mahatma Ghandi once said, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” And social workers are hard-pressed to find one group in more dire need of urgent attention than children at risk of neglect or abuse.

Children deprived of a safe, nurturing family environment are entitled to special protection, assistance and alternative care. And today’s caseworkers can most effectively address this with the right social services software.

As stated in Article 40 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child:

"Every child in conflict with the law has the right to be treated in a manner that takes into account “the desirability of promoting [his/her] reintegration and [his/her] assuming a constructive role in society.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that there are now 708,100 social workers employed in the country. Furthermore, the number of persons involved in social work is always growing. Your main goal as a social worker must be to assist individuals or spread knowledge. You need a variety of social skills that work together to help you develop and accomplish your goals for social service in order to do that. However, you also need a few soft skills to help you in your social work job.

We'll go over three soft skills that any social worker needs to know to succeed in the field of social services.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the demographics and logistics of the Social Work profession have shifted dramatically. Social workers are on the move, and telehealth has become ubiquitous. Social workers, however, are finding it more problematic than they had imagined moving from state to state. With ten years’ experience and a graduate degree from a major university they expected to simply fill out some kind of “transfer form” to get re-licensed in the state they were relocating to. In other words, they expected a high degree of “reciprocity” from state to state. This, however, is not always the case.

We like to celebrate a New Year when the calendar turns its annual page. We believe that a “new” year offers us another chance to turn the bad into the good. However, case workers who work with the most vulnerable among us know that a “new year” is simply an artifice. Every day that case workers go into the office they believe they have an opportunity to turn the bad into the better. Every day is New Year’s Day for case workers.