Advancing Child Welfare Workplace Justice

Building a Healthy Child Welfare Workplace

Moral distress emerges when everyday work constraints prevent social workers from taking ethically appropriate actions. For example, Dr. He says that social workers may experience moral distress when they want to access needed services for the immigrant families they work with, but cannot, for fear of putting these families at risk for deportation due to their residence status. Notably, she adds, more than 60% of child welfare caseworkers experienced moral distress, and approximately half consider leaving their jobs because of it. In a system with significant issues related to burnout and turnover, that is a problem.

Due to the lack of a strong theoretical base, Dr. He developed the dynamic theory of moral distress and recently submitted a federal grant to validate a measure of moral distress for child welfare workers that she designed. Her research also extends beyond understanding moral distress and other child welfare workplace challenges to preventing them from occurring in the first place.

Dr. He notes that in addition to impacting agency turnover, “Child welfare workers’ well-being directly affects their ability to support children and families.”

Drawing from positive psychology, Dr. He’s research focuses on workplace justice — issues such as diversity, equity, and inclusion, employee compensation and pathways for promotion — and worker well-being, including self-care, engagement and belongingness. Often, this means contending with the institutional racism and biases inherent in the child welfare system.

Dr. He’s research has found that child welfare staff of color experience greater workplace discrimination and perceive fewer opportunities for promotion. Further, when child welfare workers experience discrimination at work or see it happen to others, they report lower job satisfaction and higher burnout, regardless of their race or ethnicity. She has also found that white and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) workers who experience more equity at work are more likely to remain at those jobs.

With colleagues from GSSW’s Butler Institute for Families, where she is a faculty affiliate, Dr. He conducts workplace health assessments based on the U.S. Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being. Using the openly available Comprehensive Organizational Health Assessment (COHA) tool developed by the Butler Institute, Dr. He helps to identify workforce factors that impact an organization’s overall functioning or measure changes in organizational health resulting from targeted interventions.

Increasingly, Dr. He is also using an evaluation tool called Ripple Effects Mapping to uncover the impacts of projects or programs. Dr. He explains that Ripple Effects Mapping is a strength-based participatory focus group and storytelling approach that illuminates diverse perspectives and surfaces both anticipated and unanticipated outcomes of an initiative. It captures organizational knowledge and other rich data through storytelling and allows participants to define significance and meaning. Participants in a large group are asked a question such as, “What is working for you?”; “What are you most proud of?”; “What do you most like about working with families?”; and “What has helped you become the worker you want to be?” Stories are mapped in real time, and participants get to see the themes that emerge. According to Dr. He, “It helps them to see where they’ve been and the impacts they’ve made.”

A Focus on Public Impact

Across all that she does, Dr. He focuses on the words of Bentham Atirau Ohia, an expert in Māori/Indigenous leadership, management and policy: “What counts as knowledge, what knowledge counts, and who decides?”

“When I look at numbers — part of how I navigate research — I think about the faces and the people and the stories behind every datapoint,” Dr. He says. With Ripple Effects Mapping, she adds, “We let people decide what counts for them.” In the organizational health assessments, the evaluation team brings the data back to the community or agency and invites the workers to look at all the datapoints. “They have an opportunity to tell us what to focus on, what’s a priority. Workers are informing the workforce initiatives.”

Importantly, Dr. He adds, “Giving a worker a voice is also part of how you address moral distress.”

Dr. He is as committed to research dissemination as she is to the research itself — “getting research knowledge to the people who need it most.” For years she has developed infographics and one-pagers distilling research findings for her community partners. She also teaches an MSW course that pairs students with community-engaged researchers and community partners; the students develop plans and materials to disseminate research knowledge as widely as possible.

“How do you use research to really change things? How do you use the research we do in a way that can be practical?” Dr He asks. “In social work, we can speak to the challenges and push systems to do better, and we as social workers have ideas for how do that.”