Two Common Issues That Cause Problems for Children’s Homes Managers

Two Common Issues That Cause Problems for Care Home Managers

It’s fair to say that 2020 has not exactly gone the way we all thought it would – with nothing major happening and no terrible upheaval. There were really no signs of anything like that on the horizon until January and even February had more or less passed. The pandemic meant that even many of the best laid and well-intentioned plans went right out the window.

Even before the events of this year, there were two main issues that managers, in most sectors including health and social care, faced regularly, overwhelm and consistency. In this first post, we will discuss why overwhelm is such a problem, with consistency being covered in the next post.

Before we go any further, let’s just clear up what, by definition, overwhelm is.

What is Overwhelm?

Overwhelm is essentially a strong emotional response hindering the process of thinking clearly. Overwhelm at work can be caused by continual problem’s that feel like too much to handle, like drowning in paperwork, unfinished tasks or unmet deadlines. Another way to describe it would be to say if work or a problem overwhelms someone, it is too much or too difficult to deal with.

Impact Overwhelm Has on Children's Homes

When running an organisation like a children’s home there are a lot of things going on and a lot of things you need to do on a daily, weekly, monthly and even yearly basis. We have indeed all had to adapt, but with a children’s home there are constant changes and then there are the external and internal worries about not just the children and young people you have a duty of care to, but your staff, business and then on top of all that, meeting your Ofsted requirements.

Overwhelm can lead to unintentional procrastination, which is essentially the action of postponing, delaying or otherwise a task that needs to be completed, often within a specific deadline. Another way to describe it is the delay of the finishing or even starting off a task despite understanding that not too may have negative consequences.

How Easy it is to Let Overwhelm Take Hold

It can be easy to just focus on the crisis tasks that keep impacting your business. After all, you may reason that growing and expanding your business can wait because there is always something needing your urgent attention now. There is no point is there, in growing the business, if you can’t actually keep on top of everything now?

Overwhelm just slows everything right down. Not only that though because if you wait too long to complete time-sensitive tasks and projects you can quickly get things into a muddle when new tasks and jobs come along that also need your attention.

Paulo Coelho

-Author-

Life has many ways of testing a person's will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen at once.

Overwhelm is Serious

People often take a light-hearted approach to being overwhelmed and consider it something that will pass in time or when things calm down a bit! However, when your business and the care of your children and young people is in jeopardy, overwhelm is actually a lot more serious than just a passing phase.

The knock-on effect of this all is that you are left constantly playing catch-up, playing havoc with your health and finding yourself making a lot of excuses. Not the best position to be in when you are trying to manage your team of care workers while looking after the residents in your care.

At Rezume, we have a solution to overwhelm, but before we discuss that solution, in the following article we are going to look at the other issue consistency.