Can Organizational Practices Make Healthy Workers to Better Serve Families?

Background: Research has found child welfare professionals are at an increased risk of experiencing secondary traumatic stress (STS), high burnout rates, and lower levels of compassion satisfaction (Letson et al., 2020). Yet, limited research explores the relationship between worker wellbeing and service delivery. Developing research suggests workers’ wellbeing (i.e., high compassion satisfaction, low STS, and low burnout) is associated with use of casework skills (authors, under review). Furthermore, researchers often overemphasize the individual aspects of wellbeing while ignoring the organizational practices that may benefit child welfare professionals (Sutton et al., 2022). Growing research suggests compassionate organizational practices improve workers’ wellbeing (Nolan et al., 2020). The case may be that the mechanism linking organizational practices to effective service array is workers’ wellbeing. In other words, compassionate organizational practices may build healthy workers which, in turn, improves service delivery. Our research question is: Does worker wellbeing mediate the relationship between compassionate organizational practices and casework skills?

Method: Data were collected in 2023 via a statewide online survey of child welfare professionals in a Midwestern state (N=496). Wellbeing was measured using the professional quality of life (ProQOL) scales to capture work-related STS, burnout, and compassion satisfaction. Organizational compassion practices was collected using 9 items to measure practices of acknowledging, bounded play, and help offering (Nolan et al., 2020). Casework skills were captured using 15 items to measure use of engagement, assessment, and fostering kinship connection skills. We conducted multivariate regressions to test the relationships between organizational compassion, wellbeing, and casework skills. The KHB method (Karlson, Holm, & Breen, 2012) was used to assess unbiased direct and indirect effects. In all models, we controlled for workers’ race, gender, years of experience, education, and position.

Results: We found compassion satisfaction mediated the relationship between the organizational practices of acknowledgement, bounded play, and help offering and use of all three casework skills: engagement (ACK: z=4.04, p=0.000; BP: z=4.03, p=0.000, HO: z=4.32, p=0.000), assessment (ACK: z=3.46, p=0.001; BP: z=3.44, p=0.001, HO: z=3.72, p=0.000), and fostering kin connections (ACK: z=3.12, p=0.002; BP: z=3.03, p=0.002, HO: z=3.09, p=0.002). Burnout mediated the relationship between bounded play and help offering and engagement skills (BP: z=2.30, p=0.02, HO: z=2.16, p=0.03). Burnout also mediated the relationship between all three organizational practices and use of assessment skills (ACK: z=2.68, p=0.007; BP: z=2.83, p=0.005, HO: z=3.00, p=0.003). STS only mediated the relationship between help offering and assessment skills (HO: z=1.99, p=0.046). All other relationships not specified were not statistically significant.

Conclusions: Our findings highlight how organizational practices improve service delivery through building a healthy workforce. More specifically, we find organizational practices of compassion heighten workers’ compassion satisfaction and lower workers’ burnout which, in turn, increases use of casework skills. However, our results do not suggest organizational practices are mediated by STS in a way that impacts the use of casework skills. More research should be done to identify organizational strategies to reduce STS. In sum, our research suggests healthy organizational practices can build healthy workers to improve service delivery to families.