{"id":31859,"date":"2022-03-24T16:29:59","date_gmt":"2022-03-24T16:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/caseyfamilyv2.wpengine.com\/ideas42-reduce-staff-stressors-2\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T20:34:37","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T20:34:37","slug":"ideas42-reduce-los-factores-estresantes-del-personal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.casey.org\/es\/ideas42-reduce-staff-stressors\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00bfC\u00f3mo podr\u00eda el dise\u00f1o conductual mejorar la pr\u00e1ctica de primera l\u00ednea en el bienestar infantil?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Summary<\/h3>\n

A partnership turns behavioral science insights into real-world action, making everyday child welfare services more effective and equitable for families. This brief looks at ways to address time pressures for staff.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \n \n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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By Kevin Moore, Eva Frishberg, Anthony Barrows, and Allison Yates-Berg, ideas421 <\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n

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Behavioral design and child welfare<\/h2>\n \n \n \n

Behavioral design is a methodology that combines the thoughtful person-first approaches of human-centered design with rigorous scientific insights and iterative testing through impact evaluation. In 2015, ideas42<\/a> introduced a set of three behaviorally informed principles for human service professionals to use in service, program, and policy design: Cut the Costs; Create Slack; Reframe and Empower. As articulated in the ideas42 research report Poverty Interrupted<\/a>, these three core design principles offer a roadmap for evidence-informed practice improvement for systems serving people in poverty. Program administrators, policymakers, and other social impact professionals can use these principles to design for the context of poverty (which can be understood as the context of chronic scarcity), and address systems-level barriers like racism and xenophobia.<\/p>\n

After the publication of Poverty Interrupted, ideas42’s Economic Justice team began operationalizing the design principles through field-tested interventions (many of which incorporated random-assignment impact evaluation) on an array of programs including WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children),2<\/sup><\/a> SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program),3<\/sup><\/a> and public housing.4<\/sup><\/a> Recently the team began working on extending the findings from Poverty Interrupted to the context of child welfare. Since early 2020, ideas42 has worked with Casey Family Programs and a set of state child welfare jurisdictions to uncover insights about where behavioral science may advance day-to-day child welfare work, and create practical design ideas using behavioral insights and the Poverty Interrupted lens. This brief shares an overview of some of key reflections and considerations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \n \n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Scarcity and bias in child welfare<\/h2>\n \n \n \n

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Scarcity and its effect on cognition<\/b><\/h3>\n

The primary construct explored in Poverty Interrupted is the condition of scarcity, which can be understood as limitations on any key resource such as time, energy, or money. Resource scarcity affects people’s cognitive capacity because their minds “tunnel in” (focus intensely) on acquiring the things they urgently need. As a consequence, their minds also simultaneously tune out other needs that may be less urgent, but still important. This intense focus can be helpful to meet goals related to those resources in the short term. However, it becomes problematic when people are addressing emergencies constantly and must continually make tradeoffs between emergencies and other important needs. Anyone experiencing scarcity of any kind faces this “tunnel” dilemma and its consequences when those important (but less urgent) needs go unaddressed.<\/p>\n

While Poverty Interrupted includes a variety of recommendations for programs and services to help families contend with the effects of scarcity, ideas42’s newer work in child welfare has allowed for an examination of the parallel dynamic of scarcity’s effect on staff. When child welfare staff face scarcity and its associated consequences, the families they serve suffer as a result. This brief will focus on opportunities to design for the context of scarcity affecting staff as a pathway toward transforming the child welfare system and the ways families experience the system.<\/p>\n

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Staff’s experience of time scarcity<\/b><\/h3>\n

One of the biggest sources of scarcity for child welfare staff is time. Given the need for child welfare staff to provide both unbiased decision-making and proactive holistic support for children, parents, and caregivers involved with the child welfare system, the cognitive effects of time scarcity are worrisome. Consider the following scenario: A hotline worker receives a call about alleged neglect. The scenario sounds similar to a report from earlier that day where the case was assigned to investigation. The worker feels uncertain about the current case, but there is a queue of 15 other calls waiting. To compound the situation, the worker is nearing the end of the work shift and already has worked through lunch and break.<\/p>\n

This scenario is far from unusual in child welfare. What is the correct choice for the screener to make under these conditions of time scarcity and stress? Using evidence from an earlier case to assess this family’s case is neither fair nor ethical. Yet spending additional time may run the risk of exacerbating the call queue, or even delaying the response to a serious case of maltreatment. Accurately assessing each child’s safety and risk individually is important but people tend to be more risk averse and susceptible to bias when they are task-overloaded.5<\/sup><\/a> And in the face of looming ambiguity, screening in feels safer than screening out. While avoiding risk might sound favorable on its face, it often results in the over-surveillance and over-investigation of families. That increased intervention leads to trauma, family separation, and worse outcomes in the long-run – the opposite of the aims of a child welfare intervention.6<\/sup><\/a> These persistent challenges in trying to do what’s “right” in a resource-constrained environment are driven by the effects of scarcity. Being overworked and having to weigh complex risks and tradeoffs constantly lead not just to suboptimal decisions, but also burnout and turnover.7<\/sup><\/a> Ultimately, this ends up hurting those on the receiving end of these decisions: children and families, particularly those disproportionately impacted by child protective services, which include children and families of color and those in a lower socioeconomic stratum.<\/p>\n

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Scarcity activates implicit bias<\/b><\/h3>\n

Unfortunately, scarcity also activates other biases. Implicit bias – or unconscious prejudicial attitudes or stereotypes toward specific social groups – is troublesome for child welfare, particularly along the lines of race\/ethinicity and socioeconomic position. The literature indicates that several conditions make us vulnerable to implicit bias: having to make quick decisions, being angry or anxious, or being confronted with highly salient social categories like race or socioeconomic position.8<\/sup><\/a> Of course, these are the exact conditions faced by child welfare staff every day.<\/p>\n

Let’s return to the earlier scenario with the hotline screener. While the staff person is feeling the time pressure to make a choice about screening the family in or out, the worker may begin to judge the family by characteristics that should not be relevant but feel intuitive or come to mind quickly. Often these characteristics are indictors of race or socioeconomic position. For example, the address the report came from was in a middle class neighborhood, or the worker has a “gut feeling” about the family because the family’s surname is familiar from a previous contact with the system and the worker figures that the “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Without even consciously recognizing it, these implicit signals may become the deciding factor for whether a family is subject to investigation or consequent actions.<\/p>\n

It is critical to understand how much room child welfare staff have to make these judgements in order to understand how much bias may exist. While hotlines were the focus of the earlier scenario, implicit bias may affect a variety of contexts, including screening, treatment, removal, and reunification. Left unmitigated, bias leads to disproportionate outcomes for non-white families and people living with low incomes.9<\/sup><\/a> While the evidence is alarming, the call to action is clear. Policymakers and program designers who care about addressing disproportionate outcomes and avoiding downstream harms to families have an important opportunity to apply behavioral design to reduce the effects of scarcity and address bias in the child welfare system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \n \n \n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Poverty Interrupted design principles adapted to child welfare staff<\/h2>\n \n \n \n

What might behaviorally informed child welfare system improvements look like? The three design principles of Poverty Interrupted can be applied to child welfare to address the time scarcity faced by staff and the resulting exacerbation of bias. The first two principles, Cut the Costs<\/b> and Create Slack<\/b>, directly address the context of scarcity from different ends. Cutting costs for staff means making needed resources easier to get, thus reducing the burden on their scarce time and attention. Creating slack for staff is the flip side; they must be given more of what they lack, and when the issues can’t fully be addressed, it is critical to ensure the right supports are in place to reduce the negative consequences. For child welfare staff, creating slack largely involves finding ways to give them time back or reduce stress. The third principle, Reframe and Empower<\/b>, speaks to how to mitigate the various biases that creep into child welfare. Below are a handful of examples that suggest how practitioners and policymakers might apply these three principles to assist child welfare staff and transform the system overall.<\/p>\n

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Cut the (administrative) costs faced by child welfare staff.\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n

Child welfare staff make complex decisions and take actions with limited time and ample caseloads. These decisions have high stakes. Cutting the costs involves finding ways to reduce the hassles, complexities, and associated stressors that child welfare staff face in making decisions to ensure better outcomes for children and families. Below are a few design considerations for reducing hassles for child welfare staff:<\/p>\n