The Supervisor’s Guidebook: Evidence-Based Strategies for Promoting Work Quality and Enjoyment Among Human Service Staff

by Dennis H. Reid, Marsha B. Parsons, Carolyn W. Green

This guidebook will show how supervisors can ensure support staff to deliver quality services for people with disabilities whose quality of life is heavily dependent on how well those services are provided. Supervisors must ensure staff receive necessary training in their job duties, are actively supported to stay motivated to work proficiently and, at times, effectively assisted to improve their work performance. Supervisors have to overcome many challenges to fulfill these critical duties, often involving frequent changes in their staff work force and varying or limited resources. Complicating the job of staff supervisors is a lack of formal training necessary to perform their supervisory duties effectively. When supervisors do receive training in how to supervise staff work performance, the training is not always very useful. The training is frequently too general to equip supervisors with knowledge and skills to affect staff work performance on a routine basis. The training also is commonly based on unproven means of promoting quality staff performance, stemming from current fads or ideology that has little if any hard evidence to support the training content. Over the last five decades, a technology for supervising staff work performance in the human services has been evolving, derived from applied research conducted in many human service agencies. However, most supervisors have not had opportunities to become aware of these evidencebased means of fulfilling their supervisory duties. The purpose of The Supervisors Guidebook is to describe the existing evidencebased approach to supervision. Description of the approach is supplemented with practical suggestions based on the authors combined experience encompassing over 100 years of supervising staff performance in the human services. The intent is to provide supervisors with detailed information about tried and tested means of promoting diligent and proficient staff performance and to do so in a way that maximizes staff enjoyment with their work.

Genres: Professional Development, Textbooks

340 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Jessica Biggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars for content and 3 stars for readability.

[JiJi Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for Grad school

I was able to use this for my everyday work I love evidence based errrythanng

[Kelsey Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an excellent reference for someone beginning their first managerial position in the human services/dd field or just for someone who feels like they could improve their current skills with what strategies are supported by evidence.