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Two of our regular panellists offer advice on coping with stress.

The Challenge

It seems to be a fact of life that the social care workplace is a very stressful one. Workers are finding it increasingly difficult to cope, falling victim to a sense of being overwhelmed or simply feeling drained. This is sometimes heightened when meeting with more motivated partners. Although there are many individual ways to counteract personal stress, what strategic methods do the panel think are available to energise the workplace and help bring back (or maintain) effective and creative problem-solving and performance?

Kirk Benjamin is an independent social care trainer and consultant

PANEL RESPONSES

Andrew McCulloch
People do survive all sorts of stressful jobs. Social care is not uniquely stressful and can offer a higher degree of control over stress than classic high-stress work such as air traffic control. However, social care is undoubtedly characterised by a combination of the intensity of demand and the complexity of individual client need, as well as the sharpness of external scrutiny.

The literature and personal experience of managers suggest that stress in such jobs must be managed at several different levels:

- At the individual level, there may be a case for selecting people for work in this area who are suited to dealing with the relevant sources of stress, if objective and fair criteria can be found. More importantly and immediately, individuals should be trained and supported to identify and, as far as possible, manage their own stress.

- At team level, team leaders should pay attention to team burn-out by addressing role clarity, workload management, team dynamics, training opportunities and access to external support. Time out from the day-to-day environment is important.

- At organisational level, senior management must take a strategic approach to tackling stress in the workplace. Having a policy to deliver a mentally healthy workplace can do this. This must address direct stress management - through, say, access to counsellors - and managerial strategies for containing stress - for example, involving staff in setting priorities.

- At national level, the government should assess the impact of social care policy development on staff and provide local management with tool kits for tackling stress.

Anthony Douglas
The most popular and successful training course I ever commissioned was a yoga teacher who came in every week to de-stress my staff team. That was 10 years ago and stress is worse now. The causes have always been there, but they have intensified: covering for absent colleagues, which can double a workload; the quite proper, but nevertheless exhausting, demands of internal and external regulatory systems; and the trend towards institutional workaholism, a phenomenon defined as nearly everyone left standing working longer hours in a vain struggle to keep up. Most other European countries wouldn't stand for it. They have more family-friendly and health-conscious workplaces, but then they spend a lot more on their welfare states.

Strategically, senior managers and politicians should back their staff and set a limit to the demands made. This is easier said than done, because most social care teams are already only working with high-risk cases, but a climate can be set that recognises the stresses, values a culture of supervision and builds in support services, such as mentors and counsellors, for staff.

Time-out policies can also help, whereby staff are given a break from the front line for short periods, almost as if they were in a war and needing a recovery zone.

It is a fine balance to strike. If waiting lists become too large, all efforts have to go into managing them rather than getting on with reducing them. It is also important to ensure that sufficient funds are committed to staffing budgets, when the temptation is to spend what money there is on enhanced levels of care. Eligibility criteria have to be tightened to achieve this.

Resources

1 Susan Cartwright & Cary L Cooper, Managing Workplace Stress, Sage, 1997

2 Richard Davies (editor), Stress in Social Work, Jessica Kingsley, 1998

3 N Doherty & S Tyson, Mental Well-being in the Workplace: A Resource Pack for Management Training and Development, Health & Safety Executive, 1998

4 Lynette Hughes & Paul Pengelly, Staff Supervision in a Turbulent Environment, Jessica Kingsley, 1997