Jannawi is committed to supporting its staff, and strongly believes that to adequately support and challenge families to make the changes they need to ensure children’s safety, staff must also be supported in their role. Effective child protection intervention relies on staff being adequately skilled and experienced. It is also important that staff are consulted and have a role in the decisions being made in the agency, and in the direction it takes. Jannawi achieves this in the following ways:

Supervision

The Family Program Manager provides supervision for the team. This can be provided individually and/or in a group, depending on the needs of staff. Each staff member participates in a supervision session fortnightly.

The Family Program Manager is supervised by the Director to assist with general staffing issues, workload management and systemic issues.

Team Consultation

External consultancy is provided to the team on a monthly basis. These sessions consider individual clients, systemic issues, training and professional development, and issues raised by the team regarding specific situations. Where individual clients are discussed with the external consultant, Jannawi maintains responsibility for case management.

Management Coaching

The Family Program Manager is supported in their role by a commitment to provide external management coaching each month. This sits alongside the team consultation, and is important in assisting in the management of staff. Jannawi believes that management skills are different to those required to work directly with clients, and so the transition into management needs to be supported by the agency.

Accessible Management

Effective child protection intervention requires staff to have the capacity to make decisions quickly, and to be supported by management on a daily basis in the work they do. The management at Jannawi is committed to being available and contactable, and encourages informal supervision and debrief for staff, alongside more formal arrangements. The Manger role is also one which supports the direct client work by attending case planning meetings, facilitating reviews and cosigning reports.

360° Evaluation

Each year all Jannawi staff are asked to provide confidential evaluations of management performance and suggest any changes or give feedback. These evaluations are done anonymously, and the information is collated and fedback to the respective manager by their supervisor. It is the Board of Management’s responsibility to feeback to the Director. This ensures accountability, and supports the agency’s responsibility to monitor management performance.

Professional Development

Students

Jannawi offers University placements for third year Social Work students. Each year students become part of the team and assist both the Family Program and Community Connections in their work with clients, transport, developing resources and undertaking agency visits. Jannawi believes that participating in the learning of future professionals greatly benefits the agency, and allows students to question and improve our approach and service delivery.

Agency Visits

The Team visits other services doing similar work with the aim to network, discuss challenges and to learn more about different approaches in working with families. These visits are undertaken 2-3 times each year.

Team Relationships

Relationships between team members are expected to mirror the kinds of relationships staff seek to form with family members ie positive, respectful and consistent. Program effectiveness is undermined where relationships between staff and families are expected to be respectful, but relationships between staff are characterised by behaviour such as gossip, bullying, scapegoating and destructive criticism. Where conflict occurs between staff members, it should be addressed in positive, timely ways that acknowledge the concerns of all staff members, with a view to promoting better outcomes for staff and families.