My LJ friend Laurenis is going through her own job hell right now, but it made me realize that I'm not the only one who has had trouble with the field of social work / counselling.
Let me state my thesis here, clearly and for the record: Social work is a shit career. I've only been doing it for 2 years professionally, and I'm done with it. Social work can be rewarding, and it can be enjoyable. But as a career, it completely sucks. Since there are so many reasons that it sucks, I'm going to have to break it down into at least two or three parts. This entry will deal with probably the biggest problem in social work.
One: You never really know if you're doing a good job.
In social work, your job is to help people get better. Clients get better, they get worse. That can be measured in a lot of cases. The difference between a slightly depressed client, and a healthy one might be hard to discern, but the difference between a child staying at home, and one staying in the hospital is obvious: one is at home and one is in the hospital. Not too hard.
Objective standards of measurement are possible, but it may very well have nothing to do with how a good a job the social worker is doing. Some clients have bigger problems than others; some clients have more resilient personalities. Some clients, children especially, can completely amaze you with their ability to recover and really excel. Working with other clients, though, can leave you feeling like your banging your head against a brick wall. Social workers should be as wary of taking credit for success as they are eager to avoid blame for failures.
In my second year of my MSW program, I worked at a child guidance clinic. Repeatedly drilled into my head was the following statistic:
Always remember: One third of your clients will get better, one third will stay the same, and one third will get worse. I think she meant that to be a way to prepare oneself for failure, but when I heard it, I thought, "Well, how many of them would get better if I did nothing How many of that one-third would have gotten better anyway?" Questions like that aren't very popular coming from interns, I learned.
Here's another encouraging statement from experience hands: "Some days you may feel like you are doing nothing, but, then, several years later, somebody will come to you and say, 'You know that thing you said? Well, that had a huge impact on me.' And usually that thing is something you weren't even thinking was that important." In other words: Social work is so ineffective that the best affirmation you can get from clients will likely come years after your work and even then it will probably be accidental. How's that for job satisfaction?
Most employers understand this, and so don't judge workers by the success of their clients.
Two: If you don't know if you're doing a good job, your boss sure as hell doesn't know.
So what are employers supposed to do? How is an employer supposed to know that his workers are doing a good job? Well, the reality is that they can't know. But, being bosses, they need to evaluate their workers on something. So here are some measures I've seen put into place:
1) Time. Yes. Time. ie -- How much time is this person in the office? Is he on time? Does he get here late? Does he leave early? If he works late during the week, does he think it gives him the right to leave early on Friday? Time is a pretty sad measure of performance, but I've worked at places where it's almost the main measure of performance. And morning punctuality is really a stupid measure, especially when the real social work is crammed into the between when school lets out and the time parents start getting pissed you're in the home at dinner time.
2) Paperwork. Paperwork is the second standard of measurement. How much paper did this person produce? Are all the records up to date? Are the histories thorough and exhaustive? Are the case notes detailed? Paperwork is important. Papework is an official part of the job. Working with other people (insurance, therapists, supervisors, courts) requires a paper trail. I have no sympathy for who workers who whine, "I got into this to spend time with people, not sit at a computer all day," and who are six months behind on their case notes.
But paperwork comes at a time cost, time spent working with and for clients. And at times the time-demand for paperwork can conflict with the client's best interests. If several phone calls need to be made for a client, but a big assessment is due, the worker has to make a decision. There is some minor crisis going on, but my supervisor's supervisor doesn't care about the crisis -- they care about their 2-week assessment bench mark. So what to do? If it affects the workers job, the paperwork will likely come first, and the social worker will end up feeling like a toad when she's congratulated for meeting the benchmark. "Yeah, great" she'll think, "we just pushed back that kid's acceptance into a residential program by two weeks thanks to that brilliant assessment."
3) Clique. Does the client get along with the supervisor personally? Do they watch the same television shows, etc? It's a simple one, and it's obviously not a measure of performance, exactly, but it certainly feels like it some days.
4) Client satisfaction. In many instances, agency get paid per client they have, and clients always have the choice of going to a different agency. This is where the free market falls flat on its face. If a drug-addicted client is unhappy with his or her worker, they can go to a different agency. Therefore, when the client complains, the supervisor is supposed to try to make the client happy. Agencies that don't keep their clients happy, don't survive. I worked at a foster care agency, where the parents were treated like gold shit. They had to be, since they were the source of the income. There are always more foster children in the system -- foster parents were the scarce resource. Imagine wanting to work with troubled children, and then learnign that your real job was gladhandling healthy adults collecting a paycheck for their work with children. Not good.
5) Cult of X. Some agency's have a philosophy, or an attitude, or something that you personally need to adopt to do fit in.The most obvious one I ran into was the cult of people horrified by sexual abuse. One of the muckity-mucks in the center was very personally effected by sexual abuse of clients, and seemed to expect us all to discuss sexual abuse with the same personal horror and apocolyptic visions that she did. Sexual abuse is obviously very serious, but everyone responds to it differently. What should matter is how well you work with the issue, not how much you cluck your tongue, or how creative your epithets towards the perpetrator are doing meetings. But if want to fit in and advance, you need to follow the philosophy.
6) An actual goddamned objective measure based on client performance. I'm putting this one last, because it's the most obvious but least used of objective measures. I worked at exactly ONE place that judged me by the success of my clients, and I quit after four months because I was going absolutely crazy. I had little influence over how my clients did, and the official philosophy of the agency was to make the therapist responsible for all outcomes. Yeah, imagine how well you sleep with that over your head, especially when one of your clients is a multiply-diagnosed violent schizophrenic whose parents took her back into the home against the advice of the residential unit so they could start collecting her disability check.
End Part 1.
Feel free to have a discussion party in the comments. And, again, I'm speaking from my somewhat limited experience. If your experience is different, I'd love to hear about it.
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