A Vicarious Trauma Informed Organization and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Building a resilient workplace begins by recognizing the importance of connections and relationships at work including leaders, supervisors, and staff. A Vicarious Trauma Informed Organization recognizes the challenges human service professionals face and addresses the impact of vicarious trauma and disaster mental health. Through an organization’s policies and practices, an employee’s resilience is fostered. Your mission statement can recognize the need for self-care. The goal of supervisors and leaders is to identify professional and personal self-care practices to reduce the risk of VT in employees. A Vicarious Trauma Informed Organization is one where everyone communicates effectively, actively listens, and truly cares about the impact of vicarious trauma on one another. Occupational stress does not have to take its toll if supervisors and leaders understand ways to build employee resilience.

Resilience is the ability to adapt to adversity and life challenges. To foster resilience in trauma exposed staff who are experiencing compassion fatigue, burnout, secondary traumatic stress, or vicarious trauma, a Vicarious Trauma Informed Organization assesses their organizational health and the negative impact of vicarious trauma. Supervisors implement strategies to reduce negative organizational outcomes that can range from absenteeism, staff turnover, and client low-quality care.

The goal of a Vicarious Trauma Informed Organization is to improve its culture about the effects of a client’s traumatic material on workers. Here is a self-help guide for leaders and supervisors who want to educate and empower their staff to mitigate the impact of vicarious trauma.  Listed below are 20 self-help tips for employers to use to increase the positive effects of working with victims of trauma. 

Check in with your staff by doing the following:

1. Identify trauma-specific education through training and professional development inside and outside of the work setting
2. State any positive in their helping role and reframe their thinking about their negative world view, and examine ways to maintain a positive sense of self
3. Demonstrate an understanding of the cost of working with suffering people and ways to find meaning in one’s role by exploring their sense of purpose in the world
4. Establish a culture of staff wellness and team collaboration by discussing self-care techniques as a group
5. Administer employee performance evaluations that assesses their symptoms of vicarious trauma and how their organization is mitigating its impact
6. Establish hiring and ongoing policies that focus on vicarious trauma during the job interview and new staff orientation
7. Illustrate ways to change their language and reframe the way they describe their work situation
8. Select ways to increase hope and moral by establishing a communication protocol through personal conversations, telephone calls, texts, emails, meetings, and online meetings
9. Promote a culture of caring and emotional and social support from peers and supervisors through formal debriefings or a peer support group
10. Explain your commitment to social learning by advising staff to connect with other professionals who understand the experience of working with trauma and learn from each other
11. Recommend a self-assessment (e.g., Professional Quality of Life Measure ProQOL at https://proqol.org/
12. Propose that staff get evidence seek out therapies such as CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy), Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy, Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction, or resilience training
13. Employ a way to maintain a balance caseload and limit the number of trauma clients they can see in one day
14. Point out ways to vary the type of work that they do, reduce the hours of working with those who are traumatized, and flextime
15. Give examples on ways to tolerate a client’s strong feelings
16. Recommend quick ways to relax throughout the day such as mini breaks to get fresh air, have a snack, and stretch
17. Record one best thing that happened in their day or the most rewarding moment in their day to increase job satisfaction
18. Encourage pleasurable activities such as listening to music, spending time with loved ones, or pursuing hobbies

 Create an organizational culture that values self-care, fosters teamwork and debriefing. Also, balance your employee’s workload so they don’t experience burnout. An important vicarious trauma mitigation strategy is to select and recruit the right staff. Mitigate the impact of vicarious trauma in employees by offering proactive training in building resilience from the very first day on the job.

Barbara Rubel, MA, BCETS, DAAETS, Author, But I Didn't Say Goodbye: Helping families after a suicide (3rd edition) (2020)  www.griefworkcenter.com