Community Care takes a look at the role of compassion and whether it can be measured and what role it has
Will changes in social work such as personalisation put a bigger premium on compassion?
Is it even needed for the job being just wishy washy fluff?
Tell us what you think
Compassion is really a feeling and it is towards something or someone. i have a sinking feeling that someone will try to measure it. It's certainly noticeable when it is not there. But how can you measure more or less?
We've all seen occasions when people show a lack of compassion. This can be in extreme situations when we are busy saving ourselves and climbing over other passengers to get out of the crashed aeroplane. Yet there was at least one tale from the Zeebrugge disaster when a passenger used his own body to make a bridge for others to escape. Do you judge by that standard or a more day to day expectation?
We have also seen situations when the prssure of the group prevents any compassion being shown such as the Migram prisoners experiment.
So ordinary people may be capable of tremendous self-sacrifice in one situation while people can be uncharacteristically cruel in another.
Move away from these extremes and we can still see that compassion can be an expression of ourselves or of the group or institution, usually in fact an interplay between the two. Beats me how that can be measured. It just feels like another stick to beat people with as in 'your work/service would be better if you/your staff showed more compassion' A desperate remedy?
I saw a sign in a charity office waiting room recently that summed compassion up for me. It said
"Customer service is not a department. It's the reason we come to work."
I would have thought that any person working within social care has a personal level of compassion towards the client group they work with. The work itself requires a certain amount of belief in the aims of the service delivered and therefore a certain amount of compassion for that group. If a worker does not have a cetain amount of compassion in this area perhaps they are in the wrong job?
Until recently I have worked within a very busy and pressurised child protection team within a LA, and while SW's are under high levels of stress and workloads are impossibly high, I still feel that they all display a level of compassion towards the children we are protecting. Otherwise as I said above, why would they be there.
However while I believe that there is without doubt a role for compassion in social work I cannot think of any way that it could be measured. It is surely on a personal level. Is there a difference between compassion in the work and passion for the job?
I would not be surprised if the government came up with a method of measuring compassion in social care. It would perhaps be the exact opposite of working to targets which are in turn related to funding. i can just imagine, "Great, all targets are met this year, however your compassion levels have been too low so you have lost some of your funding."
Interestingly my company Harding & Yorke (www.empathy.co.uk) has been measuring EMPATHY in the corporate environment over the past decade. This is described as: 'The ability to feel what others are feeling and then doing something about it'. What is most exciting is that earlier this year (2008), Professor Merlin Stone and Dr. Yuksel Ekinci declared it the only service-related measure in the world to correlate with Profit. I feel that this would be an excellent tool to be able to measure COMPASSION in the worksplace - under any agreed definition. Essentially the methodology makes the subjective objective. I would be happy to answer any questions.
Elwing: I saw a sign in a charity office waiting room recently that summed compassion up for me. It said "Customer service is not a department. It's the reason we come to work."
How great! That's worth all of us remembering.
Senior writer, Community Care
hi, I think the important point regarding compassion, or perhaps more importantly, outwardly expressing compassion, is that in a professional setting, it needs to be 'concious' and applied conciously. Compassion is a real benefit when working with people in any setting, particular with people experiencing very difficult situations. We are all human and all have feelings...however we need to recognise these feelings and be concisous to how we express then when working professionally. Decisions and actions need to be based on fact and evidence, and situations need to be judged impartially and not clouded...i think there is a balance to be struck.
Mike Wells