We need to talk about overwhelm: Setting boundaries in a complex work culture

As a facilitator on the Practice Supervisor Development Programme (PSDP), I have been privileged to work with supervisors and managers in children and families social care. I co-facilitate learning sessions and provide one-to-one sessions to participants in this programme that supports managers by developing their knowledge base, skills and confidence in supervision practice.

Social workers and social work managers have always been heroically busy, but I have noticed over the last six months that the level of demand people are experiencing seems exceptionally high. A 2022 survey by the Social Workers Union reported that two-thirds of social workers felt their mental health had deteriorated as a result of their working life, and over half were considering leaving the profession. This is sobering reading, and resonant of the stories shared in the training. Participants were describing how often they worked late into the evening, and how they were having working days filled with an almost constant queue of Microsoft Teams meetings, emails and phone calls.

Although the reasons for these apparent increases in demands are likely to be complex and multiple, I am curious as to whether there is a link in the timing with when information became available about the tragic murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson. It is possible that, on an unconscious level, people are working more hours as a response to their increased anxiety about the responsibility of their roles, and their knowledge of how historically blame has been directed towards social workers if child homicide isn’t predicted and prevented. 

When talking about working conditions, the discussion often came back to boundaries. Our profession has a tradition of valuing boundaries and knowing we need certain protections to help us cope with the demands of our roles. However, post-pandemic, many of us have a lack of separation between work and home life, and participants discussed feeling that there was a very high expectation of their availability. Although people were aware of the importance of setting boundaries, it seemed extremely difficult to implement boundaries in practice.

US social work professor and public speaker Brene Brown describes being surprised in her research when she found that the people her research had analysed to have the most compassionate lives were also the most boundaried. Looking after our own needs ultimately helps us look after the needs of others. It is easy to believe the myth that to support our staff we need to be constantly available, yet it is often the process of setting limits and communicating when we are and aren’t available, which actually provides more effective containment. This way, staff learn that they can hold a level of anxiety and develop some of their own solutions.

In my one-to-one sessions, questions I keep coming back to are: 'are the expectations your organisation has of you reasonable; and are the expectations you have of yourself reasonable?’. The answers suggest that expectations are often not reasonable. For example, someone on one of the programmes described having over 250 emails in a day. With this level of demand, we become reactive, and in our survival state we cut off from our reflective skills which enable us to pause and provide a 'thinking' response. But, working with children and families and complex risk situations always requires deep thinking.

It is important to consider issues of boundaries and expectations systemically. Individuals should not be blamed for a failure to cope with unreasonable demands. Our knowledge about emotional resilience in social care highlights that when there is a blame culture, or individuals blame themselves for systemic issues, wellbeing is affected throughout the organisation. The SWORD (Social Work Organisational Resilience Diagnostic) can help organisations assess and act on these issues, creating and sustaining conditions that support resilience in the workforce.

Organisations can actively address trends in culture, and small steps can make a big difference. For example, defensiveness in organisations is likely to lead to a tendency to want to copy as many people as possible into emails. Lessening the fear of blame can mean the number of circulating emails can be reduced. It is also possible to make large scale changes to working cultures. For example, in France they have passed legislation which outlaws, for organisations of a certain size, the expectation that workers needed to keep their phones and emails on outside their working hours. Systemic change can happen.

The PSDP has a number of resources to support improved working culture. In the ‘Leading and influencing others’ section of the website you can view a practice tool on being an effective leader, and consider ‘The Cultural Web’ – a really effective resource on recognising and changing shared cultural norms in an organisation. There are also some forthcoming resources, available at the end of July 2022, on emotional resilience in digital and hybrid spaces, and on keeping reflection on the agenda when a team is not co-located.

There’s an idea in the meditation community that if you feel you can't find ten minutes to set aside for meditation, then you actually need to meditate for double that time. It's counterintuitive but suggests that when we feel that something is impossible, we might be more in need of it than ever.  Perhaps the same is true of boundaries. The time when they are most difficult to implement is the period in which we really need them.