Could you tell if a ‘good’ carer in your employment was experiencing burnout and had become a risk to your clients or organisation, before it is too late?
With the introduction of consumer directed care and the rise of care services being delivered in the home, care work is becoming increasingly stressful for front line staff. In a role that is increasingly under-supervised, has unpredictable working environments and that comes with high levels of responsibility, staff burnout is a real risk.
A number of recent studies have highlighted the prevalence of anxiety and depression among those working in the field. Australian Ageing Agenda reported on research conducted by Associate Professor Denise Jepsen from Macquarie University that found 50% of home carers interviewed had experienced anxiety or depression. In residential care other research studies have highlighted stress as a major cause of high absenteeism and staff turnover.
The government and registered providers of care agonise long and hard about quality assurance standards for hiring carers and disability support workers. There are the mandatory police and working with children checks of course, but a wider range of assessment steps are required to minimise the risk of the wrong hire.
At Newly we have adopted a thorough screening process that strives to ensure that applicants are suitable for work in the field and that they are well matched to the individual role and workplace culture of the employer. Our Newly Approved Assessment centre includes a number of checks including a one on one interview, observation of a group exercise, reference checks and finally a psychometric assessment using Pearson’s Workplace Personality Inventory (WPI).
We’re confident this is a rigorous assessment, however it’s not perfect. We understand the need to continually refine and improve our evaluation process. As such we recently commissioned Pearson, the global leader in workplace psychometric testing to analyse the results of our work over the last 2 years. There’ll be more on the results of that study soon.
The WPI is proving an extremely useful and successful tool in the recruitment process. However its usefulness is currently limited by the fact it is only utilized at the start of the recruitment process, providing a snapshot or a single view of a person’s personality at a point in time. We believe WPI results can be harnessed further to assist providers to identify carer burnout or even the potential for carer burnout before staff are at risk to themselves, the people they care for and the organisation as a whole.
Because we keep a record on our database of all the psychometric profile results of our Newly Approved candidates, we can replicate this assessment at any time and compare the results. By replicating the assessment at regular intervals, say once a year, employers can see if there has been any change in significant results, providing an alert that there may have been a change in that carer’s attitude to, and aptitude for the job.
Fortunately the WPI is done online and is relatively easy and inexpensive to administer. Of course there is no perfect fix for this risk, but we are confident this would be a very sound and defensible approach to mitigation. In addition, as we alluded to above, we are regularly analysing the results to refine and improve our understanding of the characteristics of ‘good’ carers. So it is embedded in a learning system as well.
