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The crisis created by the spread of COVID-19 brought increasing needs and referrals to social welfare services in many countries. However, at the same time, social services suffered from staff cutbacks and service closures, resulting in significant workload increases to address the hardships associated with the pandemic. This article investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Israeli social workers’ well-being, using a mixed-methods design with a sample of 2,542 licensed social workers. Findings show that over 70 percent of social workers suffered from at least one health problem related to their work. Path analysis findings indicated that social workers who experienced greater service restrictions reported a greater decrease in job satisfaction and experienced higher levels of stress and work-related problems. Machine learning emotion-detection analysis revealed that the pandemic affected their lives, causing feelings of fear, frustration, and sadness. This article demonstrates how social workers whose work was characterized by greater service restrictions were less satisfied with their jobs, more stressed, and experienced greater job-related health problems, and concludes with a discussion of the implications for social work practice in times of crisis.

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Social work is a highly stressful occupation, its practice requiring coping with complex situations integral to serving the most deprived populations. Professionals in this field experience varying degrees of secondary trauma, burnout and psychological distress imperiling their own well-being. This study uses the newest framework of intrinsic job attributes to examine a multidimensional model of intrinsic job quality constructs to explain perceived stress (PS) amongst national sample of social workers in Israel (N = 2,542). Based on cross-sectional data, we employed exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to construct intrinsic job quality index. Structural equation model (SEM) and path analyses revealed the adverse effect of workload and a poor physical working environment on social workers’ PS. Social environment factors relating to superiors’ and co-workers’ support and sense of recognition mediated the effects of workload, job autonomy, physical working environment and meaningful work on social workers’ PS through diverse pathways. These findings may inform policy measures responding to the urgent need to monitor social workers’ workload and suggest how to nurture a stress-reducing social environment in social services in order to promote social workers’ well-being and the quality of the services they provide.

While the evidence on the adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the well-being of frontline social workers is emerging, the research on the impact of the pandemic on their performance is scarce. The presented study explores how the relationship between work environment predictors and perceived stress explains the job performance of child welfare social workers during the pandemic using survey responses of 878 child welfare social workers. The findings revealed the mechanism through which environment predictors and perceived stress interacted in explaining job performance during a time of large-scale crisis. We found that C.W. social workers who experienced greater COVID-19-related service restrictions reported poorer job performance, that perceived stress disrupted workers’ supervision and autonomy, and that supervision and job autonomy protected C.W. social workers from the adverse effects of perceived stress and workload on their job performance. Conclusions included the importance of autonomy and supervision in mitigating job-related stressors and the need to adapt and enhance child welfare supervision during times of national crisis.