For many of us, public-sector work brings us a sense of purpose and making lives better. We work with veterans, disabled people, disaster survivors, low-income families, first-time farmers, and refugees to name just a few subsets of communities. As personally rewarding and important as this work can be, repeated exposure to sensitive topics without mitigating its impact can lead to burnout and second-hand trauma. Earlier this year, I consulted with practitioners from the clinical and social work fields to learn about the practices they use to maintain team health while working with sensitive topics. Their expertise could fill a book, but here are some of the most applicable takeaways I learned from my time with them.
1. Build in Breaks
Stress and trauma can chip away at people in small doses, building up over time. To prevent the metaphorical dam from breaking after years of small stressors, it’s important to build in recovery time. Some tactical ways to do this on your team include:
- Reducing the number of back-to-back interactions that people have related to sensitive topics (for example, calls with disaster survivors or intake sessions with asylum seekers)
- Working with teams to schedule time off before or after projects dealing with stressful topics
- Putting time in between deliverables or large-scale engagements where possible
By spreading out interactions and due dates on your team, you are keeping your team restored and sharp while also being sensitive to deadlines. Brute-forcing our way through tough topics rarely results in the best outcomes for us or the people we serve.
2. Pre-Brief With Teams
Help your team prepare for new topics and engagements before jumping into them to avoid on-the-spot surprises. Many topics impacting government services have complex and unknown variables below the surface that may not be obvious at first. For example, people new to working with families seeking SNAP (Supplementary Nutritious Assistance Program) benefits may not be aware of the difficulties that food-insecure families face or how widespread food-insecurity is in the United States. Even topics that may seem devoid of stress or trauma can surprise folks. People working with farmers seeking USDA loans, for example, may be unaware of generational and culture hardships involved in agriculture. By prepping your team with information and context on the communities they’ll be serving, you’re helping them go into potentially stressful situations more informed.
3. Hold People Accountable
Stress and trauma can sometimes cause people to react in unexpected ways. While this may not be intentional or nefarious, it can still have negative impacts on the people involved. Establish norms with your team for what is (and isn’t) acceptable behavior, what early signs of distress look like, and appropriate ways to respond if someone displays distressed behavior. If the inappropriate behavior occurs on your team, have a process in place to hold that person accountable in a way that provides them with the support they need to cope and grow as profesionals. In the event that distressed or inappropriate behavior occurs towards your team member from an external source, you can reduce harm by removing that team member from the situation (and pointing them towards support and resources) and providing coverage with a team member who is more experienced with that topic.
4. Proactively Make Help Available
Asking for help can be difficult, especially in the workplace. Many people fear that asking for support is indicative of low performance, weakness, or unprofessionalism. However, this cannot be further from the truth! By creating a culture that values support, we are reducing burnout and attrition, which makes us able to better serve our constituencies.
We can further close this gap by being proactive about resources that your team members have. Whether it’s peer-to-peer support, built-in debriefs, external services (such as psychological or community-based support) or a dedicated neutral escalation path, providing these resources up front normalizes their utilization and encourages team resiliency.
These practices may be new to those of us outside of clinical disciplines but are commonplace and evolving for our clinical colleagues. For more information on trauma-informed practices in public-sector work, I recommend the following (by no means exhaustive) list of resources that I found particularly helpful:
- Applying Trauma-Informed Design to Improve Government Services (blog post)
- Social Workers Who Design, founded by Rachael Dietkus
- Stress First Aid Framework from the VA’s National Center for PTSD
- Kate Every‘s survey and findings on practitioner trauma in the user research space (including resources for broader trauma-informed civic tech resources with a focus on the UK civic tech space)
Ann Aly (pronounced like Ali) is a UX and civic tech practice leader with a background in academic research, music, and education. She combines these experiences to lead teams improving federal government services, emphasizing communal leadership and transparency. Ann holds a PhD and MA (both in Linguistics) from UCLA, and an MA (Spanish and Portuguese) and BA (Music) from Florida State University. When she’s not asking too many questions, Ann enjoys woodworking, gardening, and exploring the Shenandoah Valley woodlands near her home.
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