Public Policy Commons^™

Supporting Virtual Supervision As Part Of A Hybrid Workforce, Quality Improvement Center For Workforce Development

QIC-Tips

More and more public child welfare agencies offer the opportunity to work in a hybrid environment, combining remote work with in-office work. This has raised questions among supervisors about how best to manage a remote workforce. Since research on virtual supervision is fairly limited relative to the popularity of remote work, studies are needed to understand the ways and conditions that influence effectiveness. Available research on remote work indicates that it is moderately associated with greater perceived autonomy and modestly associated with better supervisor relationships, performance, and job satisfaction. It was also modestly associated with decreased role stress and turnover …

How Can Supervisors Support New Employees?, Quality Improvement Center For Workforce Development

QIC-Tips

When the Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD) recently asked public child welfare agency staff and leaders about their concerns related to improving the workforce, one of the questions was, “How do we support new employees?” This QIC-Tip aims to answer this question with research-informed recommendations and practical advice from the field.

The process by which newcomers make the transition from being organizational outsiders to being insiders is known as onboarding, or organizational socialization (Bauer et al., 2007). The overall goal of onboarding is to facilitate newcomer adjustment, meaning that new employees understand the key tasks of …

Supervision In A Virtual Workplace, Cynthia Parry

QIC-Takes

Some agencies have increased their use of telework due to office closures, a desire to decrease their carbon footprint, or because of the pandemic. This can add stress on supervisors as they have to manage staff virtually. Remote supervision requires changes in communication (both styles and tools) which can result in staff feeling micromanaged or neglected. Navigating these and other issues have been difficult for many child welfare agencies. The QIC-WD sites, like other child welfare agencies around the country, pivoted to virtual supervision quickly due to the pandemic. Most supervisors were unprepared for managing a virtual workforce and are …

Abusive Supervision, Megan Paul

Umbrella Summaries

What is abusive supervision? Abusive supervision refers to “subordinates' perceptions of the extent to which supervisors engage in the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors, excluding physical contact” (Tepper, 2000, p. 178). Abusive supervision is most commonly measured using 15 items that describe abusive behaviors, and subordinates rate the frequency with which the supervisor engages in each behavior. Examples include “Ridicules me,” “Puts me down in front of others,” “Blames me to save himself/herself embarrassment,” and “Breaks promises he/she makes” (Tepper, 2000). Thus, subordinates do not judge whether they feel abused or consider their supervisors’ behavior abusive; they …

Perspectives On Multi-Intervention, Multi-Design Evaluation For The Child Welfare Workforce, Quality Improvement Center For Workforce Development

Other QIC-WD Products

The QIC-WD is working with eight sites and the Children’s Bureau in a participatory fashion (Fetterman, 2014) to implement utilization-focused (Alkin & Vo, 2017; Patton, 2008) site-specific and cross-site evaluation strategies. The goal of this research is to build knowledge of interventions to improve child welfare workforce retention, and ultimately outcomes for children and families. A complex systems approach (Westhorp, 2012) is being taken to identify how factors such as organizational structures and culture, staff workload, supervision, and caseworker values influence outcomes, including safety and permanency of children. The QIC-WD team has extensive experience conducting rigorous evaluations within and across …