No. 1968
When recruiting and employing staff
When recruiting and employing staff for group care settings, what is the hirer looking for? Consideration will be given to values, personality, mixture of rigidity and flexibility, dogged control versus negotiation, permissive approaches versus detailed surveillance, and so on. Without a definite profile of the type of person best suited to working in a particular group care centre or agency, then recruitment involves an intuitive and possibly prejudicial approach to hiring staff. Decisions are based more on the characteristics of the hirer than on the traits of the employee. Some hirers' track record for recruitment is excellent, while others' records are abysmal when considering the length of service of those they hire, the candidates being able to manage the job and their ability to work as team members. Some people are good at hiring men but do a poor job with women; some are excellent with basic grade workers but second-rate at employing supervisors.
Thus, in group care settings there will be a range of staff from different backgrounds, with different values, different parenting experiences, different religious principles, different sexual mores, different hygiene habits, dressing and grooming practices, different nutritional ideals, and different eating habits. In summary, an establishment with six workers will tend to be a place where six individual workers come together to work with a group of children, with a spectrum of philosophies, practices, and behaviours that will be varied in at least six different ways.
If one person had been responsible for hiring these six workers, then it may be easier to detect a pattern in their characteristics; it is more likely that one would find people with certain similarities included and those with other traits excluded. The frequent pattern is that several persons have had the responsibility over months or years for hiring staff for a particular establishment or group of establishments. Thus, the differences and heterogeneity will probably be greater and values, ideology, and morals will frequently be in conflict amongst workers at the shop floor and at the level of shop floor supervisors.
It can be argued that the attitudes, energies, and optimism of each staff member is the critical influences for maintaining 'Good Order' in an establishment; for stimulating children to interact with each other, staff, and outsiders in a positive way; and for making definite progress in a planned direction. Based on these unique personality features, the group care worker assesses the crucial elements of treatment, makes decisions about the children's group and specific treatment plans for individual children, and imposes sanctions on behaviour within a given set of procedures. This personality quagmire, the coherence or lack of coherence between staff members, would seem to be the main element which influences the success or failure of routines, intervention methods, and planned activities that surround a child's total working day. Unless staff have organized themselves into a cohesive team, with an integrated climate which absorbs the different ideologies, values, and philosophies, then the energies of workers may go into surviving or just competing with each other, virtually ensuring that no treatment is accomplished.
STEPHEN CASSON
Extract from Casson, S. Developing a Shared Language and Practice. In Fulcher, L.C. and Ainsworth, F. (eds.) (1985). Group Care Practice with Children, p.84-85.
