Professional Social Service Managers

A Day in the Life

As a social services manager, your day begins before the facility where you work opens.. Depending on where you work, you may be known as a social services manager, a social work manager or a community services manager. No matter your title, you will be responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations of your facility. From the moment you arrive to the last second of the workday, you're busy assisting social workers and mental health providers.

Before the rest of your staff arrives, you take time to listen to your phone messages and read your emails. An association you work with is offering special training sessions for social workers who assist clients with disabilities. You forward the announcement about the training to the employees in your office who would benefit from attending. You'll check in with them later in the day to ensure that they have received the information.

Shortly after your facility opens, you circulate from office to office to check in with your employees. You listen to concerns that one of your employees has about a client's welfare and help him to troubleshoot how he will interact with the client today. You quickly glance over the case loads of all of your social workers and identify those individuals that might need extra help with their appointments throughout the day.

After you've made the morning rounds, you leave the office to go to a county-wide budget meeting. At the meeting, you explain the budgetary needs of your facility and explain to county supervisors why your services are important. To prepare for the meeting, you have outlined the amount of funding that you receive from state and federal organizations. You make a request for additional funding from the county. It will be several weeks before you know if your request has been approved.

You return to your facility after lunch. The social workers with whom you work are overburdened, so you're interviewing for a new social worker to join the team. You conduct interviews during the afternoon. You work with a senior social worker to choose the top three candidates and ask your facility's receptionist to arrange another round of interviews. You'll talk to the candidates again next week and will make a final hiring decision then.

Before you leave for the day, you check in with the social workers at your facility again. You let them know that you're headed home and tell them to call you if they need your assistance. It's been a long day, but you feel a great deal of pride in what you've accomplished at your facility.