HIGH STAFF TURNOVER .....CHILD AND YOUTH CARE WORK IN SOUTH AFRICA

This is a response to a question posed on Messenger this week. "Mr B, I know that you directed quite a number of Child and Youth Care Centres. I would like to find out from you....what are the main challenges that have caused a high staff turnover in your tenure and how did you you address those challenges with your staff?"

The first response to this is to say that staff turnover was different from one facility to the next and that the differences tell a story in themselves. 

In 1983 when I first directed a residential facility, the then National Director of the National Association of Child Care Workers             ( NAACCW) had researched the rate of staff turnover across South Africa. Brian Gannon's statistics put the AVERAGE stay of a child and youth care worker at two and a half years.The average stay of a Director was five years. For a child and youth care worker, this made a short stay about two weeks and a long stay about 5 years or longer. The story was always..If you can make the first three weeks you can make the first three months. If you can make the first three months, you can make three years. Those first three months were critical. Many left before.

I do not know of any current research. It would be very interesting to do this....especially in government residential facilities.

In those early dormitory styled facilities for boys and/or girls, staff turnover was much higher than in the cottage (village) styled settings. We all know. child and youth care workers were called "house mothers" and "house fathers". They lived in. It was a 24 hour day with meals from a central kitchen. They were given, perhaps, 2 days a week as "days off ". The living conditions, the setting and the hours with little cash emolument was, obviously, in itself, a formula for quick turnover. Those who stuck it out were those in need of the accommodation more than anything else.

Staff turnover, and so, staff retention was a major cause for concern for me as a Director. The issue was that the children and young persons experienced a stream of different faces. People with no training at all. Each new person went through, what I called, a "baptism of fire" ..serious testing times as the children and young persons sought to establish, "Will this one last?"  In fact the VERY FIRST question I faced on entry was. "OK, Mr Lodge, so you're here. When are you going to leave?"

The behaviour of the young persons was a shock to  starting out workers. Newcomers found out very rapidly that this is not what they thought it would be. One came in, put down her handbag on the girls floor (..handbag!...girl's floor!) to wake them up. Before the end of the day she picked up her handbag (luckily) and walked out. On passing my office..."It's a den of snakes up there!"  Period of stay....less than 24 hours.!!! In and out.

What am I saying? Expectations not met, motivation for entering child and youth care work not realised, lack of proper training, the extraordinary life style attached to the job, the troubling behaviour of children and young persons with troubles and trauma, the small monetary compensation. These were the challenges and causes of rapid staff turnover, I wonder if these may inherently still somehow be lingering in our systems.

Live out staff on predicable shifts, at that stage.. in-house training, meal allowances for use outside of routine meals with the children, lots of opportunities to talk, share, plan and contribute to policy....All this was needed to slow down the exodus.

Then came a new curved ball. It was when we started our first child and young person's forum. Once they learnt that it was safe to talk out about the treatment they experienced, the otherwise secreted punishments and rule of fear surfaced. Some clearly abusive. Staff  ( without being named by the children) recognising themselves exposed and confronted in the descriptive grievances, left fairly rapidly.They just walked out of the door never to come back. Nothing developmental in that. Problem was, they had to be replaced. Frequently leaving a vacancy for far too long.

Sometimes there were fairly young graduates with psychology or education majors who applied to work in the facility. They wanted to have the experience between their first degree and going on to Honours. They always however put out the message that they wanted to make child and youth care a career. But what they really wanted was to chalk up practical experience on their CV's to gain easier access into the advanced degree. They hardly ever stayed long. They saw themselves as having knowledge which elevated their status. This was no doubt true, but the longer serving, hard core, child and youth care workers without any training, persistently quoted their experience as the key to better practice. They quite frankly, frequently, undevelopmentally, made the working life of these "young upstarts"quite untenable. Teamwork broke down. Not able to "get on"with other members of the team was reason to quit.

Then came the introduction of daily logs, compulsory training, reports, incident reports and assessment checklists. All of this was regarded as "Not what I was employed for". ... and the young graduates were further distanced as they were comfortable with all the writing.  Attempts to sabotage innovation largely failed as child and youth care practice grew in professionality and slowly there was an exodus of the "old guard"....often to the dismay of the children and young persons. 

There were times when, obviously I was compelled to terminate employment. Not a frequent occurrence, eg Drunk on duty, bringing marijuana into the facility, stealing from donations.

In my second appointment many of the same challenges were there. but there were some very different elements at work. Different dynamics altogether. Staff were established, It was a male dominated environment, as if women should or could not work effectively with boys.  This was the 10 year or longer end of the statistical turnover range. And this brought about its own set of challenges....As a start, a much bigger resistance to change. Now, as the new boy on the block, I frequently became the reason to leave. It was a top-down army styled hierarchical system. It HAD to change.

The approach here was to shift the power from the top down system into a system that was as democratic as possible. EVERYTHING was discussed. Weekly staff meetings, committees for everything, forums for everyone, Also weekly staff training, weekly interpersonal supervision. It was an attempt to get "buy in", to own and to understand the need for change. Some left. Again more especially when the young persons were given the same SOCIAL RIGHTS as the staff, (The right to be heard and the right to make choices... among others) and again when they became part of the democratic process. All this coincided with the legal abolition of corporal punishment. Too much change !!!!

Staff left because of not fitting with the dynamics of the system, the philosophy and approach of child and youth care as against being a 'House Master" as in a boarding school. Also lack of career pathways. There was this thing... "Once a child and youth care worker, always a child and youth care worker." To mitigate some of this, a system of levels and grades tied to scopes of practice  was introduced with raised key performance areas on a scale of  competencies from 1 to 4 with salary increments ( even if small ) to go with them. It worked to slow down the tempo of staff turnover up to a point. The group who called me the "educated idiot" tended to move out.

I hired a younger group and I hired for intelligence. I needed people on the staff that had a greater capacity than I. The idea was that I could do my job....and that was to manage and to direct. The democratic approach sat more easily with these incumbents.

My last management function was a period of one year in a semi-rural village community-based model of care . The Isibindi Model. Back to hiring off the streets . This time with a contract to be learners in a training programme from the get go. Reasons for leaving this setting were....Not able to meet time frames for the assessments...so "giving up". Support groups for assessments helped. I had left before the State took over the programme, but from what I was told the turnover accelerated. Issues arose, I was told, in the shift from a democratic approach to a top-down approach and apparent negative attitudes toward child and youth care workers as being lesser social practitioners than others. It was explained to me as a shift to power based management styles.

Taking an overview now. It seems that management styles, approach, over-riding philosophies and organisational dynamics and staff dynamics play a a seminal role in the challenge of staff turnover. As child  and youth care workers, we have a particular way of doing things. "Nothing for ANYONE without them," "Nothing for us without us". Child and youth care workers have a deeply built in belief that as employees we should be managed in the same developmental democratic way we practice.

I hope this helps.