I’m the only case manager at a social services agency serving 1000+ clients, and am absolutely not suited to the job. I’m trying to put together an exit plan that involves me having health insurance, but that’s been extremely difficult in the current political/economic climate. So for as long as I need to stay here, I want to work on mitigating – or at least finding workarounds for – some of the more dysfunctional work habits I’ve developed here. I do have ADHD, my particular brand of which is a spectacularly terrible fit for my org’s work culture, even when medicated. I won’t go into the details because that would make this way too long, but basically this job was tailor made to focus on my biggest weaknesses.
My main issue is the phone/voicemail. I’ve always preferred written communication to oral, but in past jobs I could suck it up and take calls/respond to messages in a warm, professional way – in fact, I was so convincing that people were surprised to hear I wasn’t a big fan of the phone.
This job has worn down that skill to the point where the sound of my phone ringing activates my startle reflex the same way a horror movie jump scare does (and I’m a giant baby about horror movies). My voicemail inbox is a graveyard of unopened messages going back months. That’s unacceptable in any job, but especially one serving extremely vulnerable people. Our client population has varying levels of education, literacy (some never learned to read or write), and tech savviness. By being responsive to email but not the phone, I’m behaving not just unproductively but inequitably.
I’ve identified some of the root causes and have tried to find workarounds, but nothing has really stuck. In no particular order:
1. Most of our clients speak Spanish, but not all. Unlike most other departments, I don’t have separate English and Spanish extensions – I’m a one-person department with only one phone and never know which language to answer in. I usually default to English, because while our Spanish speaking clients may pause or sound disappointed that I might not speak their language, some of our English speakers spew some pretty potent vitriol if they’re greeted in Spanish.
It sounds so trivial here, but I get worn down after the fourth or fifth time I answer in English, get an awkward pause, and start over in Spanish. Since most of our clients speak Spanish, this happens a lot.
I’ve tried quickly looking up the phone number in our system before picking up, but a) our system is slow, and the phone keeps ringing during that whole process, which I’m sure is grating for the people working near me, and b) once I pick up, do I pretend not to know who is calling? Clients know each other and sometimes swap phones, or families might share, so I probably should still verify. But sometimes a coworker will see me go through this whole lookup process and still ask for the caller’s name and DOB, and then look at me weird, as if it’s some petty power trip to make them wait and then prove who they are. Which, again, should not be such a big deal if I just explain why I do it. But it adds to the total cognitive load that goes into just *answering* the phone, let alone having the conversation.
2. I don’t know what people are calling about or how long the conversation will take. For someone who struggles with time management, that’s a problem. I try to schedule my day, but I’m constantly being interrupted with urgent fires to put out, even without taking the phone into account. The phone adds a whole new dimension.
From my vantage point, I can see which client issues are most urgent and which can probably wait, but to the client, whatever they’re calling about is usually the most stressful issue in their life, and they want to talk to someone about it. My job is supposed to be more about finding solutions and connecting them with resources, but how can I interrupt someone to do that when they’re unburdening themselves about something they probably needed to work up the courage to call about in the first place?
To complicate things further, I don’t come from the same culture as most of our clients, and Spanish is my second language. It seems like many of our clients come from cultures where interruption IS expected, so they’ll speak for 10+ minutes at a time without leaving a natural pause for me to smoothly switch gears. I just can’t figure out where/how to jump in. Since these issues are emotionally fraught, they often speak quickly or through tears, and I don’t understand everything they’re saying (because second language), so I end up interrupting to ask them to repeat themselves (which is probably not fun for them, because emotionally fraught) and don’t want to interrupt yet again to either schedule an appointment for another time or explain the solution. And often the solution is very, very quick and easy! But it doesn’t actually end up being quick and easy because I’m so bad at handling the give and take of these conversations. So picking up the phone basically feels like playing Russian roulette with my schedule/ability to focus for the rest of the day.
2b: It seems like letting more calls go to voicemail would be the solution to this, but not so. My voicemail greeting requests that people leave a brief description of the reason for their call, but many of them still just say “please call me back,” which brings us back to not being able to budget time for the call. When they do tell me what they need, it’s often in a roundabout way that makes my brain itchy – I get restless having to take in information at the speed at which they speak, when I can read much more quickly. That sounds so petty and small, but it truly does make things so much more difficult.
We do get emailed transcriptions of our voicemails…but only English voicemails. I know there are third party transcription services that work with more languages, but since clients are sharing personal and sensitive information, I probably shouldn’t feed their voicemails through there.
3. Because my “caseload” is all the clients, my time fills up very quickly with work that comes to me via other avenues (email, fax, notes on my desk, people coming over to my office, the separate email system in our client tracking software, Teams…basically everything but carrier pigeon). And because the phone is particularly painful for me, it’s easy for me to neglect it. I sometimes put my phone on DND so I can focus, and actually get a lot done and feel SO productive…then remember my phone is on DND, look at my voicemail inbox, and despair. I’ve tried setting aside time at the beginning of my day just to deal with voicemails, but again, I’m also getting interruptions from every other direction, many of which I can’t ignore. It seems like I can stay on top of my scheduled workload + interruptions when my phone is on DND and I forget my voicemail exists, but reintroducing the phone tips the scales into overwhelm, and I end up dissociating and just doing nothing.
Those are the broad strokes. Any advice would be helpful. I have looked into changing the ringtone on my phone to a less harsh/startling one, but all the options have me jumping out of my skin. I am in therapy, but that can only do so much.