Practising social work groups online: Practitioners’ reflection on the COVID-19 outbreak

Background

In the wake of the implementation of social distancing rules with the recent COVID-19 outbreak, most social service centres in Hong Kong have been instructed to close. To maintain services for service users and people in the community, social workers have adopted information and communication tools (ICTs), such as social media channels and video-conferencing applications. Two authors of this article, who are social workers at an Integrated Children and Youth Service Centre (ICYSC), have implemented various online groups for their children and youth service users since the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020. This article serves as a reflection on the use of online social work group from the practitioners’ point of view at this critical juncture.

Reflections

In groups, service users learn coping skills for life experiences and experience healing through cohesion and mutuality. Regardless of the format, practitioners must create a group that can effectively serve the purpose for which it has been designed. Workers should also accurately assess dynamics and intervene effectively (Trevor and Orton, 2014). To what extent do online social work groups help accomplish these goals? Several limitations and difficulties were identified while using ICTs and applications to interact with service users in group work practices.

Group dynamics are fundamental to all social group works. However, the use of ICTs limited interactions among children and youth participants. Existing literature suggests that online group participants can have real-time verbal or visual communication with others (Barbhuiya and Mazmuder, 2020; Bryant et al., 2018). Yet significant interactions in the form of body language and nonverbal communication were reduced or even disappeared. They were less likely to interact with one another. As a result, group dynamics were restrained. Participants may take part actively in cohesive groups, but the atmosphere requires a certain period of time to develop. In other words, ICTs are more suitable for groups that have already been well developed.

However, social workers met with challenges when trying to implement ICTs in groups that were not developed yet. In these groups, the members were usually children and young people aged 6–12 years old who had started a new group at the beginning stage and met other members in the first session by way of the screen. They found it difficult to accurately observe the nonverbal behaviours and communication styles of the group members through video conferencing. It was also challenging for social workers to assess children’s safety and privacy as they found it difficult to offer help when group members perceived risk of injury. Since the young participants had to be accompanied by adults at home, they would probably repress their emotions around their parents who would observe how their children were doing in groups. A healthy group process requires an all-embracing relationship to work, face-to-face communication and absolute access to the social cues of participants (McDermott, 2002; Payne and Reith-Hall, 2019; Trevor and Orton, 2014). Workers sometimes failed to notice important signals that reflect the emotions and feelings of members on the screen. In fact, social workers experienced that some participants even refused to turn their microphones and cameras on. Subsequently, communication between group members and workers was distorted when the messages were unclear or vague, as their facial expressions could not be observed. These phenomena reduced the involvement of members and adversely impacted the group cohesion and development.

To solve these difficulties, social workers are encouraged to set up some group rules with participants that could stimulate effective online communication between group members and workers. For instance, all participants can be invited to turn on their cameras, thus allowing them to see themselves simultaneously in the group. Moreover, some ICTs such as Zoom and Google Meets have the whiteboard function that allows participants to express their ideas through writing and drawing instantly; this technological feature can be seen as an advantage of ICTs over the traditional group approach. Furthermore, the function of breakout rooms in some ICTs allows social workers to split their online meetings instantly into separate groups, where participants are encouraged to communicate with each other inside their own group. Last but not least, social workers could encourage participants to use ICTs in a quiet and private place to ensure confidentiality in the group. Workers are encouraged to consider safety issues when preparing online session plans and to reduce the risk of injury from group materials and activities.

Apart from communication barriers, some typical social work interventions could not be applied. For instance, social workers were unable to reinforce certain behaviours of group members by delivering tangible rewards such as a little gift or even a little sticker for children instantly via ICT. However, a few social workers pointed out that some ICTs have the virtual reactions function such as ‘thumbs up’ and ‘clapping’ which they can adopt to appreciate their group members, but they only appear on the screen for several seconds, making it very hard to encourage children to pay attention. Alternatively, social workers can only either provide verbal rewards, such as admiration, to group members or type their good points in the chat box and deliver tangible rewards after the entire group process. On the other hand, some social workers revealed that when using ICTs, they lost their ability to instantly intervene when group members displayed adverse behaviours such as distracting and interrupting the group. In face-to-face groups, social workers may deal with these group members using negative reinforcement. For example, social workers can set up a calm-down corner for group members who display adverse behaviours, where they are separated from the group until their adverse behaviours stop. Nevertheless, the calm-down corner is difficult to set up in online groups as there is no physical boundary in online meetings. As discussed above, some social workers claimed that a breakout room can be a substitution for the calm-down corner. However, the participants have the absolute right to determine whether they join these rooms or shut down the screen immediately in order to isolate themselves. Thus, online groups for children and youth could hardly be intervened in efficiently, and influence group dynamics to some extent.

The discussion above has reflected the use of ICTs in influencing group dynamics and group management. However, the use of ICTs also raises other concerns in Hong Kong, namely, digital inequalities and exclusion. Over the course of this pandemic, digital inequalities (Beaunoyer et al., 2020) and digital exclusion (Seifert, 2020) have received ample attention (Kwan et al., 2020). Currently, the children and youth within a community do not all possess equal accessibility to ICTs. In fact, one service user shared with us that he needed to go to a public park to enrol in online groups since free Wi-Fi was provided by the government. ICT users may also become frustrated when they lose Internet connection or face hardware or software failures. Colleagues reported that parental assistance in ICTs was necessary for some children but this potentially interferes with the group formation and cohesion. Consequently, any group member who experiences these circumstances may disrupt the cohesion and efficiency of the process of the whole group as well.

While the various shortcomings of online social work groups have been illustrated above, there are also several benefits of using ICTs in social work practice. First and foremost, online social work groups not only prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease as stakeholders do not have to meet in person, but they also allow social workers to sustain their provision of services during the COVID-19 outbreak. Moreover, online social work groups overcome geographical limitations as social workers are able to meet their group members on the Internet. This enhances the flexibility and convenience of both workers and participants. Finally, some social workers also integrate numerous ICTs with different functions such as virtual whiteboard, online sand tray or even online board games into their online social work groups which, in turn, enrich the group content.

Conclusion

Conducting online social work groups, as a substitute for traditional forms of groups, was uncommon in Hong Kong before the outbreak of COVID-19 as government-funded cyber youth work has only been established in recent years (Chan and Ngai, 2018; Leung et al., 2017). Frontline social workers encountered a number of difficulties and challenges in the course of providing this alternative form of social work intervention (Cheung, 2016) and practitioners had not been well prepared for providing services amid the pandemic (Cheung, 2020). In this article, the authors have highlighted how group dynamic cues, such as form of body language and nonverbal communication, are restrained as a result of significant interactions being reduced or even disappearing in online groups. Social workers also find it difficult to observe nonverbal behaviours and communications of group members through video conferencing. Furthermore, safety and privacy issues are another concern for online social work groups. However, modern ICTs such as Zoom, Google Meets and even chatrooms in esports platforms (Shum et al., 2020) also surmount the geographical limitation as group members can gather on the Internet, which enhances the flexibility and convenience for both workers and participants. Moreover, social workers can utilise digital tools to enrich their group content. Guidelines or protocols were not accessible to practitioners and they had not been properly trained to implement online groups at academic institutions (Loue, 2016). There is also a tendency to rely more on well-designed ICTs than on skilled social work practitioners (Chan and Holosko, 2016). In order to evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of online group work, direct service users have to be involved such that the pros and cons of this intervention can be discussed openly. Apart from the outbreak, the ongoing political and social unrest in Hong Kong has influenced the accessibility for children and youth to attend groups in social service units. Practising social work groups online could potentially be (or has already become) a ‘new normal’ in the field, but practitioners’ amateurishness and uneasiness have to be resolved appropriately before moving forward.