Child welfare design teams: An intervention to improve workforce retention and facilitate organizational development

Workforce turnover in public child welfare is a national problem. Individual, supervisory, and organizational factors, individually and in combination, account for some of the turnover. Complex, comprehensive interventions are needed to address these several factors and their interactions. A research and development team is field testing one such intervention. The three-component intervention encompasses management consultations, capacity building for supervisors, and a cross-role, intra-agency design team (DT). DTs consist of representative workers from pilot child welfare systems. A social worker from outside the agency facilitates team problem solving focused on retention of workers. DT problem solving combines action research and learning. DTs and their facilitators rely on specially designed tools, protocols, and social work research as they address retention-related priorities. Intervention research findings as well as successful examples of retention-related problem solving indicate the DT intervention's potential contributions to social work education, research, and practice.