Caring for Our Child Welfare Workforce: A Holistic Framework of Worker Well-being

Abstract

Child welfare (CW) workers, who play a critical role in the delivery of services to children and families, have a fundamental right to workplace well-being and opportunities to develop their job-related capacities. According to the human development capability approach, the freedom to achieve wellbeing is a moral imperative; people must have the opportunity to do what is needed to achieve the kind of life they want to lead (Nussbaum, 2011). This approach is anchored in social justice and equity and generally applied at the societal and political levels. It is the responsibility of the individual workers to exercise this freedom to achieve their capabilities and the organization’s responsibility to provide employees with an equitable, supportive, and safe work environment (Cumming, 2017). Several other professional (e.g., National Association of Social Workers) and political (e.g., Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees) organizations similarly call attention to and advocate for the professional well-being of human services workers. However, there are currently no frameworks or best practice guidelines that consider the multiple dimensions of worker well-being within the CW context, a profession totaling around 30,000 workers in the United States (Administration on Children, Youth, and Families, 2020). Outside of the CW context, Danna and Griffin (1999) provided an organizational framework of the antecedents and consequences of workplace well-being based on a synthesis of the general workforce literature. However, this framework includes only two dimensions of health and well-being, (i.e., mental and physical health) and as previously noted, is not specific to the CW workforce. This leaves CW organizations and leaders lacking guidance on a comprehensive approach to understanding and addressing their workforce’s well-being. The lack of a holistic worker well-being framework makes it difficult to know how to measure its absence or presence and how to create optimal work environments to ensure and support worker well-being. To address this gap in the literature, we developed a framework of worker well-being specific to the CW workforce and context, guided by Engel’s (1978) biopsychosocial model of health and a review of the current CW workforce literature. The proposed biopsychosocial framework includes conceptual definitions for three key dimensions of worker well-being: (a) physical well-being (e.g., low secondary traumatic stress), physical safety in the workplace, and general health); (b) psychological well-being (e.g., psychological safety, job satisfaction, inclusion and equity); and (c) social well-being (e.g., peer and supervisory support, work-life effectiveness). This biopsychosocial framework takes into account that understanding well-being in the CW context requires consideration of the complexity embedded within workers’ job functions. This includes the multifaceted job demands of working with children and families with repeated experiences of trauma (Kisiel et al., 2014); high workload and time pressure (He, Phillips, Lizano, Rienks, & Leake, 2018); and regulatory, political, and bureaucratic job environments (Ellett, Ellis, Westbrook, & Dews, 2007). Notably, some of the same job demands and complex