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Your Officers Are the Intervention: Why Staff Care Is Your Agency's Most Underused Performance Tool
SESSION INFO
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
8:00 AM - 9:00 AM
Session Type: Workshop
Ask most agency leaders where staff wellbeing sits on their priority list, and the honest answer is: somewhere between HR compliance and the next budget cut. This session challenges that assumption directly. Drawing on international evidence from probation systems across Europe and North America, we argue that how an organisation treats its officers is not a welfare matter — it is a supervision quality decision. When officers are emotionally exhausted, disengaged, or merely "coping," their clients feel it: therapeutic alliance deteriorates, evidence-based skills erode, and outcomes decline. The research is clearer than most of us are comfortable admitting. But this session goes further than the familiar burnout narrative. We propose a shift in the conversation — from resilience (surviving the job) to thriving (doing it well, sustainably, with purpose). Participants will leave with a practical framework for assessing and improving organisational care as a measurable driver of supervision quality.
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SESSION PRESENTERS
Ioan Durnescu
Professor, University of Bucharest
Ioan Durnescu is Professor at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Bucharest, and coordinates the Master of Probation programme. He has trained and consulted probation services across Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, with a particular focus on Core Correctional Skills implementation and organisational performance. He is the author of the Core Correctional Skills practitioner handbook and has published extensively on probation effectiveness, staff-client interaction quality, and the governance of community supervision. He served for several years as co-chair of the Rehabilitation Working Group of the EU Radicalisation Awareness Network and is an independent Council of Europe expert. His current research focuses on organisational staff care as a governance and performance construct in community corrections.
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