Who'd Be An SPO?

Right from starting my career in the Probation Service, it was pretty clear that being an SPO was a thankless task having to deal with all the stuff from above, as well as absorbing all the angst from below. Ok it was a very early and stark observation borne of my university tutor placing me in a team undergoing crisis and with the words 'it's a difficult placement but we think you can handle it'. Within weeks the SPO went off sick with a nervous breakdown, never to be seen again. The team had destroyed that man and it had a lasting effect on me. But it's always puzzled me, if the joy in the work was interacting with clients, why on earth would you give that up?

Anyway, here we have a fascinating piece of research and article looking closely at the SPO role and published in the European Journal of Probation. As with most academic stuff, it's long and should be read in its entirety, but in order to give a flavour I've decided to go with the selected quotes from those who took part.  

‘Pushed from above and pushed from below’: Emotional labour and dual identities amongst senior probation officers in England and Wales

Abstract

Senior Probation Officer’s (SPOs) in England and Wales work at the ‘front and centre’ of the organisation’s hierarchy. They act as both manager and developer of frontline probation practitioners. Previous research has focused on the emotional labour undertaken by probation practitioners yet there is very little research on the emotional labour of SPOs, even though they must be skilful emotion managers of their own emotions and those they supervise. Using data gathered from interviews with 28 SPOs and managers across England and Wales, we analyse how SPOs’ emotions are ‘controlled’ by senior management, and how SPOs ‘control’ the emotions of frontline workers they supervise. SPOs attempts at managing emotions are resisted by their supervisees, and SPOs resist the emotional displays they are expected to present in their work role. We conclude by considering the impact of emotional labour on SPOs and how best to support them in their role.

-----///----

"Some of the emotions that crop up the most I guess are things like just a sense of frustration with the system, the sense of frustration about the detachment of higher-level probation staff..... up there, from the actual practice of managing service users on the ground, you know, they are very disjointed and their expectations of what we can physically achieve are quite unrealistic to some degree." (Ursula)

"I think you get all of the direction from senior management about the things you need to implement and sometimes you don't agree with those things, but you have to implement them, and you have to do it in a way that gets the team on board." (Brianna)

"In terms of my emotional management what I'm not always great at is hiding emotionally how annoyed I am because I get frustrated by stuff, like ridiculous things, you know, organisational ridiculousness really frustrates me because it gets in the way of us being able to discharge a job effectively…and there are times as an SPO where you're so burdened." (Eugene)

"I think when I'm in team meetings, when I'm in supervision sessions it's very calm, very measured, very supportive but I think on the inside at points it is frustrating, there are points I'm feeling at times quite angry. I can feel quite resentful at points as well." (Oliver)

"That was a really difficult experience because all the way through that she was extremely frustrating, unbelievably infuriating but, again, you actually had to maintain the professionalism." (Tianna)

"They're coming to you and it might be that you think ‘why the hell are you feeling this way? because that to me, you know, probably there's people in a different situation that might be ten times worse or have got more workload than you but for them they're living and breathing a difficult situation so I suppose it's, again, putting your personal views aside and trying to put yourself in someone else's shoes and think, okay, well why for you is this really difficult at the moment?" (Heather)

"Even if you don’t agree with having to provide stats every week or so, or COVID reporting or whatever it is, and you’ve got to do it and you’ve got no choice….But it’s about trying to think that there must be some reason why they want this all the time, these stats, these figures. Trying to have that conversation with the staff so that they understand we’re not just asking you to do this because we want to waste your time, there must be a logic to it." (Ursula)

"I had a manic day with appointments and everything, I had two officers crying because of different issues, one about an offender, the other about personal stuff." (Brianna)

"All the emotions I've been talking about. Some people will come to me in tears … Other people might be quite angry [asking] ‘Why aren’t there enough staff?’, you know, they have the opinion that maybe other staff aren’t doing as much as they are, so you have to manage that." (Ursula)

"When I want them to see that I empathise with them I allow them to see that, that I have empathy for you, that I have empathy that you are struggling or that you're finding this particular report difficult or that you're about to miss this deadline and I want them to see empathy and I think they do see empathy." (Lillian)

"I was honest, I said ‘You're going to make me cry!’ We just kind of talked it through and reassured her that, one, she was safe and okay, two, she won't have to see that person again…and also reassured her that she was good at her job and doing what she was supposed to do." (Rhonda)

"Yeah, it's reacting to people as well and also trying to work out how you get a message over in a way that's acceptable because it's dead easy to say you can't do that, don't do that but all that does it puts it underground. So, it's about with a smile on my face saying let's explore why you've said that shall we? What do you think's going on?" (Winston)

"Handing over any message that comes from above and trying to sanitise it and make it in such a way that it's not going to, you know, it's either understandable to your staff or not too kind of - some of the messages you get are quite hard hitting, you think my team at the minute are struggling, if I send this message out it's just not going to go well." (Toby)

"It really is - the role of an SPO in the organisation is anything the organisation can kind of dictate. We are probably the meat in the middle of the sandwich, and we get squeezed from every direction and it's a difficult job." (Toby)

"One of them just left this week who's a really brilliant manager and she was my manager when I first joined, and she said I can't keep up. It is, it's quite a difficult job. You have to have a lot of resilience." (Toby)

"I'll give you an example because this is real, and this happened yesterday. So my team are kicking back at the moment, well, one of my team is kicking back… So we had that discussion, it got very heated. They think they're being hard done to because they're keyworkers, we're front facing at the end of the day." (Jemima)

"So yesterday I came out of that meeting absolutely drained after nearly two hours feeling that I couldn't stay on site. My emotional bucket has been drained for probably the last eight weeks really and has just been getting worse and worse and worse." (Jemima)

"Give me 50 high risk offenders rather than two really difficult members of staff! It's like, oh my god. It's draining. It's draining." (Frank SPO)

"I think when people are angry, in general what I've allowed them to be is angry. You can't rob the genuineness of somebody's emotion…if somebody comes in that is really angry I saying, okay, calm down, have a glass of water is not really going to get you the result that you want to achieve and so you have to kind of understand and ask the right questions to understand why they're feeling the emotions that they're feeling without asking a question that's going to trigger or exacerbate and that is a really nuanced set of skills." (Eugene)

"I said to the deputy head the other day, I says look, all my staff have been in every single week and you're complaining because we want to close the office because it's snowing? So I mean sometimes I get annoyed about it, and I make it clear I'm annoyed." (Mia)

"I wouldn't let it go to the point where I was unprofessional or anything if that makes sense but if things are annoying me, I'm not afraid to say, yeah, I think these decisions are utterly ridiculous but how can we make it work best for us? Because there is a professional way of using your frustration to acknowledge where you're at but find a solution to how in practice you can make it work best for you." (Eugene)

"You're a little bit of everything; you’re a manager, confidante, enforcer of process and performance management as well as trying to support and develop people as much as you can, and you have to be emotionally nimble to be able to do that I think. And with honesty and openness - the way that I was able to, manipulate is not really the right word, but the way in which I present and manage myself allows other people to have trust and honesty in return with me." (Eugene)

-----///----  

Discussion and conclusion

This article makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the challenges SPOs face in the probation service in England and Wales. The consideration of ‘control’ and resistance both by and of SPOs through the lens of emotional labour provides a rich understanding of the demanding emotional expectations place on them as frontline managers. SPOs find it necessary to skilfully fulfil their varied and ever-expanding responsibilities. It also highlights the tension between their role as developer and manager, in the context of increasingly managerial demands. Our analysis also sheds light on the nature of probation work and how emotions are appropriated for the ends of criminal justice. There are some limitations to this study, most notably that the sample was self-selecting, and so may be skewed towards those people were keen to discuss the emotional labour they performed as SPOs. As referenced in the methods section above, there were several people who initially indicated in the survey that they were willing to be interviewed. This may be a result of the delay between survey completion and interviews (due to the COVID pandemic), their circumstances changed, and they did not respond. Nonetheless, it means that our sample is not representative of the SPO population and so our findings need to be understood in that context.
Their position in the PS means SPOs are required to be ‘emotionally nimble’ (Eugene SPO Generic), skilful in the art of emotional labour knowing when and how to ‘control’ theirs and other’s emotions. In doing so, it is clear that SPOs are:

required to produce a more complex and varied species of emotional labour than is often required in the service industry… This reflects the greater variety of issues faced by leaders and the greater variety of leadership work required to deal with them. (Iszatt-White, 2009: 448)

Given the emotional skill required by frontline managers in the PS to fulfil their role, it is important to recognise the value in having experienced senior staff in the SPO role and to understand that the way in which these emotional skills are best learned is through experience. It also prompts questions around the suitability or otherwise of engaging SPO and senior managers from outside probation practice.

The need to engage in complex and varied emotional labour, with emotional display expectations that, at times, conflict with the underlying values and identity of SPOs can be traced back to the shift in focus of probation practice and its effect on how staff should be managed. SPOs were originally employed as senior practitioners whose role was to advise and encourage those less experienced than themselves. However, from the late 1970s onwards, the move from a predominantly welfarist to a neo-liberal ideology resulted in ‘reduced social welfare, the intensification of punishment, and the increasing marketisation and re-regulation of criminal justice agencies to free market principles’ (Walker et al., 2019: 118). In probation, this brought about an increased focus on targets and accountability, cost effectiveness and risk management which led to SPOs taking on an increasingly managerial role.

The congested space which SPOs occupy means they are caught in the middle of organisational demands and staff pressures (Coley, 2020). This requires SPOs to ‘control’ their own emotions and the emotions of those they supervise. In an illustration of what display rules are at play in probation, we have also shown that the suppression of undesirable emotions is not enough. SPOs are expected to circulate directions from senior management in ‘a way that gets the team on board’ (Brianna SPO Generic). SPOs are an emotional buffer between senior management and frontline staff. Organisational policy – which is uncompromisingly direct – means SPOs are required to use various emotional labour techniques to sanitise directives and persuade frontline staff to accept them. The way in which the organisational hierarchy has developed, places increased pressure on SPOs to perform emotional labour in a way that creates conflict between their different job roles. Consequently, it is noteworthy to consider the emotional toll this has on SPOs and how this might be alleviated by thinking about how organisational policy is presented by senior management. The increasingly managerial nature of probation work – a sharper focus on enforcement, punishment and risk management and public protection – combined with the expectation to maintain the senior practitioner role results in tension for SPOs which can only be managed through surface acting. While surface acting ensures SPOs present requisite emotional displays there is a price to pay in the form of negative consequences such as burnout and role overload (Tolich, 1993; Wharton, 1993; Wharton and Erickson, 1993). We can see here glimpses of the emotional burden placed on SPOs raising questions about the scope of the SPO role and the demands it places on them.

Deep acting is one way of reducing the potentially negative consequences of being emotionally ‘controlled’ but SPOs must still invest themselves emotionally in the work they do. Being frontline managers means SPOs can understand the job role of frontline practitioners and the challenging situations they find themselves in. SPOs are therefore well-placed to provide the organisation with a human face of management and be pivotal in the provision of support for the well-being of practitioners. However, this aspect of the SPO role means tapping into their own experiences as frontline practitioners and prioritising an identity akin to Reuss-Ianni’s (1983) ‘street cop’. The resultant ‘sanitisation’ of organisational messages inevitably puts pressure on SPOs to manage these identities or risk negative consequences. It must also be borne in mind that in this context SPOs are positioned in the organisation as ‘vital and loyal lynchpins’ (Dudau and Brunetto, 2020) between senior management and frontline workers and can create or destroy value in the public service provided by the PS where it does not conform to their own underpinning values. The benefits of value congruence underpinning professional leadership (Iszatt-White, 2009) leads to less emotional dissonance and the negative consequences highlighted above and this represents an area for future research focused on authentic leadership and emotional labour to shed much needed light on the role and identity of SPOs.

Our analysis sheds light not only on the role of the SPO in England and Wales but also on the PS itself. The probation service has become increasingly managerial in recent decades (along with myriad other public sector institutions) and the experiences of SPOs serves to underline how this is manifesting on the ground. That SPOs are responsible for performance management as well as developing practice and supporting staff, demonstrating the influence of 30 years of new public management and the challenges this brings to a staff group which is and remains value driven (Grant, 2016).

Ultimately, our analysis points to the demands of high workloads which are currently endemic across probation in England and Wales for both practitioners and SPOs. Whilst the impact of this on the quality of probation practice is recognised by HMI Probation (2020), it is clear from our research that high workloads present similar issues for frontline managers. There are – it would seem – significant risks to SPO well-being that have their roots in the tensions that exist in the SPO role and the emotional labour that is demanded from them. One solution here would be to introduce a clearer definition of the SPO role and reduce the amount of work they do. Another solution may be the introduction of a senior practitioner role which is often seen in the context of social work. This would have the effect of improving the amount and quality of support they can provide to frontline practitioners and, in turn, improve the quality of work done with people on probation.

SPOs find themselves stuck in the middle of an organisation which itself is dealing with high workloads, difficulties in recruitment and retention and questions over its legitimacy amongst the media and general public. However, SPOs play a crucial role in holding the two ends of the organisation together by being the link between what the organisation is trying to do, and the frontline workers who are responsible for putting policy into practice. Our research highlights the need for the probation service to do more to support SPOs as they navigate the ‘intrepid path’ between being held to account by senior managers, protecting the public, supporting staff and helping people on probation to desist from offending.

Chalen Westaby, Jake Phillips, Sam Ainslie, and Andrew Fowler