1) Navigating Burnout and Resilience Among Social Service Practitioners in Turbulent Political Times: Insights from Refugee Resettlement Agencies

Background and Purpose: Refugee resettlement practitioners, as social workers, work in organizational settings that are subject to abrupt changes and uncertainty due to contentious political environments. While there has been considerable scholarship documenting the adverse impact of organizational factors including unclear organizational processes, negative cultures and climates, and lack of support to meet mounting client needs, there has been less investigation regarding how macro-level social policies, such as immigration and neoliberal welfare policies, impact staff well-being and burnout. Given the relationship between employee burnout and retention, understanding factors across ecological levels is imperative for sustaining meaningful employee engagement. Further, evidence from parallel social service environments suggests that organizational support and professional development opportunities can promote employee well-being. The purpose of this study is to explore how federal and state policies influence the work life of practitioners, especially in relation to their experiences of burnout and workplace engagement, and to construct knowledge regarding employees’ strategies for navigating, adapting, and resisting hostile macro-level social policies.

Methods: Individual, in-depth interviews consisted of twenty-two practitioners in five refugee resettlement agencies in a southeastern U.S. state. A semi-structured interview guide designed and pilot-tested by the researchers elicited participants’ interpretations of the unique environmental factors in resettlement agencies, including policy challenges, their impact on burnout and engagement, the meaning-making process attached, and subsequent actions taken. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using Dedoose software. Qualitative analysis utilizing Constructivist Grounded Theory analytic techniques entailed initial and focused coding, reflexive memoing, and simultaneous analysis.

Findings: Findings illuminated a complex and challenging policy landscape, including immigration, refugee resettlement, and federal and state welfare policies, prefigured resettlement practitioners’ experiences of burnout. Practitioners identified four domains of policy that factored into burnout including: (a) disparities in the application of policies and programs according to immigration status, (b) rapid and disordered policy changes, (c) unclear strategic plans, including those of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and, (d) enacting neoliberal policies within client interactions. Policy challenges contributed to multidimensional experiences of burnout including exhaustion (e.g., feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, tired, and drained), developing negative and distant attitudes towards their work (e.g., dreading tasks, losing hope, feeling cynical, and losing care and concern for clients), and reduced professional self-efficacy. Despite attention to both practitioners’ experiences of burnout and work engagement, participants did not identify organizational resources that offset the negative impact of policy challenges on burnout and promote engagement. However, a smaller number of participants adapted to the demands of policy challenges by seeking and developing opportunities for multi-level policy advocacy.

Conclusion and Implications: The findings illustrate the oft-neglected challenges posed by policy on the work-life and wellbeing of social welfare practitioners. This example from the refugee resettlement domain illuminates the need for practitioners and agency systems to integrate policy advocacy supports and training at the macro and meso levels into their operations. Cultivating active emotions, accompanied by resistance through policy advocacy, may be more adaptive ways workers and agencies can promote a positive work-life and practitioner well-being.