A Framework for Social Work to Lead in Organizational Wellness

Overview: Organizational wellness involves intentional efforts to address professional stress and burnout. This presentation shows how social work is ideally situated and ethically compelled to lead organizational wellness. We provide an explicit, adaptable framework for leaders to use social work competencies in conceptualizing, planning, implementing, evaluating, and sustaining organizational wellness.Proposal text: “Leading Critical Conversations: Human Rights are Global Rights” must include attention to the human rights of those enacting the profession’s mission. Social work increasingly experiences the deleterious impacts of professional burnout, staff turnover, and compromised services (e.g., Cox & Steiner, 2013). How can the profession purport to pursue human rights when neglecting the human rights of practitioners? Organizational wellness involves planful efforts to address these concerns and promote employee well-being.

This presentation contributes to a critical conversation about the profession’s needed leadership role in organizational wellness. First, we articulate a rationale for organizational wellness, including its critical value for social work. We discuss the relationship of self-care, as micro-focused, and organizational wellness, as macro-focused. These complementary aspects are essential for systemic, sustainable attention to practitioner well-being (e.g., Authors, 2020).

Then, we discuss the evolving paradigm of a wholistic, systemic approach to organizational wellness (Kanter & Sherman, 2017; Terry, 2019). As contrasted with traditional approaches that emphasize a medical model, emerging wellness models promote a multi-dimensional understanding of wellness. These models require more complex, systemic approaches.

Next, we elucidate how social work is ideally situated to lead organizational wellness efforts, as an arena of practice. For instance, social work’s person-in-environment and systems approaches are intrinsically applicable to wholistic wellness paradigms. Social work must claim responsibility and capacity for leadership in this space.

We provide a framework for designing and developing an organizational wellness culture in non-profits (Authors, 2021). We explicate how CSWE competencies (2015) uniquely prepare social workers to lead in organizational wellness. Social workers can use our framework to provide leadership in conceptualizing, planning, implementing, evaluating, and sustaining (C-PIES) organizational wellness.

We link specific EPAS competencies with each phase of this framework. For example, the Conceptualizing phase uses the social work competency of engagement to lead the organization in a participatory process for identifying desired components of an organizational wellness culture. A related competency in this phase is practice-informed research and research-informed practice. Similarly, in the Planning phase, the leader uses the assessment competency to analyze information from the conceptualization phase to prioritize the organization’s wellness components. Next, the leader uses the intervention competency to work with others on Implementing. Then, the leader engages the evaluation competency to coordinate Evaluating both discrete components of the wellness initiative and overall effectiveness.

The final phase involves iteratively engaging all the previous phases and competencies in Sustaining. Also, this phase especially requires effective communications about the wellness culture. Effective communication is one element of the social work competency of demonstrating ethical and professional behavior. This competency corresponds with the competency of advancing human rights and social justice. Together, these competencies inform both the practice and principles inherent to an organizational wellness culture. As such, social work holds an ethical obligation to provide leadership in organizations to ensure just processes and enhance human well-being. Social work education can prepare leaders for organizational wellness (Authors, 2016). This leadership promotes the profession’s mission, supports the profession’s viability, and establishes a vital arena for practice.