All About the Burnout

Partner organisations working in the social work field have noticed a huge decline of motivation among their staff - adult social workers. This decrease is affecting not only quality of work, but ...

The main aim of the project was to enrich social workers, mainly adult mentors/educators with the tools to tackle burnout, to keep their motivation and to stay at work instead of falling sick or going back to NEET. To reach the aim we set following objectives: -increase capacity of social workers toward using anti burnout practices and providing practices to the groups that they mentor; - measure impact of the mindfulness/well-being practices on the adult educators/mentors and adults who participated in the programmes; - create a pool of mindfulness/well-being instructors in the adult non formal education field; - raise awareness about burnout in social work and its threats as well as importance to equip the educators/mentors with tools. NOTE that based on the evaluators feedback the objectives were clarified to be applicable to adult sector.

The project had 3 main activities: 3 Joint Staff Trainings: New Attitude (Lithuania, 18 social workers/adult mentors) Wellbeing (Sweden, 24 social workers/adult mentors) Modelling the Work (Poland, 18 social workers/adult mentors) After each training, the local communities were impacted by local workshops in each partner countries: 21 local workshops organised in total reaching 257 people . Besides, we had management meetings to ensure the quality of the activities.

The results were firstly and foremost skills, competences and attitudes of social workers and their managers, which resulted in increased quality of work, increased motivation, less drop outs from work and healthy workplace environments to thrive in. Specifically, these were these learning results: - ability to notice and work on the problem of burnout - be able to help yourself and others when the problem of burnout appears - be aware of the symptoms of burnout - know how to react when the feeling of burnout appears - know how to deal with getting the distance to work, and its issues - know the methods of working on treating burnout - know the ways of taking care of the work-life balance - know how to find the peace of mind among the thousand tasks that we were dealing with every day - know how to set goals in order not to forget about own needs and life - know how to find a balance when the harmony is destroyed - be able to use critical thinking on the current situation, be able to make conclusions out of it and bring the solutions into action - be able to motivate yourself when the energy gets down - know the ways of working on assuring the harmony: e.g. by yoga, mindfulness, self-development tasks, goal setting, meditation, alternative medicine, etc. - know and be able to implement assertiveness -focus first on the own problem of the educator, activist, social worker, etc. – putting their own problem and finding the solution to it in the first place before helping others - awareness of how our organisation and the bad management influence on our burnout and how to solve it.