Supporting the support services providers: exploring the invisible aspects of work extremity of social workers

Abstract

This inductive research reveals an invisible form of mundane extremity caused by the organisational system and inefficient HRM practices. Based on 30 interviews with social workers across Australia, we employed an interpretivist approach to coding and analysing the data thematically. We identified four paradoxical tensions existing in the domains of occupation, organisation, interpersonal, and work roles that hinder social workers’ capabilities to help clients. These tensions generate perceptions of a lack of support, a lack of resources, and role expectation violation, as well as negative feelings of supportlessness, helplessness, powerlessness, and hopelessness, subsequently resulting in physical, psychological, and emotional exhaustion for social workers. Since the inefficiency-driven demands occur in the work processes and not the work itself, they are often not accounted for in the official workload and contribute to mundane work extremity in an invisible manner. Our research enriches the understanding of work extremity, introduces a work extremity lens to understand social work, and connects work extremity research to HRM practices.

Keywords:

• Social workers
• work extremity
• mundane extremity
• support
• invisible workload

Australia has approximately 900,000 human services personnel, among which social workers constitute a significant proportion (McCurdy et al., 2020). Social work is widely acknowledged as a demanding and stressful occupation that involves complex work characterised by constant changes in regulations and organisational systems, often resulting in high levels of uncertainty (Kalliath et al., 2019). The complexities are reflected in the need to respond to burgeoning social needs, and to the political, socio-cultural, environmental, demographic, and other external influences on social work practice (Kalliath & Kalliath, 2015). Social workers help and serve the most vulnerable groups in society (Okafor, 2021), working in fields such as aged care, child protection, disability, domestic violence, drugs and addiction, homelessness, mental health, refugee and asylum seeker services, and many others. Therefore, they are often exposed to extreme work demands that need to be addressed in a timely manner, alongside the need to adapt their practices and procedures in response to evolving situations such as pandemics, economic crises, and geopolitical conflicts (Ben-Ezra & Hamama-Raz, 2021).

Recently, due to the unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, the demands, stresses, complexities, and uncertainties that social workers face have amplified. Based on a questionnaire involving 208 social workers in Australia and New Zealand conducted by members of the Australian and New Zealand Disaster Network¹ from October to December 2020, social workers reported inadequate staffing, increased workload and high staff turnover, struggles with balancing between self-protection and providing services to clients, and annoyance that social work is not as recognised or acknowledged as other human services personnel (Alston et al., 2022). Such challenges were also prevalent internationally. In a research conducted by UNISON² involving 2,949 social workers across the UK, it was revealed that the pandemic has intensified what was already a crisis in social work with continued service cuts, rising demand for services, and growing caseloads (Labour Research Department, 2022). The most deeply felt concerns among social workers were workload (cited by 90%), staff shortages (93%), and working beyond contractual hours (80%). A majority (87%) of the social workers were also concerned about their ability to provide a good service to the public, and 70% of the respondents indicated that their morale had gone down, with almost half (49%) admitting that they were less likely to stay in their jobs. As a result of these factors, many experienced constant emotional distress and worry over their cases and clients.

Despite evidence of the extreme work conditions that social workers face, a quick search of the literature encompassing social workers and extreme work yields little to no results. If the intense work demands, long working hours, and extreme work behaviours were to persist and be left unaddressed, prior studies on non-social worker samples (e.g. Boxall & Macky, 2014; Turnbull & Wass, 2015) would suggest that workers will continue to suffer from high turnover, and decreased performance, health, and wellbeing-related outcomes. Thus, we aim to investigate work extremity through the experiences of social workers. Since the work challenges faced by social workers are closely intertwined with organisational practices, we seek to understand the role of organisations through a qualitative inductive approach in the context of Australian social work. Specifically, we pose this research question ‘How do organisational and HRM practices and processes affect the work extremity of social workers?’. In doing so, we address these research gaps: (1) the lack of connection and integration between the extreme work and social work literatures; (2) the lack of examination of non-occupational causes of work extremity, which have been neglected in the extreme work literature; and (3) while researchers have sporadically recognised that the challenges faced by social workers are related to management, there is a dearth of theoretical explanations which limits the potential of organisational interventions to help social workers effectively.

Our research makes important contributions to the combined work extremity, social work, and HRM practices literature. First, we extend work extremity research by identifying invisible forms of extremity, which refer to non-work factors that generate excessive demands for personal resources to deal with, such as system glitches, administration inefficiencies, or interpersonal conflicts. Such invisible forms of work extremity deplete social workers’ physical and mental energies, subsequently increasing their perceived work intensity as they need to expend limited physical and mental resources to cope with more demands. Our research highlights the need to consider both visible and invisible work extremities to alleviate social workers’ extreme work conditions. Second, by drawing on the work extremity literature to expand social work research, we introduce a new analytical lens to understand social workers’ experiences. Specifically, our findings show that the work extremity experienced by social workers is often not an individual issue, but a system-level issue related to the industry, management, HRM practices, and how work is organised. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is an obvious cause of increased work intensity, our findings reveal that work extremity has existed in the social work sector for a long time, and the pandemic merely exacerbated it. Rather than diverting attention away from these pre-existing issues and shifting the blame to the pandemic, there is an urgent need to find solutions within the human services system and organisations. Third, our research extends understanding of how wellbeing-oriented HRM practices affect employees’ attitudes and behaviours by introducing work extremity as a mediating mechanism and provides evidence of the negative impacts on social workers when wellbeing-oriented HRM practices are absent.

This paper is organised as follows: we first review work extremity research in general, followed by work extremity in the healthcare sector, and the relationship between work extremity and HRM practices. We then describe the research methodology, data collection and analytical process, followed by a discussion of the findings. Our paper concludes by outlining the theoretical contributions, practical implications, and research limitations.

Work extremity

Macro and mundane work extremity

Extreme work research can be classified into two streams. The first stream focuses on extremity caused by external forces. This includes extreme events defined as ‘a discrete episode or occurrence that may result in an extensive and intolerable magnitude of physical, psychological, or material consequences to organisational members’ (Hannah et al., 2009, p. 898). It also includes extreme contexts which are risky, disruptive, and emergent, resulting in extreme physical and psychological intensity in individuals who work within such contexts (Cai et al., 2021; Hällgren et al., 2018). The contexts could include macro-extreme events, such as wars, terrorist attacks, disasters, or major accidents, and occupations that require people to work in extreme conditions such as the military, police, emergency response services, or aid workers (Bader et al., 2019a; de Rond & Lok, 2016; Norris et al., 2020; Weick & Roberts, 1993).

The second stream conceptualises extremity as contexts that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) (Cousins, 2018). This conceptualisation extends the scope of extreme work from the macro-level, externally caused extremity to micro-level extremity within organisations, and from episodic extremity to mundane extremity that occurs daily and can be observed in routinised job tasks and activities (Cai et al., 2021; Wankhade et al., 2020). An example is workplace violence experienced by emergency workers (Meacham et al., 2020). This conceptualisation also incorporates work intensification and workaholism into the overarching theme of extreme work. This includes pressurised schedules where employees perform the same amount of work over a shortened period of time (Darics, 2014; McDonald & Thompson, 2016), work intensification due to external pressures such as global competition or digitalisation (Gascoigne et al., 2015; Neirotti, 2020), or workaholism characterised by long working hours in high paid but demanding professions such as healthcare, politics, law, finance and accounting, or consulting (Gascoigne et al., 2015; Holland & Liang, 2020). Emergency services workers and the police are examples that fall under the ‘mundane extremity’ category as they are often targets of day-to-day physical and emotional violence (Granter et al., 2019; Meacham et al., 2020).

To demonstrate the types of work extremity, we mapped the extreme contexts and related professions examined in the two streams of literature (see Figure 1). The mapping is based on two dimensions, namely the extent of extremity (macro vs. mundane extremity) and public visibility (high vs. low visibility). Macro extremity is often discrete, episodic, intense, or infrequent, and often receives a high level of public visibility through the media (Wankhade et al., 2020). Examples of macro extremity include wars, disasters, and occupations such as the military and firefighters (shown in the top right corner of Figure 1). On the other hand, non-extreme, traditional work is located at the bottom left corner of Figure 1, characterised by low public visibility and mundane extremity. Macro and publicly visible extreme work tends to have a clear boundary with traditional, non-extreme work. Research on mundane extremity focuses on events and occupations with moderate levels of extremity and public visibility. As mentioned above, examples of occupations characterised by mundane extremity include the police and ambulance service. Due to work intensification, some traditionally non-extreme work is transforming into mundane extreme work, resulting in blurred boundaries across many types of events and occupations. Figure 1 shows the three clusters of research conducted on work extremity, but it is not a comparison of the magnitude of extremity and public visibility across events and occupations.

Figure 1. Mapping social workers in relation to other occupations in the context of work extremity research.

Work extremity in the healthcare and social services sector

The healthcare and social services sectors are ideal research contexts for work extremity research. Many tasks performed by professionals in these sectors fall under the category of mundane extremity. Professionals often work in tough, demanding environments, where their decisions and actions have life or death implications. They also need to work under tight deadlines within the constraints of regulatory bodies and multiple stakeholders, and make decisions out of conflicting priorities (Buchanan et al., 2013). Recent social work literature has indicated that social workers’ work environment is becoming VUCA. Due to the client-facing nature of frontline social work, social workers experience strong social responsibility and pressure as their work-related decisions have major implications for individuals of vulnerable groups. Numerous studies (e.g. Newell & MacNeil, 2010; Xu et al., 2019) have also recorded that chronic exposure to traumatic situations and high work demands negatively affect social workers’ physical and psychological wellbeing. Furthermore, social work is emotionally intense because clients and organisations expect social workers to demonstrate compassion and emotional labour, that is, they have to manage their feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of their job (Granter et al., 2019). As a result, social workers are found to suffer from high levels of emotional exhaustion and compassion fatigue (Adams et al., 2006; Roh et al., 2016), and prolonged stress and burnout (McFadden, 2015; Tan et al., 2019).

From an organisational perspective, the work environment of social work has also worsened. Many experience extremely high workloads and increasingly challenging work demands with fewer resources (Welander et al., 2017), which has also become another source of psychological toll. Nevertheless, compared with the other occupational groups that have been widely examined in the work extremity literature, social workers are lower in public visibility but higher in mundane extremity (see Figure 1). Thus, although work extremity is a mundane experience for social workers, this phenomenon is rarely studied from a work extremity lens.

Work extremity and human resource management (HRM) practices

Both the macro and mundane extremity research streams link work extremity to HRM and its practices, but from different angles and through distinct mechanisms. HRM refers to activities associated with the management of people in organisations (Boxall & Purcell, 2008). HRM practices include a variety of practices aimed at building the capability, motivation, and opportunity for organisations and individuals to thrive (Van De Voorde et al., 2012), such as work design, organisational culture, and organisational support (Boselie et al., 2005). Macro extremity is often caused by factors external to the organisation. Thus, the role of organisations and managers is to provide targeted support through non-traditional arrangements and practices. For example, Fee and colleagues (2019) identified HR safety security practices (e.g. regulatory, informal mentoring, and empowerment) that organisations use to ensure the physical and psychological safety of employees working in hostile environments. Harvey et al. (2019) advocated the duty of care that organisations have when they assigned employees to work in dangerous contexts. Bader et al. (2019b) promoted a HRM framework to manage and support employees in pre-crisis, acute-crisis, and post-crisis phases, and the framework also included macro (i.e. national/global), meso (i.e. organisational), and micro (i.e. individual) levels of HRM practices.

In contrast, mundane extremity is often caused by factors within the organisation, such as organisational processes and policies. For example, Granter et al. (2019) pointed out that some extremity experienced by ambulance workers was caused by performance goals and organisational changes. Similarly, Gascoigne et al. (2015) argued that the long work hours culture is deeply entrenched in certain occupations, such as medical practitioners, chefs, and teachers (Gascoigne et al., 2015). Although the extant literature has established the link between organisational practices and work extremity, it tends to focus on a small number of visible extremity practices, such as long working hours (McDonald & Thompson, 2016) and work intensification (Gascoigne et al., 2015; Neirotti, 2020). Furthermore, there is a general lack of understanding of the role that organisations play in causing mundane work extremity.

Due to the rise in work extremity across industries and occupations, HRM scholars have also called for wellbeing-focused HRM (Guest, 2002, 2017). Traditionally, HRM’s focus has been on achieving organisational goals and treating employees as a means to obtaining organisational goals. Guest (2017) proposed that HRM should be centred around employees’ wellbeing and argued that organisational objectives can be achieved if employee wellbeing is prioritised. This line of research tends to focus on the direct associations between HRM practices and employee outcomes such as job satisfaction (Guest, 2002), job performance (Kowalski & Loretto, 2017), and wellbeing (Okay-Somerville & Scholarios, 2019). However, an explicit and systematic investigation of the role of HRM practices in relation to mundane extremity remains limited. Therefore, we aim to investigate the experience of work extremity as well as the role of the organisational system in contributing to work extremity through the lens of social workers.

Research methodology

We employ an interpretivist theoretical perspective aimed at exploring individuals’ interpretations of their real-life experiences (Crotty, 1998). Following a social constructionist epistemological stance, we argue that reality is formed through interactions between humans and their social context. This approach was appropriate for a study of social workers against the backdrop of a rapidly unfolding healthcare sector crisis, job intensification, and high turnover, as the construction of meaning in this situation is fluid and situated in the context. We adopted an inductive theory-building process and thematic analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2014; Glaser & Strauss, 2017) through semi-structured interviews to understand social workers’ subjective experiences of work extremity.

The research team included both academics and practitioner-scholars who helped to ensure that both the insider and outsider perspectives were considered in the analytical process. The third and fourth authors, who are practitioner-scholars in the healthcare and social services sector, collected the data. The research team worked together to design interview questions (shown in Appendix 1) and recruitment strategies and collectively discussed issues that arose in the data collection and analysis processes. This approach can minimise expert bias when researchers are too close to the informants and lose the high-level perspective for theorising and ensuring qualitative rigour (Gioia et al., 2013).

Recruitment posts were published through our practitioner-scholars’ professional networks and community groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Word-of-mouth snowballing strategies were used subsequently. We followed the theoretical sampling strategy, which highlights the representativeness of concepts (i.e. mundane extremity) instead of individuals (Corbin & Strauss, 1990), and we also sought to include a broad range of experiences of social workers. Thus, we purposefully varied the sample based on the types of social work (e.g. child protection, disability, mental health, and so on), work contexts (rural vs. urban), regions or states, gender, and age. Most of the participants were female (n = 27, 90%), aligned with the gender breakdown of the social work sector (Labour Market Insights, 2022). Participants’ ages ranged from 22 to 58 years old, 16 of them (55%) were single or divorced, 10 of them (33%) had dependents, and their social work experience ranged from 0.5 to 30 years. Only five of them (17%) reported working in rural areas, while the rest lived and worked in urban areas. Participants worked across a range of social work fields, including child protection, disability case management, domestic violence, child and adolescent mental health, family services, practice supervisor, call centres and helplines, aged care, homelessness, and youth services. The list of participants along with their demographic details can be found in Table 1.

Table 1. Demographic overview of interview participants.

Pseudonyms	Gender	Age	Marital Status	Dependents	Field(s) of Practice	States	Urban/Rural	Social Work Experience (years)
Anna	Female	29	Single	No	Child protection	VIC	Urban	5
Bianca	Female	35	Single	No	Family services	VIC	Urban	10
Claire	Female	51	Single	No	Disability	VIC	Urban	30
Ella	Female	41	Married	No	Family services	QLD	Urban	21
Emily	Female	35	Married	Yes	Child protection	NSW	Urban	8
Gemma	Female	55	Divorced	Yes	Youth protection	VIC	Urban	25
Henny	Female	34	Single	No	Mental health	NSW	Urban	15
Henry	Male	25	Single	No	Call centre	QLD	Urban	0.5
Jaime	Female	50	Divorced	No	Youth and family services	VIC	Urban	20
Jane	Female	44	Single	No	Disability	NSW	Urban	15
Jess	Female	25	Single	No	Disability case management	WA	Urban	0.5
Jo	Female	31	De facto	No	Mental health	VIC	Urban	8
Julie	Female	39	Married	Yes	Mental health and AOD	QLD	Rural	2.5
Laura	Female	22	Single	No	Aged care	QLD	Urban	2
Lena	Female	51	Married	Yes	Child protection, AOD, Policy, Counselling, Healthcare	WA	Rural	30
Lisa	Female	43	Married	Yes	Family services	WA	Urban	13
Mary	Female	40	De facto	No	Youth homelessness	VIC	Urban	7.5
Mel	Female	27	Single	No	Youth work	QLD	Urban	6
Nara	Female	49	Married	Yes	Child and adolescent mental health/Out-of-home care	NSW	Urban	22
Natty	Female	48	De facto	No	Practice supervisor (Counselling, FDV, Youth engagement)	QLD	Urban	17
Nicky	Female	24	De facto	No	Out-of-home care/Child protection	NSW	Urban	3
Pat	Male	42	De facto	No	Case management	NSW	Urban	18
Penny	Female	41	Single	Yes	Child protection	NSW	Urban	19
Rachel	Female	50	Single	No	Disability	NSW	Rural	20
Ray	Female	39	Married	Yes	FDV and homelessness	NSW	Urban	0.8
Rose	Female	56	Divorced	No	Family services	VIC	Urban	2.5
Shaun	Male	43	Married	Yes	Youth work	NSW	Rural	14
Sue	Female	58	Married	No	FDV	QLD	Rural	3
Terri	Female	38	Single	Yes	Mental health	NSW	Urban	18
Vic	Female	30	Single	No	Clinical	VIC	Urban	12

FDV: Family and domestic violence; AOD: Alcohol and other drugs; NSW: New South Wales; QLD: Queensland; VIC: Victoria, WA: Western Australia.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted from late 2020 to mid-2021. Most interviews were conducted virtually through Microsoft Teams or Zoom due to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, and some interviews were conducted face-to-face. The data analysis paralleled the interview process, so we could adjust the interview questions based on the preliminary findings. The data reached saturation after about 20 interviews as no new information emerged. Nevertheless, more interviews were conducted, yielding a final sample of 30 participants.

Since there is a limited theoretical framework that connects work extremity and organisational and HRM practices in social work research, when analysing the data, we followed Glaser and Strauss’ (2017) suggestion and ignored existing theories and instead listened to the informants to let themes emerge from the data. This helps to ensure that the theoretical categories will not be contaminated by existing theories. The data analysis consisted of the following stages: We first read the interview transcripts verbatim and selected information relevant to our research focus in general. We then used the open coding technique as the first-order coding to identify broad categories related to HRM practices and work extremity (Glaser & Strauss, 2017; Locke & Golden-Biddle 2001). At this stage, we tried to be faithful to informants as much as possible (Gioia et al., 2013). For example, we coded three categories related to the macro system of social work, which are ‘system is complicated’, ‘stakeholders are hard to manage’, and ‘service is inconsistent’, which we labelled under ‘system complexity’ (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Invisible mundane extremity of social workers.

In the second-level coding, we adopted a theoretical-based interpretation of the categories by identifying how the themes can help to explain the focal phenomenon (Gioia et al., 2013). For example, we categorised the three themes mentioned above as ‘occupational-level system tension’, which specifically refers to informants’ description that their ‘work is dynamic but the system is rigid’. In total, we identified four types of paradoxical managerial/HR tensions in the domains of profession, organisation, work environment, and social worker. We aggregated these tensions into invisible mundane extremity because they posed a range of challenges for social workers by increasing their physical, psychological, and emotional exhaustion, all of which are features of work extremity identified in the extant literature (Granter et al., 2019; Meacham et al., 2020). Since the managerial/HR tensions tend to occur during the work process, but are not part of social workers’ job scope, the additional efforts to deal with them were often not considered in social workers’ workload, further depleting social workers’ limited time and physical energy. We present the power quotes (Pratt, 2009) in the next section as well as the supporting quotes in Appendix 2. We followed an iterative process going back and forth between the original data, codes, and themes identified in the work extremity literature. After several iterations, the data analysis concluded when the research team believed that the proposed model provided innovative answers to the research question and was truthful to the data.

Findings

Work extremity was evidenced in every social worker’s description of their daily jobs. More importantly, our data revealed regular and constant occurrences of invisible work extremity caused by system inefficiencies and HRM practices. We identified and theorised four paradoxical tensions occurring at different levels within the organisation, labelling them as follows: 1) at the occupational level, the tension is ‘work is dynamic but the system is rigid’, 2) at the organisational level, the tension manifests as ‘support services providers cannot support their own employees’, 3) at the interpersonal level, two tensions were identified, namely ‘managers (of social workers) are not familiar with the profession and do not understand social work’ and ‘social workers help clients but not their colleagues’, and 4) finally, at the individual level, the tension is related to role identity, which is ‘social workers joined the profession to help clients but are overwhelmed with paperwork’. Furthermore, due to a lack of resources to cope with these tensions, they became a source of negative emotions. Social workers felt a lack of support, a lack of resources, and a lack of role clarity, leading them to feel helpless, supportless, powerless, and hopeless. These negative experiences and emotions have been found to be associated with experiences of work extremity (Paterlini et al., 2022). We elaborate on each paradoxical tension and how it contributes to the mundane invisible work extremity of social workers in the next section.

Occupational-Level paradoxical tension: work is dynamic but the system is rigid

Social services providers are embedded in a macro-system that constitutes a chain of regulatory bodies and professions such as social workers, doctors, nurses, police, judges, lawyers, and volunteers. Whilst serving their clients, social workers often have to liaise with different stakeholders from the start to the end of a case due to the complexity of their clients’ needs. Our data revealed that as social workers deal with a range of stakeholders, the cross-professional nature of social work can also lead to system inefficiencies, inflexibility, and inconsistencies, which are difficult to coordinate. This increases social workers’ task difficulty and work intensity, limiting their ability to help clients. This finding is corroborated by prior research (e.g. Cogin et al., 2016) which found that regulatory authorities and professional bodies constrain the efficiency of social services. Our data revealed three features of the macro-system that hinder support for our informants, leaving them powerless and supportless, thus contributing to the mundane invisible extremity of social work. These features are system complexity, stakeholder diversity, and service inconsistency.

System complexity

Social workers frequently remarked that their IT and reporting system is too complicated and rigid for them to navigate, particularly the procedures and requirements, and the complexities were often compounded by the ongoing migration from a manual, paper-based system to a digital system. The comments below show that when social workers could not deal with the system, they felt frustrated, powerless, and subsequently, upset and angry. For example, Nicky felt that dealing with the system is more complicated than dealing with difficult client cases, suggesting that system complexity was a major source of her negative emotions.

People think that the hardest part of my job is dealing with children being neglected and abused… In fact, the hardest thing for me is the systematic stuff. It makes me feel powerless. That’s the stuff that I feel I can’t talk to my friends about or to my partner because they don’t really get it. So, I find myself venting to my colleagues. (Nicky, child protection social worker)

Nicky further indicated that the system complexity was a major barrier that prevented her from fulfilling her career goal of helping her clients, and there were times when she felt helpless and could no longer put up with the system. These quotes indicate that system complexity depletes Nicky’s work resources (e.g. time and positive emotions), reduces her efficiency, and makes her feel hopeless and powerless.

So many people come into this field because they want to make a change and they want to make a difference…the reality is that you spend more time fighting the system …you get to that point, you literally reached this like absolute point, where like I don’t give a shit anymore… (Nicky, child protection social worker)

Rose’s experience shows that system complexity not only affects its users, such as social workers, but also members of vulnerable groups who were not equipped with the skills to use complex systems. She further attributed her burnout to the system.

I’ll do part of it [the application form] and then I’ll get her [my client] to finish the rest. Sometimes, society gets in the way of these people. The system is so hard. It makes a life multiplied with difficulties and it’s just not fair. Things always take more time than I planned… I can’t be around [my clients] when they need me… [the system] stops me from being supportive to my clients… I feel tired, tired, very tired… …I become very negative as well, not personally [but] personality wise negative, standoffish, not interested in. (Rose, family services social worker)

Nevertheless, our informants did acknowledge that the social support systems (e.g. child protection, mental health, or family support) established in Australia are robust in general, although they are not perfect. Further, they recognised the range of support provided by Australia’s federal and state governments. They also understood why regulations were needed given the sensitivity of the services provided by this sector. However, at a micro-level, they preferred the system to be simpler and more efficient, as using the system often felt like a burden.

Stakeholder diversity

Social resources, or support or assistance available to an individual or family from community organisations, agencies, and their social network, tend to be provided by different sources. Therefore, social workers often need to liaise with different professionals and stakeholders to gather social resources for their clients. It is not easy to coordinate and get all stakeholders on board because each party has their own priorities and constraints. The lack of shared goals and similar priorities unexpectedly increases social workers’ workload and heightens the uncertainties in their job. Consequently, many informants remarked feeling frustrated and hopeless in their job roles. In worst cases, some chose to leave their jobs, indicating their work often goes beyond the standard job scope.

As an example, Natty, a social work practice supervisor, expressed frustration when other parties did not actively contribute, which led to her decision to leave the profession:

I’ve been in that sector for about 10 years when I decided to leave. It was based on a few things that happened. One of them was at a meeting, where I was with a whole heap of stakeholders around really high-risk young people. No one was making decisions or doing anything… I just became really directive and took control, and actually ended up undertaking all the risks because police, health and child safety all went “Yep! Cool! You do that” […] I was so busy and tired, I didn’t do all those usual processes as I normally would, and I didn’t engage in a collaborative process. I’m really sick of this, there’s nothing happening, so I just took control over the whole situation…That was the last straw. (Natty, social work practice supervisor)

Sometimes, the different stakeholders also evaluate a case from their own perspectives, and the divergent evaluations make it difficult for social workers to support their clients. Lena’s experience is a good example:

I think in my role, the expectation is you are with them [clients] as much as possible and you’re working with the systems […] you’re working with the child protection system, police, mental health system. These systems may determine whether a young person is having a behavioural issue or a mental health issue. For example, a young person may not be admitted to the hospital to the mental health unit because [the system believes that] the issue is behavioural. But in residential, you’re managing ongoing attempts of suicide, self-harming. You got all those systems around with varying approaches… at the end of the day, you ask yourself, how do we manage this? (Lena, child protection/healthcare social worker)

These examples demonstrate the difficulty in estimating the complexity and uncertainty when working with diverse stakeholders. Because stakeholders may have divergent priorities, social workers end up absorbing the hidden coordination time and energy, resulting in work extremity.

Service inconsistency

Since multiple service providers are typically involved in one case, they may not always have up-to-date information about the case development or hold the same service standards. The quality of service is also affected by the resource constraints of the service providers. As a result, our informants and their clients might not receive the quality support they expect across service providers. Since social workers are directly responsible for their clients, they must cope with unexpected challenges due to service inconsistencies. This lack of control tends to generate a sense of powerlessness and became a source of stress and invisible workload. The two examples below demonstrate the frustration that our informants experienced when other service providers failed to provide the expected support:

The things that I get most stressed out about are when they are constantly cancelling. [As a result], my clients missed out on services that they need…I think the client might expect me to get a package [of service]. The providers, that’s their job to give us the services, so we can stay at home and expect a reliable service…we know they’re going to come every Wednesday at 9, you know that sort of stuff, whereas [the system] can’t necessarily provide that consistency, so it’s just the weight of the expectations of the client. (Laura, aged care social worker)

I once worked on a case. The kid was sexually assaulted. English is not her first language. Gradually, we could have conversations. She had specific signs that she would use. I have developed a rapport with her, who’s extremely traumatised and so I stayed with her through her forensic exam… They [the system] couldn’t get an interpreter. English is not her first language. You don’t know how much she can understand. A male doctor was assigned and tried to touch her without asking for her consent […] What would you like me to do? That’s not really fair. I worked there for 13 or 14 hours straight that day with her. (Penny, child protection social worker)

Organisational-Level paradoxical tension: support services providers cannot support their own employees

Social services organisations are established to help people. Ironically, our data showed that some organisations were not equipped to help their own employees, instead they were a source of stress for them. Organisational inefficiencies and poor organisational support increased the mundane invisible work extremity of social workers, and subsequently triggered feelings of a lack of support (‘supportlessness’) and helplessness. We identified and theorised the data into four themes: (1) inflexible procedures, (2) system disruption, (3) staff shortages, and (4) ineffective support, which reflect the issues that exist in management and HRM practices.

Inflexible procedures

Organisations use procedures to manage workflow. Ideally, the procedures are underpinned by rational logic, which would function well if work processes and employees follow the same logic. However, the nature of social work does not always follow rational logic. Thus, the procedures and the nature of social work do not always complement one another, causing inefficiencies. This is reflected in many social workers’ remarks, as they alluded to the inefficient work processes and time wastage caused by organisational procedures when helping their clients.

For example, Sue commented that according to organisational procedures, she must develop a safety plan for all her clients. However, a rational safety plan would not work well on a mentally unstable client. Although the procedures are set up and designed rationally, they do not always guarantee the client’s safety. Due to the nature of social work, social workers often develop a psychological connection with their clients. When a case is not completed, they may not be able to draw a clear boundary between their non-work time and caring for the safety of their clients (Chan et al., 2023). Thus, rational procedures do not necessarily help social workers, instead they add another layer of stress for them. For example, Sue was concerned about what could happen to her clients over a weekend, but her manager believed that following the safety procedure was sufficient:

I’ve got a couple of clients at the moment who are a little bit erratic. You don’t know what’s going to happen… if they’ll be there on Monday … You can put a safety plan into action. You give them the numbers to call and all of that. But you wonder, then, in that kind of state, they will not follow through with the safety plan that you put together. (Sue, domestic/family violence social worker)

Inflexible organisational procedures and regulations could also become barriers to social workers and amplify the feeling of hopelessness. Laura, who works in aged care, complained that her ability to help clients was limited by organisational procedures:

When I was in [an organisation], it was just all those procedures…you can’t do this, you can’t do that. It just felt like your hands were tied all the time, hamstrung by the system. (Laura, aged care social worker)

Emily, a child protection social worker, expressed a feeling of powerlessness when dealing with the system requirements and implied that the inflexible system became a major barrier to completing her job tasks.

They [some social workers] had this really great attitude and they wanted to be the best caseworker possible, but then the system just beats it out of you until you just morph into [it]. (Emily, child protection social worker)

System disruption

A common system-level issue that was repeatedly mentioned by our informants is organisational change, such as structural change, changing workplace policies and procedures, or digitalisation. Organisational changes are supposed to improve efficiency and optimise operations, but changes that are not well-designed or routines and procedures that keep changing create new demands for our informants. All these demands pile up on top of an already high workload for social workers, increasing their daily work intensity. Consequently, our informants regularly experienced stress and hopelessness, and some ultimately resigned from their jobs or exited the profession.

Anna, who worked in a variety of roles in the social work sector, described how her workload has increased with organisational changes and implied that the changes neither improved social work processes nor produced any positive impact. Instead, they pushed her workload to an extreme.

We are trying to move forward, then the higher up people continuously come up with different ways of doing things. This creates either extended tasks of what you are already doing, or additional tasks on top of them so the workload just piles on and on and on, and then people can’t cope with that, and so they leave… You are then stuck with an even more increased workload because you’re taking on the workload of people who are no longer working there, so it’s very, very stressful. (Anna, child protection social worker)

The comments from Terri, a mental health social worker, corroborated Anna’s view, as she explicitly linked the organisational changes to the increased anxiety she experienced.

We’re changing [structural changes] and you know here’s a new system that we’re going to implement, or we’re going to be doing it this way so no other issues with that. But because it just happened so quickly, it was so overwhelming … I notice the cases were piled up here, and my anxiety levels were going up. (Terri, mental health social worker)

Technology-driven change also emerged in several interviews. In many of these accounts, it was revealed that organisations do not fully understand how the changes they implement affect their frontline employees. For example, the apps or digital platforms being rolled out were often not user-friendly, and employees were given short notice to adjust and adopt. Mary, a youth services social worker, complained about how the new apps implemented in her organisation intensified her workload and created stress for her and her co-workers:

They introduced a new database, so there’s a lot of desk work. I am trying to get to grips with the new system… I find the new system very clunky, and not very intuitive. We’re at the moment validating our clients to check that they’re all being transferred to the new system properly… there’s lots of clicking and all this sort of stuff and… They [IT] have tried to be supportive and give us lots of Q&As, but it just adds to the stress. (Mary, youth services social worker)

Sometimes, the changes were caused by a change in leadership. Employees then had to follow new practices and procedures introduced by the new leader:

In the health sector in our state, there’s quite a turnover of managers or people going on leave or people being seconded. So, you often come into a role and then three months later, you would get a new manager… Then you need to deal with changes they brought in. (Lena, child protection/healthcare social worker)

Staff shortages

High turnover has been identified as an ongoing issue that continues to threaten many areas of the social services sector (Chan et al., 2021; McFadden, 2017). Our data also indicated that high turnover is a pertinent problem in nearly every organisation in which our informants worked. What we are interested in is how staff shortages affect the work extremity of the remaining social workers. Our data revealed that, until the vacancies were filled, the workload was divided among the remaining employees, which increased their existing workload. Unsurprisingly, many informants felt very frustrated. For example, Gemma explained how severe the staff shortage was in her organisation:

In the last seven years, we’ve had over 30 new staff members working in my office, but there are only 10 positions, meaning we had the whole office turnover three times. (Gemma, youth services social worker)

Bianca remarked that the organisational system she was embedded in was at a breaking point due to severe staff shortage, and the remaining employees (including herself) were being pushed to their limits:

It’s about managing the child protection expectations around what’s realistic. These people are only employed 38 hours a week, like the rest of us, what do you think they can achieve? And then as well, the system is inherently broken. (Bianca, family services social worker)

Ineffective support. Our informants also acknowledged that their organisations did provide a variety of support programs, such as professional development opportunities, time management training, or self-care workshops. When the support was effective, they appreciated it, as evidenced by Nara’s comments below:

I was a casual worker on a weekend for them, doing the contact centre work they offered us. They put us on training, they pay for us to do training. They offered us really good debriefing after certain visits we’ve had and when they said that we also get this external supervision. I just went yeah, you know what? That’s the place where I feel supported and sustained. (Nara, mental health social worker)

Although some informants, such as Nara, appreciated such support mechanisms, others found them unsatisfactory. They perceived these supports to be irrelevant and ineffectual in mitigating their immediate and heightened stress levels evidenced in the comments below:

There is a lot of talk but no action. I would say it so that people wouldn’t understand the fact that it’s so stressful. Yes, obviously they do mention the fact that we have a lot of support system there, but at the end of the day, you’re the one who piles up work and you need to finish that off, so they don’t really care… just see work needs to be done. (Ray, family/domestic violence social worker)

I didn’t feel there is much [support] from our organisation, from federal or state [governments], especially for frontline staff. I mean, yes, obviously, there’s a lot of focus on medical health staff and teaching staff which were absolutely necessary. I’m not saying that didn’t need to happen. I think we were a little bit forgotten in terms of the work we do and the risks we have each day. (Ella, family services social worker)

Some organisations also designed innovative support programs, but they may not be implemented effectively. Lena explained how a peer supervision program failed to offer actual support because she and her co-workers were busy and did not have time to take on the additional invisible workload. Her comment below demonstrates that workload extremity is prevalent in her organisation.

We have a model of peer supervision. When I went off to request peer supervision, my colleagues said, yeah, great! But everyone is so busy. They don’t have time to read your report. That is the reality of it. (Lena, child protection/healthcare social worker)

Interpersonal-Level paradoxical tension: managers are not familiar with the profession and do not understand social work

Line managers directly interact with social workers and play a critical role in influencing the experiences of social workers. Line managers not only allocate work and evaluate work performance, they can also be a direct source of support for social workers (Kalliath et al., 2020). A good line manager can guide employees to complete tasks successfully and mitigate the impact of negative emotions or stress that social workers experience. However, many informants revealed that they suffered under poor line managers at certain points in their careers. Based on the responses from our informants, we identified substandard manager capability and a lack of care for social workers as two reasons for how poor management contributes to social workers’ invisible work extremity.

Substandard manager capability

Due to high turnover at both the staff- and managerial-levels, our informants had to adjust to new managers frequently. The data revealed that organisations tended to appoint managers who did not have sufficient knowledge of the industry and profession. This causes two issues for social workers. First, developing an effective relationship between managers and social workers takes time, but the high turnover and limited resources have meant that both managers and social workers have less time for bonding and relationship-building. The more time social workers spend accommodating managers, the less time they have for clients. Due to the frequent change of managers, our informants had to spend more time on work coordination. Further, the additional time and effort needed to adjust to new managers were often not formally included in the workload, indirectly increasing their work intensity. Second, our informants were frustrated when they discovered that their line managers did not have sufficient knowledge of social work and often felt helpless when dealing with such managers. At times, some of them even had to coach their line managers. Again, this indirectly increases work intensity. For example, when Pat noticed that his manager did not have sufficient knowledge of social work, he was concerned that his manager could not offer the help he needed:

I have a new team leader because our supervisor left. I don’t feel like he has enough casework knowledge or social work knowledge to know how to do supervision. He is supposed to coach us, but I sometimes give him ideas, which are stuffs he should know. Ideally, you should feel safe to be able to talk about things with your manager… I’m stressed about this… I don’t fully trust him. (Pat, case manager)

Similarly, Jess was disappointed when both her old and new managers were incapable of helping her:

It sounds like I am not going to get that guidance from my old manager, and I am not going to get that guidance from the new manager. God, no! She has no clue. I can get it [guidance] from the Australian Association of Social Workers, look for a qualified supervisor, but it is just really expensive. (Jess, disability case manager)

Jess was also disappointed that her manager only focused on her performance and did not understand the nature and meaning of social work.

She [my supervisor] seriously misunderstood the issue. She just talks in numbers rather than what the core issue is. I said to her, what do you think social work does? She only knows discharge planning, I am like, oh gosh, there’s so much more than what you know. (Jess, disability case manager)

Lack of care for social workers

The feeling of not being taken care of by managers also arose in multiple interviews. Some managers paid more attention to key performance indicators (KPIs) instead of the challenges faced by social workers and their wellbeing. The focus on KPIs made social workers’ work more intense and difficult. Interactions with such managers also created another layer of stress for social workers who already experienced tensions from the increased workload and complexities of their job. Unsupportive management thus became an invisible workload to our informants and contributed to their turnover. Gemma was frustrated with her manager who only focused on KPIs or getting new contracts, but turned a blind eye to the needs of social workers. This led Gemma to leave the job she loved:

They [management] seem to be busy ticking the boxes, making sure we get our contract, the policies and procedures are followed through, you know, hitting the KPIs. They do not care what I am working on. I have stayed at this role for so long because I’ve found my niche. But I’m gonna quit! I actually like this position, and the role I do, but I cannot stand him [my manager]. (Gemma, youth services social worker)

Julie compared the current manager with her previous manager who provided timely support and guidance when she travelled for work and was upset such support was no longer available with the new manager:

I had really good reporting system in previous jobs, where you travel where and ring in before you go, and ring in every few hours when I’m still travelling. Now my direct line manager is very distant. It’s like you just do what you do. I don’t need you to ring in. That […] adds to that stress… like a lack of accountability checking in sort of processes, especially the trouble: like at night from 8 clock, they’re not checking what I’m doing, so it feels a bit like: you’re going off on your own without that support. (Julie, mental health social worker)

Henny further underlined the fact that many social workers were not treated properly by managers and pointed out that since social workers do not ill-treat their clients, social work managers and organisations should also lead by example and not ill-treat their own employees:

It was high stress when there is a difficult relationship with management… The management style is very authoritarian, humiliating, making things up or saying things behind your back, putting you down…We wouldn’t do that to our clients. Right? So why do we do it to our colleagues? (Henny, mental health social worker).

Nevertheless, our informants did acknowledge the numerous caring managers they encountered. The contrast between caring and uncaring managers showed that uncaring managers were another source of invisible work extremity for social workers. Although Henry complained about his current manager, he acknowledged his prior experience working with a good manager:

I have had managers who were incredibly supportive, they might be directive, they might pull rank when they need to, but generally if there’s a trusting, open, supportive relationship, it makes a big difference to your motivation, and then that trickles down to your clients because you’re happy at work. (Henry, call centre social worker)

Interpersonal-Level paradoxical tension: social workers help clients but not their colleagues

Workplace relationships are an important aspect of the work environment (Fischer & Walker, 2022). Co-workers are often a valuable source of support, mentoring, and friendship (McMullan et al., 2018). Positive relationships with colleagues enhance employees’ job satisfaction, and identification with and commitment to the organisation (Yang et al., 2019). Our data revealed that social workers were grateful when working with supportive colleagues, but poor workplace relationships were unfortunately a more common experience. Poor relationships indirectly contributed to their perceived invisible work extremity and placed an emotional burden on social workers. Naturally, our informants also valued supportive co-workers highly. As Jo reported, her team members supported one another through difficult times:

In my last organisation, I could make some really great connections… When you’re struggling, your whole team feels that struggle. And then you know you don’t have that office banter that you can kind of lean on. (Jo, mental health social worker)

Jo also mentioned that in the absence of a supportive manager, supportive co-workers became a particularly important and valuable resource:

Without the support of my colleagues, I would not still be here. I’m very fortunate that I’ve had a fantastic team, not always a fantastic manager, but a fantastic team… (Jo, mental health social worker)

However, an equal number of social workers also shared that their colleagues or team members were not helpful and even became an additional source of stress for them, intensifying their heavy workload. Their colleagues were overwhelmed by their own workload and did not have extra resources to offer help. Jane’s experience below is one example:

I’ve tried to discuss issues [I had with my colleagues]. No one really cares. It’s like you do your job and let me do my job. It’s like they have their own client load and their own problems. I’m just adding another problem to them… (Jane, disability social worker)

Sometimes, relationship tensions at work also became a psychological toll and caused pressure and strain on social workers. When Ray mentioned that she often felt like she was walking on eggshells in the office, we can imagine the tension she experienced at work:

I am walking on eggshells, [worrying] I set somebody off by saying something. I am very glad I got out of that environment. (Ray, family and domestic violence social worker)

Ray’s account of relationship tensions at work is another example of how the negative organisational environment affected social workers’ mood and performance:

I don’t like arguing. That’s just a fact of life, but I don’t agree with backstabbing whatever. Just come up with a solution, deal with it, and tolerate it. I don’t have patience for that [arguing]. (Ray, family/domestic violence social worker)

Ray also pointed out that some clients were treated badly by her colleagues:

If you treated the patient the way you treat your colleague, you should be thrown out of the hospital. (Ray, family/domestic violence social worker)

A common reaction in such a negative and harsh environment is to escape from it, as evidenced by Julie’s comment:

I’d rather be in a team where I felt valued, so I quit. (Julie, mental health social worker)

Similarly, although Nara was new to social work, she chose to leave an unsupportive work environment:

It was quite a year … although quite happy to do the job, I couldn’t stay any longer, do what I’m doing, putting people into homes day in day out… and then I’m over the team and the way they behave, and they are not going to change. So it was sort of that weighing up if it is worth my mental health to stay? No, because I’m a new grad. I’ve got so much more to learn. I don’t need to be tied down to a job that affects me so much. I moved. Now, I’m a lot better. (Nara, mental health social worker)

High turnover and negative workplace relationships tend to intensify the invisible work extremity of social workers through a vicious cycle (Sozen et al., 2021). As social workers resign from their organisations, the existing workload is re-distributed amongst remaining staff which increases their workload. Due to the increased workload, social workers become less likely to help or engage with their co-workers, leading to perceptions of unsupportive co-workers and negative workplace relationships. Over time, the remaining social workers also begin to feel overwhelmed by the invisible work extremity, ultimately leaving their jobs. Our data corroborated these findings—high work demands, poor management, limited support, and negative interpersonal relationships all contribute to high turnover:

When people leave there… they just couldn’t handle it. It’s not about their abilities… I’ve seen plenty of fantastic caseworkers who are amazing at working with children and their families and carers. (Nicky, child protection social worker)

I’m quite open now in saying that I’m burnt out… I can’t have a day off because there’s no one to cover our shift because we are minimal on staff. (Jo, mental health social worker)

Individual-Level paradoxical tension: social workers joined the profession to help clients but are overwhelmed with paperwork

A distinctive feature of the nature of social work is that their work generates social resources by helping members of the most vulnerable groups. Respect for people, social justice, and professional integrity are the core values of the social work profession (AASW, 2013). Since social work utilises public funding and social workers make appraisals and decisions for members of vulnerable groups, two key elements of their professional integrity are accountability and responsibility. Social workers are accountable and responsible for the information they collect and keep in the course of their work (AASW, 2013). However, the high demands of maintaining detailed paperwork often divert resources away, creating an obstacle for social workers to help their clients.

Our data revealed that our informants perceived paperwork and helping their clients as incompatible such that resources dedicated to one task depleted resources for the other task. On one hand, existing social work research acknowledges that the human services profession values ‘autonomy, expertise, ethics, meaningful and challenging work, and dedication to service delivery’ (Höjer & Forkby, 2011). In contrast, management research often reveals that ‘the management of public organisations emphasises control, close supervision, work standardisation, and productivity’ (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004). Our data explicitly corroborates this incompatibility. The majority of our informants said they chose to be social workers because they wanted to help others. Helping others was their intrinsic motivation to work in this sector. They repeatedly mentioned how happy and satisfied they were when they successfully helped clients, and when their efforts were acknowledged by clients (see the last two quotes in Appendix 2). At the same time, our informants often held strong negative attitudes towards administrative paperwork and believed that the latter stood in the way of helping clients. For example, Vic was very upset by the amount of paperwork she had to do:

In my current role, we have to track every hour. I was furious when I first started, I thought I had to do it because that influences our funding. But actually, it was not. (Vic, clinical social worker)

Gemma expressed her anger towards the time-consuming paperwork:

Child protection sent us an email saying that we haven’t done [it], …You don’t get KPIs and you don’t get your funding, then you lose our contract blah blah blah… We have certain paperwork we have to do for each client which might as well be toilet paper. It’s irrelevant, useless and time-consuming […] I’ve been focusing on other things for him that are more important. (Gemma, youth services social worker)

Shaun used the word ‘hate’ to express his dislike for paperwork:

It’s the sort of work that I hate. I think most social workers, and all who work in human services, hate the admin work… the last thing you want to do is spend more time at your desk. (Shaun, youth homelessness social worker)

Since helping clients and paperwork are closely intertwined, when caseloads increase, so does the paperwork. Just as an example, when the caseload doubles, social workers’ workload quadruples, but the increased paperwork is not sufficiently reflected in the workload, thus becoming a form of invisible work extremity. Social workers want to help others but are preoccupied with endless paperwork. Along with the perceived incompatibility between these two tasks, social workers experience multiple layers of stress that are not always accounted for.

Discussion

In sum, the above-mentioned paradoxical tensions reflect the inefficiencies of the occupational and organisational systems in supporting social workers. Instead of facilitating social work processes, they became the causes of invisible work extremity for social workers. First, tensions at the occupational and organisational levels generate challenges that require more time and effort for social workers to complete their core job tasks. These demands are often not explicit (and thus, ‘invisible’) as they occur during the work processes and are not usually measured or accounted for. Since these additional demands are not included in social workers’ workload, they often have to absorb them by putting in more resources (e.g. working overtime, expending more energy and effort).

Second, these inefficiencies cause exhaustion. Negative workplace or interpersonal experiences tend to require more mental resources to cope with and overcome; hence, due to limited mental resources and capacity, the more negative experiences social workers have, the fewer resources they can allocate to work (Brown et al., 2005; Chan et al., 2023). This, in turn, increases work intensity, as the workload remains high and some clients may require immediate attention. Similar to visible work extremity, invisible work extremity also pushes social workers to their physical, psychological, and emotional extremes in their daily work. Taken together, these negative, invisible experiences are another key contributor to work extremity, yet they are not often considered explicitly. These paradoxical tensions generate daily negative perceptions of a lack of support (supportlessness), a lack of resources, expectation violations relating to the lack of role clarity, and negative emotions and feelings of helplessness towards the organisation, powerlessness towards the system, and hopelessness towards the job.

Theoretical contributions

Our research makes important contributions to research on work extremity, social work, and HRM practices. First, our research extends the mundane work extremity literature by identifying invisible mundane extremity as a new dimension. Existing work extremity research tends to focus on the visible aspects of work extremity at the macro- and micro-levels, such as extreme contexts (Hällgren et al., 2018; Hannah et al., 2009), long working hours (Holland & Liang, 2020; McDonald & Thompson, 2016), work intensification (Gascoigne et al., 2015; Neirotti, 2020), or workplace violence (Meacham et al., 2020). Our study proposes the concept of invisible work extremity as a more subtle form of mundane extremity. Although researchers have identified the organisational or system drivers of challenges faced by social workers (Gascoigne et al., 2015) and non-work-related factors (e.g. interpersonal relationships, inefficiencies) that place excessive demands on social workers, thereby depleting their mental resources, the extant research has not explicitly connected non-work-related factors to work extremity. By establishing this connection, our research lays the foundation for future studies to examine organisational inefficiency from the work extremity perspective and opens up opportunities to identify new solutions. Our findings show that, similar to visible work extremity, invisible mundane work extremity can also cause negative physical, psychological, and emotional impacts on employees, but these additional demands are often not accounted for in the workload due to their intangible and insidious nature. Thus, improving the efficiency of HR practices is also a possible way to mitigate work extremity.

Second, we have introduced work extremity as a new theoretical lens to social work research. Numerous studies have identified the challenges faced by social workers in relation to organisational inefficiencies, work processes, and management practices (Cogin et al., 2016; Gascoigne et al., 2015). These studies often treat the aforementioned challenges as typical organisational issues that have been present for decades. By bringing these issues under the umbrella of work extremity, we have created opportunities to identify systematic solutions from a new perspective. In doing so, we also introduce a new and important future research direction by shifting the focus from visible to invisible work extremity, and recognising the value of ‘behind-the-scenes’ job tasks and processes.

Finally, our research also contributes to research on wellbeing-oriented HRM practice by highlighting invisible mundane work extremity as a novel mediating mechanism between wellbeing-oriented HRM and employees’ attitudes and behaviour. The current literature has identified direct associations between wellbeing-oriented HRM practices on employee attitudes (Edgar & Geare, 2005; Guest, 2002; Van De Voorde et al., 2012), but there is limited investigation on the mediating mechanisms between wellbeing-oriented HRM practices on employee attitudes and behaviour. An example is Cooper et al. (2019) who tested how wellbeing-oriented HRM practices affect employee performance through an organisational-level mechanism (i.e. social climate) and individual-level mechanism (i.e. employee resilience). In addition, our research also provides a more complete picture of the nature of the relationship between wellbeing-oriented HRM and employee attitudes and behaviour, by shedding light on the negative impact of the ineffectiveness or lack of wellbeing-oriented HRM practices in many social services organisations, complementing the predominant focus on the positive aspects of wellbeing-oriented HRM practices (Guest, 2017).

Practical implications

Our findings have major practical implications for the management of social services organisations. Organisations need to take immediate, proactive steps if they are serious about reducing social workers’ invisible mundane work extremity, which has proven to be a systemic issue across the social work industry. First, organisations and HR managers need to understand the organisational- and system-level causes of visible and invisible work extremity and gather inputs from frontline social workers to co-design a system that minimises work extremity. Importantly, managers need to be able to identify which aspects of social work practice increase visible or invisible work extremity. When evaluating the appropriateness or effectiveness of a system or policy, examining how it reduces social workers’ work extremity should be used as a key evaluation criterion. Organisations need to balance management control with the service delivery aspect of social work, and develop a true client-centred management system. Thus, the practice should be evaluated based on the extent to which the system can effectively help social workers to help their clients. Managers need to identify and eliminate potential sources of invisible work extremity. For example, managers need to listen to and take on board social workers’ feedback, streamline or simplify their administrative processes, and ensure that the administrative processes facilitate client-focused activities.

Second, any organisational or system change needs to be carefully planned in advance rather than using a ‘trial-and-error approach’. At the planning stage of the organisational change, managers have to consider how the change may affect social workers’ workload, particularly the visible and invisible aspects of their workload, rather than only considering how the organisational change can help to achieve their managerial goals. If the change increases the employees’ workload in the short-term, managers need to provide support and resources (e.g. buffer time or reduced caseload) to social workers and help them to manage the change.

Third, when recruiting or appointing managers, organisations need to evaluate their relevant professional experiences (in this case, social work experience), managerial capabilities, and people skills in supporting social workers and reducing their stress and uncertainties. Organisations need to train and retain an experienced pool of middle managers and social workers to prevent sudden, severe staff shortages. This would also help to stop the vicious circle of turnover and professional exit amongst social workers. Further, it would greatly assist the remaining social workers with their workload distribution and management, as they would not need to take up more work to fill in for the staff who left.

Fourth, organisations need to develop a support system that can reduce work extremity. Most social services providers do offer their employees professional development opportunities and stress management training. However, organisations also need to provide effective support in reducing social workers’ mundane work extremity. There should be more empathic understanding that time is a valuable resource for social workers, and social workers’ stress also comes from a lack of time to meet a variety of demands, particularly demands stemming from paperwork. Thus, instead of providing support that requires social workers to invest more time, organisations need to identify support that can reduce social workers’ time commitment.

Finally, organisations need to design formal employee training programs or informal socialisation programs to enhance understanding of the role of social work among key stakeholders. A role represents the social structure and is associated with socially agreed norms (Burke, 1991). Individuals in the role may or may not completely embrace the role definition and activities (Ashforth et al., 2000). These role socialisation programs can shape social workers’ and their stakeholders’ understanding of their roles and offer an opportunity for them to negotiate the scope of their roles. These programs can specifically highlight the importance of role expectations and minimise the role expectations gap between the organisation and social workers. Research shows that one’s mindset, for example, and by extension how stress is perceived, can play a role in reducing stress (Casper et al., 2017; Dweck, 2006) and its negative impact on work extremity.

Limitations and future research directions

Our research has limitations. First, we used snowball sampling to identify informants. Although this method gave us flexibility in recruiting informants, it also has drawbacks such as selection bias and a lack of representativeness (Parker et al., 2019). Second, the majority of our informants were female. Although 80% of social workers in Australia are female (Kalliath et al., 2020; Labour Market Insights, 2022), we might not have considered the experiences of male social workers adequately. Finally, most of the interviews were conducted virtually. This method enabled us to overcome the geographic limitation and interviewed social workers across Australia. Nevertheless, it limited our ability to observe informants’ behaviours and their work environment. Therefore, we welcome future research to validate our findings using a more representative sampling approach, collecting experiences from male social workers, and using face-to-face interviews or ethnographic methods. We also call for future research to operationalise invisible mundane work extremity and apply quantitative methods to compare the impacts of visible and invisible mundane work extremity.

Concluding remarks

Social workers play a critical role in society by providing essential support to members of the most vulnerable groups. Our data showed that a majority of our informants chose to become social workers because of an internal drive to help others. This is a rare, valuable asset to our society, and it is imperative that governments and organisations step in to offer a multi-agency response that reduces social workers’ work extremity. Like all of us, social workers’ physical and mental resources are limited and can be severely depleted through a systemic lack of support. Governments and organisations need to provide more resources upon which social workers and their managers can draw upon to thrive in their roles. We urgently call for more research and resources to investigate the role of organisations in alleviating social workers’ invisible mundane work extremity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The participants of this study did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, so due to the sensitive nature of the research supporting data is not available.

Notes

1 The Australian and New Zealand Disaster Network (ANZDN) comprises of a group of social work academics from several universities in Australia and New Zealand who have been meeting virtually for over three years in response to the increasing numbers of climate-related and other disasters occurring in both countries.

2 UNISON is one of the UK’s largest trade unions, with 1.3 million members. UNISON represents staff who provide public services in the public and private sectors.

Appendix 1:

Interview protocol

1. What does your work involve? What are your key tasks, and how much time do you spend on them or your workload?

2. Why did you choose this line of work?

3. What does a typical working day look like?

4. Which aspects of your work do you enjoy or dislike or feel are the most difficult to handle? Provide an example. Probe: the role of organisations, managers or HR. (Probe the same to the questions below if they do apply).

5. Describe an example of an extremely busy day. What made this day so busy?

6. Describe a time when you were stressed out (i.e. you felt upset, hopeless, or powerless) because of work. What happened?

7. What are the work-related barriers that affect your ability to help your clients?

8. Describe a time when you experienced burnout. Why?

9. Was there a moment when you were emotionally touched by others (i.e. clients, peers, managers) at work?

10. Describe a time when your manager (or peers) supported (or did not support) you. How did this affect your work?

11. What kind of support do you receive from your line manager, the organisation, or the professional association? How does the support help you and your work?

12. How would you describe your current work environment within your team or unit? What is going well or is not going well?

13. To better service your clients, which aspects of your work do you want to change? Why? Please provide examples.

Appendix 2:

Supporting evidence from the interviews

Supporting Evidence of the Themes Identified—System Complexity

Table

Themes	Supporting quotes
System complexity	You’re working with the child protection system, police, mental health system… You got all those systems around with varying approaches… At the end of the day, you ask yourself: how do we manage this? The system… I find extraordinarily difficult to work in mental health with old people. The structural staff around the job… wasn’t there. You either stay and fight the system that you see is wrong or your leave… I cannot fight this battle, I do not have the headspace. I left. I love working in mental health. And I still love that client group like I still miss that client group. I had to log all the jobs that I did by the hour and submit that to my manager by the end of the day and I found that to be just another pressure and stress because you’ve got all this work to do when you have for, you know, show what you’ve done. It just becomes so much harder to do your job. Extra steps, extra documents, like making it more complicated along the way. Multiple agencies are involved…some participants or families feel [that they were] left out in the cold, because we can’t provide referrals, or pathways for the people that aren’t recommended. So they feel like they haven’t got help, but the system is complicated… we’re not resourced to help every person that comes through. They’ve got to be recommended and assessed as suitable [by other agencies]. And they might not be suitable because of a variety of things, a lot of the time it’s around legal issues.
Stakeholders hard to manage	The things that I get most stressed out is when there are constantly cancelling [the service which was booked by the providers]…[the system] can’t necessarily provide [service] consistency. This program is part funded by the Mental Health Commission, part funded by the Health Department, and Department of Justice. The aim is to support people with major mental illness from prison. So there is a variety stakeholders that provide the guidance. I’ve got a boss from the Health Department. Then we have an NGO out-care that work with us, and they’re located with us, but they have their own manager. There are several different agencies giving information on, what we need to do and not do… You can imagine how difficult to coordinate it can be. I’ll complain about structural stuff, like you know, we don’t have enough housing [for clients]. Centrelink really pisses me off. I scheduled meeting with XX [an office], but every time, they gave me different versions of excuses. You know, you’re trying to help these people but instead what you’re doing is dealing with conflict with other agencies.
Service inconsistency	[The overall system] not having enough funding, not having housing… we can’t provide or support our clients to get those outcomes. So those sorts of issues were very frustrating… We would be in touch with our counterparts around the States, and some States interpret the same policy very, differently. Some people said you can do this, but others said you can’t… and so this inconsistency was generally frustrating. So the unit was run by doctors. I’ve never been in an environment where I felt so under-supported by another bunch, I just never worked somewhere like that. That was probably the most burnt out I got because it was like you were doing on-call all the time. For hospital discharge, I will be liaising with multidisciplinary team from the hospital, an occupational therapist for evidence, a neuro-psych psychologist, a clinical psychologist everyone or reports; and the housing agency if its housing that I’m looking at, see, it is this lot of liaising built into the job. … is it not as smooth as planned. I cannot move on if one report is missing or without the housing is cancelled.

Supporting Evidence of the Themes Identified—System Inefficiencies

Table

Themes	Supporting quotes
Inflexible procedures	They want you to follow frameworks and plans … I can see how they are meaningful and how valuable they are, but they do not help my work. [There are] so many ‘spot fires’ coming up. I just put out that one and then another one comes out …. The things [new procedures according to the new plan] that I needed to do haven’t been done and now they are overdue. The sort of procedures, they do add stress particularly when you have a lot going on.
System disruption	These sort of new procedures, they do add stress particularly when you have a lot going on. Structural changes and you know here’s a new system that we’re going to implement, or we’re going to be doing it this way so no other issues with that. But because it just happened so quickly, it was so overwhelming information overwhelming… I notice the cases were piled up here, and my anxiety levels were going up. I get really frustrated when I feel like there hasn’t been consultation I think that adds to the stress when you think hang on who put together this system did they actually talk to any case workers people who are working on the ground who gonna need to use this every you know every hour of the day did they sort of give this any thought because the moment the system just looks so complex and I can imagine people who work in the more crisis focus work they would be a lot more stressed out trying to do this. I think that that’s a stress for me. We were directed to use a new app for all our telehealth. It is a program that never made it on the open market because it was that useless but was the one that we were required to use. It is constantly not working, just almost always never worked. It took a good six months before they started saying, ‘Actually, you can use Skype’, and it’s only now that they’re starting to say we can use Microsoft Teams or Zoom. How much pressure we experienced in those 6 months? To put it in the context, the organization was going through an audit as well as a whole new restructure. I had a two-day-a-week contract, and then they offered me five days [contract], and I felt maybe then I should not have probably taken the five knowing that I probably wouldn’t be able to manage the new requirements.
Staff shortage	We’ve all been managing really high caseloads …with only half the stuff that we need to do the job. I don’t think there is any recruitment now. We need to have two to three recruitments during the year to keep our staff numbers high, so that if people need to take leave, we always have enough coverage. If there’s a high volume of work, we’ve always put enough coverage. So, I think we’re struggling in that sense. We probably have been understaffed for many years. We’ve all been managing really high caseloads and responding to pressure from within the hospital setting and the community setting with only half the stuff that we need to do the job and that’s been ongoing.
Insufficient support	I come from child and family [service], where you get trained before you step into client’s home… Now, all my worker had no training in mental health. I was trying to get training for particularly 20 workers because they were stepping into the family home so they could have been in an unsafe situation without any mental health training. I was trying to get them to get at least the mental health first aid training done. However, I kept getting blocked from higher up. Oh, no, we don’t have the money. I was astounded by that. It [the support] probably sits around a four or five [on a scale of 10]. I believe that there was much more than they could have done to support us, but I also respect that their hands are tied. If we had a request, it still had to go through a higher level of approval. So at the end of the day, even they don’t have a say.

Supporting Evidence of the Themes Identified—Management Inefficiencies

Table

Themes	Supporting quotes
Incompetence	The problem was that her social skills were absolutely zero…She couldn’t manage two staff, let alone thirteen. He [new manager] did not fully understand how much we need to do for a case, but he introduced changes. Our workload became even higher. Lin was a fantastic colleague. She went on unpaid stress leave just because too much, the tasks were too much. After she came back, he reduced her workload to part-time, but didn’t really reduce her caseload. She ended up quitting. If, during that time, I had one more spot fire or one more crisis, I really think that I would have tipped over the edge. One of my clients, whose mental health really declined badly last year. It was really stressful for me not knowing if she was going to be OK. My team leader was not being helpful. His response was that: It was more important for him to know that I did the risk report than thinking about how we could support the young person, and how he could support me…It was just really unhelpful. That added to my stress…I just don’t feel like he has the sensitivity to really deal with the issue…I feel awkward as he didn’t really know what to do.
Lack of empathy and care	It feels a bit like: you’re going off on your own without that support. I worked in disaster recovery, but I don’t have a good line manager who can sort of the processes. It was a new director… She was my direct report. When travelling, I needed to report to her frequently, but she seemed to not care. I can understand that she was working out the priorities, and trying to get them settled, but I need instructions. It’s like bringing your solution to your own role. Although I sought help from my manager, he expects me to have a solution. I was so helpless.

Supporting Evidence of the Themes Identified—Unhelpful Environment

Table

Themes	Supporting quotes
A lack of care for social workers	I’ve tried to discuss issues [I had with my colleagues]. No one really cares. It’s like he’s ticking the boxes most of the time rather than thinking about how like he can put himself in others’ shoes. If I was a supervisor, I’d be thinking about what the different needs of each of the workers are, how should I approach them, what’s their work style. It sounds like you would want to just go in and solve the problem but instead what you ended up with is this extended conflict. The person in charge was absolutely atrocious, incompetent, a horrible person….One of the ladies, unfortunately, went on stress leave six months because of him.
Tension at workplace	Poor work relationships: I’m over the team the way they behave, so and they are not going to change. The relationship was bad. No proper professional relations, you know, the kind of relationship, you able to lean on them for support and then you’ll do the same in return. Good work relationships: We’ve got a really nice team, so yeah. That’s probably the benefit. I stayed because of them. There were a couple of staff members that I was working with. They were really good at empathy, good at support. When things were getting difficult, I would go and have a chat with them. I don’t know what I would have done if they weren’t around. I could just quit, but no, I didn’t. I don’t want my team to have to absorb that caseload because they are struggling just as much as I am.

Supporting Evidence of the Themes Identified—Expectation Violation

Table

Themes

Supporting quotes

Paperwork takes up time, diverting attention of helping

Paperwork eats the time I can use to help others. It’s the sort of work that I hate. We have certain paperwork we have to do for each client which is as well be toilet paper. It’s irrelevant, useless and time-consuming. It prevents me from doing the actual meaningful work that I want to do. My current stressors are being behind in my file notes, not having them up to date, so that if management review them if something happens on a weekend or night time. To write this huge case note, I needed an hour. I spent 180 minutes with the client and I traveled for 90 minutes… Actually, you know planning takes place before you do a session with a client. I have to log this and that. I spent two hours 120 minutes planning before my session to deliver parenting information and parenting strategies. And you know, preparing charts and support. ‘I don’t think they [supervisors] put the requirement [of paperwork]. The requirement really comes from [a higher level organisation]… It’s all very, you know, covering your bum. What is your good moment? That is the one hour, you’re there, in the home visit. However long you stay there afterward, and then driving back to the office. Just no one interrupting that little bubble. Then, as soon as you get back to the office, it just bursts because one thousand things [admin work] are waiting for you. I feel like so much of my time is just so much paperwork and bureaucratic shit, and I feel like I spend less and less time with kids than I would like to… When that boy picked that dandelion and gave it to me, I just felt really happy. It was all of those moments to me, a very, very sweet…Just so many things popping up that you didn’t like…My whole job is basically writing reports, and putting out spot fires. It prevents me from doing the actual meaningful work that I want to do. Yep and paperwork and paperwork irrelevant useless paperwork, waste of time. Intrinsic motivation to join the social work sector: I like having a caseload. It’s nice seeing people through to the end of the six-month periods. So that’s quite satisfying and working with people the way you want to work, identifying the agencies that would be good to work with them, working with the out-care staff, that’s always really enjoyable. So many people come into this field because they want to make a change and they want to make a difference….You either get so overwhelmed that work becomes your entire life and you spend your weekends working in. … You stress out or you just let it crush your soul and…. You just turn up, get paid and go home. When I feel as though I have achieved an outcome that I’ve been working really, really hard on, that can be quite satisfying. That is what I wanted to do by becoming a social worker.