Employer Resources: Tackling stress in adult social care workers – Skills For Care
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Social care can be a stressful job, and stress at work can lead to errors, misjudgements, low morale and sickness absence if it’s not managed properly. Building the resilience of your staff will help them to deal with stress and cope better under pressure – it’s a core skill that everyone working in social care needs to have. 

This #LovetoLearn month get your copy of the Skills for Care (SFC) ‘Greater resilience, better care’ guide to help you build the resilience of your staff.

Here are three ways you can start to build the resilience of your workforce, to help them better deal with stress at work.

Use management systems to prevent and reduce stress at work

As an employer, you need to organise work in a way that protects the wellbeing of your workers. This might include ensuring workloads and work patterns don’t lead to stress, and ensuring that support is in place for staff to feedback about pressures in the workplace.

You also need to ensure that staff are aware of stress and how to manage it, and that there are adequate systems in place to identify and resolve any challenges.

Good leadership and management is vital to this and the SFC People performance management toolkit can help.

Use learning and development to help managers and workers develop resilient behaviours

Learning and development around stress should explain what it is, how to manage it and how to apply learning into practice.

It should focus on building the knowledge, behaviours and skills needed to be resilient, for example problem-solving skills and knowing how to deal with pressure.

The ‘Greater resilience, better care’ guide explains what you might include in a ‘resilience’ themed learning programme. You can also find learning providers who’ve been endorsed by Skills for Care as delivering high quality training here.

Build positive workplace cultures to foster resilience

Workplace culture is the character and personality of your organisation – it’s what makes your organisation unique and it influences how people behave and feel at work.

A positive workplace culture is a powerful force that affects the lives of people who need care and support. It can also either encourage employees to exceed expectations, if positive, or on occasions act out of character, damaging your organisations outcomes and reputation.

It can also support the resilience of your workers and reduce stress in the workplace.

Skills for Care are currently refreshing their ‘Positive workplace culture toolkit’ – keep an eye out in their enews for updates in summer 2018.

Find out more

Download your copy of the ‘Greater resilience, better care guide’ for adult social care managers, or email here for a free paper version.

Picture (c) MeganBailey-Earl.