Behavioural science for policymakers: What we can learn from trials conducted with local authorities

This post is written by Shibeal O’ Flaherty, PhD Candidate, King’s College London; Research Associate at What Works for Children’s Social Care.

• The problem: There is a lack of evidence demonstrating how public-sector organisations can improve the well-being of their workforce
• Why it matters: The well-being of staff is of rising concern to organisations and policymakers. Record numbers of public-sector staff are leaving their jobs as part of the Great Resignation, with employees demanding more of their employers and seeking out jobs that promote a healthy workplace culture.
• The solution: Organisations should incorporate wellbeing interventions as part of everyday activities, but should also focus on how to address the larger structural issues to produce meaningful and lasting change for staff wellbeing.

Policymakers across the globe have turned to behavioural science to address high stakes policy issues and to examine levers to promote behaviour change across a range of policy areas. One under-examined policy area in the literature is the application of behavioural science interventions to address poor employee wellbeing - an area which has become increasingly top of mind for organisations during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This need is felt strongly in the field of child protection social work, where rising demand for services has coincided with substantial reductions in spending. Social work is a profession that is pervaded by high levels of turnover and sickness absence rates - almost 50% higher than teaching - and is generally absent of external motivators such as financial incentives. Social worker well-being may be poorer than in other public-sector settings due to the high time and administrative burden, emotional labour and complex nature of the work.

Light touch, behaviorally informed interventions we implemented with local authorities had small effects, but more structural changes are needed to produce meaningful, sustained change.

Over the past three years, at What Works for Children’s Social Care, I’ve been involved in the design and implementation of eight well-being interventions aimed at making social workers happier and more motivated in their work. Through this research, we have learned a lot about what is needed for a successful field partnership, and how local authorities (as well as other public-sector organisations) can set themselves up for engaging in innovative research.

Lessons learned

Most of the local authorities we worked with had not engaged in experimental research before being involved in the programme. Some of the things we found that helped to develop a smooth relationship with our research partners included:

1. Senior-level buy-in: having a senior-level individual who is responsible for decision-making in the organisation, who is excited about the research and who allocates the necessary resources to ensure smooth delivery of the intervention is vital.
2. Day-to-day contact: Allocating someone who can help with “on-the-ground” work, for example through the collection of administrative data and the sending of wellbeing surveys to measure our outcomes of interest is needed.
3. Careful design and pre-work: Doing ample pre-work and having meetings with the relevant stakeholders is necessary to ensure the intervention is designed with the workplace context in mind.

In one of our interventions, which involved sending letters of gratitude to social workers coming from senior-level management, we found that social workers who received the intervention reported a statistically significantly higher sense of feeling valued and recognised for their work.

However, in another intervention which involved sending social support messaging to newly qualified social workers and newer staff at the Ministry of Defence (which was found to be effective at reducing burnout in other settings), we did not find any significant impact of the intervention on staff wellbeing.

Overall, our findings suggested that many of the light-touch, behaviorally informed interventions we implemented with local authorities had small effects, but more structural changes are needed to produce meaningful, sustained change.

Local authorities - and other public-sector organisations - could look to incorporate these interventions (such as letters of gratitude, or providing flexible working) as part of normal functioning. More broadly, however, what we learned was that employees such as social workers - who are time impoverished and deal with high administrative burdens - need larger, more structural innovations to produce meaningful and sustainable change in the wellbeing of their workforces.

To see a full-text copy of the report, follow this link.

👋 You can create a post like this one! Share your thoughts with a community of public servants. Learn more

(Image Credit: Unsplash)