Human Services When Speaking About

¶ … Human Services

When speaking about "nowadays," the first thing that might come to one's mind, or at least among firsts, is the multitude of institutions and organizations that exist in a society. Although they have all been created with the same and certain purpose of fulfilling people's needs, it is exactly the variety of needs that makes these institutions and organizations so divided and so specific. They perform in particularized areas of activities and their work can be translated into the types of services they offer to population.

The current paper work focuses on a service that covers a significant area of the society's concerns, the human service.

To begin with, one should gain a better understanding of what "Human Services" specifically refers to. Overall, this field activates with the objective of meeting human needs, focusing both on prevention and on the remediation of the problems. Human services' constant concern must regard improvement of the quality of life, which one can gain not only by focusing on direct services, but also by seeking improvement at the level of agencies in service delivery. or, in other words, the good or poor quality of a service relates directly to the professionals that stand behind it.

Furthermore, in order to get an even more complete view of this field, one should think at the specificity of human services in comparison to the other types of activities from this extended area that is called "services."

There is a general assumption that they are not alike, but in more specific terms, what differentiates human services among all the other services is that they are designed to address issues of happiness to a large extension and in a systematic and extremely complex way, rather than tangential or as a secondary objective, which is the case of most ordinary services.

Let us take the example of an adolescent with a deviant behavior, a pickpocket or a child dropping out of school. The intervention of human services will firstly provide a complete analysis of the family background, childhood environment, possible psychical traumas which will further lead to an adequate treatment and intervention.

The history of human services spans over a century and has been in constant transformation ever since. The main reason for this relies on the notion that, as they are different from the other services, one should organize them in a different way. Furthermore, despite the general purpose of fulfilling human needs, there have always been specific objectives that have lead actions in various directions and sometimes became potentially competitive: improving efficiency, effectiveness, accountability, availability, coherence, continuity, quality of life, consumer choice etc.

Though, the most important redesign of the human services consists in two key-words: collaboration and service integration, referring to the generic processes by which individuals and groups grow to be more positively interdependent and learn to coordinate their activities in ways that provide for synergistic benefits.

In accord to this, one should cast a glance at a specific human service system change: in the early 1990s, in Georgia, the governor gave his authorization for a series of collaborations between executives and board members from three distinctive service departments- the Department of Human Resources, the Department of Education, and the Department of Medical Assistance. The results showed a grown effectiveness for these departments' actions and therefore, integration and collaboration became the support of nowadays' organization of the Human Services. Unlike traditional forms of organization, collaborative strategies are currently implemented at every single level of activity, from developing common wishes and goals, shared values and communications expectations to tasks that can be done jointly and fair distributions and exchanges. Strengths of these modern techniques of work, revealed in comparison to the traditional ones are multiple: long-term perspective of actions, democratic management perspective, continuous change and constant adaptation and re-adaptation in order to meet the community's needs, search for useful programs among a wider range of expertise than individual agencies etc. Therefore, this model has rapidly spread and has been widely adopted.

However, as much as a Human Service System would differentiate itself from the other types of services, there are some common elements and strategies that must be reached in every organization, in order to provide a successful development. And the most important regards employers' motivation to work and by their personal involvement, to contribute to the overall effectiveness. No matter the area of activity, it is motivation that leads to productivity and further, to success.

Productivity and well carried out tasks by employees are, of course, the manager's part of the manager's duty and supervise activity. Yet, one should distinguish between management and leadership. While the former regards the field of task issues, the latter focuses on finding the most suitable manner for motivation and the best organizational innovation. A manager is not compulsory a leader, and vice-versa, but a good manager has to learn efficient strategies of leadership, in order to reach to the point where he becomes able to understand his employees' needs and furthermore, the motivation that satisfies these needs.

In the specific area of social work, managers must be aware of the fact that Human Services reunites people from different fields and with various educational backgrounds. Therefore, along with the traditional notion that they "just want to help people," social workers have specific needs in accord to multiple factors and require specific motivation.