Tips for Creating a Motivating and Supportive Environment for Staff Success in Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Services

This brief presents four tips for supporting staff providing HMRE services and examples from the experiences of the HMRE grant recipients who participated in SIMR. It focuses on ways to generate motivation and buy-in and provide organizational supports to staff.

This brief shares four tips to support staff providing HMRE services: 

• Include staff in the process of developing and refining staff supports to build their motivation. Encouraging staff to take an active role in charting the direction of HMRE services promotes a sense of ownership, buy-in, and motivation. In SIMR, grant recipients regularly sought feedback from staff about the improvement strategies they tested. This feedback led to important adjustments to the strategies.  
• Offer tools to help staff identify and reduce sources of stress and increase the opportunity for them to do their best. Working in a social service organization can be stressful. Organizational cultures, work environments, and resources can intensify or relieve these pressures. Workplace strategies that help staff regulate their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors may build staff capacity to manage stressful and emotionally taxing situations. In SIMR, two grant recipients tested strategies to build staff self-regulation skills and support the self-regulation of HMRE participants.
• Be mindful of existing staff burdens and time constraints and how additional responsibilities may affect staff motivation and opportunity. Changes to staff roles and responsibilities can contribute to staff stress and reduce motivation, even if they are intended to improve services or make staff members’ jobs easier. In SIMR, some HMRE grant recipients made fundamental changes to the way that staff performed their work. As a part of these strategies, they included supports to help staff adjust to the changes. They also monitored service provision to understand pain points for staff and adjust in response.  
• Encourage staff to set goals to build motivation to practice new skills. Asking staff to set their own performance goals taps into their intrinsic motivation, helps staff know where to focus their efforts, challenges them, and activates their problem solving skills. In SIMR, grant recipients asked staff to set goals about when and how often to use improvement strategies they were testing. Setting individual goals encouraged staff to practice the strategies and become more comfortable using them.

As part of the SIMR study, Mathematica and Public Strategies worked with HMRE grant recipients to test and refine strategies to address key implementation challenges using rapid cycle learning. Rapid cycle learning is a method for quickly and iteratively testing strategies to strengthen implementation of programming. It often involves successive cycles to pilot strategies, collect feedback from staff and participants on how these strategies are working, and gather data to demonstrate whether the strategies are supporting improvement. Based on what grant recipients learn, staff can refine and test strategies again in a subsequent learning cycle.

Service providers are encouraged to apply the tips and strategies in this brief and refine them to work in their contexts. Through testing and evaluation, HMRE service providers can continue to contribute insights that benefit the HMRE field.

Baumgartner, S. “Tips for Creating a Motivating and Supportive Environment for Staff Success in Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Services.” OPRE Report #2023-075, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023.