Social work as a professional mainly focuses on seeking to assist members of a community to enhance their wellbeing singularly and severally. The professional involves a high number of variables and complexities that pose challenges to practitioners, more so supervisors. Based on my experience, the key among these challenges is motivating social workers to maintain proper records. Secondly, there is the challenge of convincing research parents to undertake annual education. Finally, delegation and time management is also a supervisory challenge.
According to my supervisor, she often struggles to motivate her followers to keep up to date notes about their cases. This challenge mostly affects older social workers, having been used to a system when the profession was much simpler and more focused on interpersonal relationships. As social work gets wider and more complex, the issues that require records expand thus augmenting the record-keeping work burden (Weinbach & Taylor, 2015). To mitigate this challenge, I would make the keeping of records easier by harnessing information technology. Using IT, the social workers can update their records in real-time as they work thus preventing backlogs. It can also make the process of entering records easier for social workers.
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Regarding the second challenge, social workers need the help of lay members of the public to cater to vulnerable members of the community such as children. An important part of this partnership between professional and lay people are resource parents, who open up their homes to vulnerable children. Resource mothers require formal annual training but many either do not have time for the training or feel that the training is not necessary. The supervisor thus struggles to get resource mothers to attend such training programs. To complicate the challenge, the resource parents are not under the direct instructions of social workers. Hence, it is not possible to compel them to undertake the course. On the other hand, removing parents who decline to attend the annual course on the program would limit the resources available to take care of vulnerable children.
To encourage resource mothers to attend annual training programs, I would make the programs more informal. Instead of having a singular annual training camp, I would organize for a personalized training program designed to suit the needs of each resource parents. IT would play a crucial role in informal training programs. Most of the interactions between the resource parents and their instructors would be through the internet. Making the training program easier and less inconveniencing would increase the propensity of resource parents agreeing to undertake the program (Weinbach & Taylor, 2015).
The final challenge that my supervisor faces is delegation issues and poor time management. Beginning with the latter, time management in social work is a complicated topic. Social work is more about the results that it is about the process. Social workers thus have to focus on getting the job done, which sometimes will take longer than expected. However, it would also be wrong to focus on one client or group at the expense of the others. Whereas the supervisor cannot push social workers to focus on time overly, there is a need to save time as the scope of social work keeps on expanding.
I would mitigate this challenge through training on innovative ways to save time in immaterial issues to create more time for material issues and activities. Delegation is also another challenge associated with social work supervision, more so due to the current expansion of the mandate of social workers (Weinbach & Taylor, 2015). For example, social workers have found themselves having to work with different professionals such as doctors and law enforcement officials. The supervisor would prefer to attend most of the complex inter-professional assignments but due to scheduling conflicts, delegation is unavoidable. However, getting members of staff capable of working in some of these engagements is a challenge. My solution to this problem is specialization. For example, I would train one of the social workers to work with medical professionals, another with law enforcement. This way, delegating would be easier as each discipline has a social worker specially trained to handle it.
References
Weinbach, R. W., & Taylor, L. M. (2015). The social worker as manager: a practical guide to success . Boston: Pearson.
