Does your child welfare team feel safe at work?

It’s no secret—the child welfare workforce is experiencing a crisis.

Vacancies and turnover rates are higher than ever before.

To face our retention challenges, we must ask ourselves:

How does our work culture affect the psychological safety of our staff?

We know that careers in child welfare, while fulfilling, can be challenging. Secondary traumatic stress is a factor in this work that we can’t always control. What we can control, though, is what it feels like to show up to work every day at our organization.

A psychologically safe team will:

• Share ideas, even those that may be unpopular
• Provide honest feedback without fear of consequences
• Own their mistakes—because continuous growth is normalized and encouraged
• Trust their teammates
• Show up as their authentic selves to work

Employees will also feel brave enough to share how they’re feeling. This allows leaders to fix any issues and retain a talented worker.

What can you do to cultivate a culture of safety in your workplace?

Review–and improve!–your data

Do you know the primary causes of staff turnover at your agency? Do you know when staff are most likely to leave, or which teams are experiencing the highest turnover rates?

Are there trends in your staff turnover data? Are certain populations more likely to stay than others? Do you know what staff think about your leadership team?

Your communication? Your improvement efforts?

The Quality Improvement Center on Workforce Analytics (QIC-WA) can help you with data collection to meet workforce challenges. With better data, you can make better decisions to improve staff psychological safety. There are also resources available via the Quality Improvement Center on Workforce Development.

Talk with staff about what a healthy workplace looks and feels like to them

Each person will have different support needs as an employee. It’s important that we aren’t making assumptions about what staff want and need from their leaders.

This goes beyond data-gathering. Day to day, how are you talking with staff about their evolving support and wellness needs?

Foster healthy team dynamics

Child welfare work is often done in teams. When the teams aren’t functioning well, it can get in the way of the work. You can proactively foster healthy group dynamics on your team by addressing these key aspects:

• Develop team agreements together. Teams work better when everyone agrees on how you’ll engage with each other. How would each of you like your team to function? These agreements might include some rules to follow in team meetings, like “raise your hand to avoid interrupting.” They can also include broader behavior expectations, such as “own your mistakes.”
• Honor differences. Respect looks and feels different across cultures and lived experiences. Open communication across people of different backgrounds can help to avoid unintentional harm on your team.
• Don’t avoid conflict. Most of us would rather not be in conflict with others, especially at work. But by avoiding conflict, we usually make the problem worse. By encouraging your team to speak plainly about their concerns and disagreements, you can better prevent building resentments within the team.
• Share ownership over the team. A sense of shared ownership over the wellness of your team can help all members to feel more connected to each other and to their team’s mission. While the manager of the team sets the tone, a healthy team requires the buy-in of everyone.

Explore this topic as a team

The Capacity Building Center for States offers resources on fostering psychological safety:

• First, learn about the concept as a team
• Use the assessment tool to better understand how psychologically safe your team feels
• You can also learn about addressing complex problems in their Change and Implementation in Practice series

Consider becoming a CWEL site!

CWEL offers free technical assistance strategies to improve your staff’s psychological safety. Learn more about our recruitment and retention strategies. Interested? Email us to see if CWEL is a good fit for your agency.