Return On Investments: A Re-turn To The Basics

 ROI, or Return On Investment, is difficult to measure when the primary investment is emotional-interchange with people, and the primary outcomes are, in large part, about an improved quality of life. While I see the objective features that can be quantified (e.g., number of people served, nights spent with stable shelter, income improvement, and others), how do you accurately quantify the subjective measures of happiness, peace, or potential when serving people? Sure, I know all about operationalization of abstract concepts, statistical techniques for measuring validity, and other strategies for quantifying inherently fuzzy concepts (e.g., Love…lots of measures of love!), but they still lack “nature’s laws” confidence, and always remain one-step removed from the actual thing we’re trying to identify.

The largest returns we get as social service professionals are not financial, but rather come in knowing that we’ve made the world a better place, even if only for a very small part of it. For me, it’s satisfaction from knowing I had a part in placing a beautiful baby for adoption from a wise and willing birth mother and father into the arms of a wonderful caring couple. It’s knowing that couples lived together with a lot more happiness than before. It’s knowing that I played a small part in peoples’ decisions to change their lives for the better. Our investments are resources such as time, money, and emotional output. And instead of investing in stocks and bonds, we invest in people and potential.

We are in an economic environment that increasingly demands that we prove the value of our services with quantifiable outcomes. I support such demands, because I think they reflect best practices and provide the best services for our clients. But, I don’t want to become so focused on looking for the quantifiable outcomes as returns that we fail to recognize the returns of personal fulfillment that can never be measured. Right now, many workers in the social service industry are tired. It’s been a tough year for thousands and thousands. Their jobs inherently demand a level of emotional investment that can lead to compassion fatigue and eventual burnout, and they work in many cases with clients who are just as tired as they are. And, with organizations scaling back and cutting jobs-while at the same time being required to offer more services-I’m worried that a lot of social service professionals in the coming year will move from tired to disengaged, to disenchanted, disillusioned, disappointed, and depressed.

Regardless of how “outcome” oriented we collectively become in the coming months and years, I hope we can hang on to the un-measurable outcomes that called us to the profession in the beginning: engaging people in real relationships that produce mutual satisfaction. I don’t want our interactions to become 15-minute patient consultations that end abruptly. I don’t want the solvency of a program to become more important than the sanity or safety of a person. Perhaps it’s “pie in the sky, save the world” thinking, but that’s what brought me into the profession in the first place. I believed I could be an agent of change, and that I could participate in making someone’s life somewhere just a little bit better than before; that a burden could be just a little bit lighter; or that a laugh or a smile could linger just a little bit longer. That’s the kind of Return On Investment that makes it worth it. That’s the Return On Investment that I hope we never lose sight of.