If the person you are working with won’t meet with you or talk with you, you can’t do social work.

This means that the first, and most important, task of social work is to engage with service-users. Social workers need to be able to listen to what those they are working with have to say, and have to have good enough relationships so that those they work with will listen to them.

This means that social workers need to make skilled use of introductions and ice-breakers, and explain the mandate for their meeting with the service user. If the service user is unclear about who you are or why you are there, you will not do good social work.

But engagement is not just a phase that you must ‘get through’ in order to get on with the real social work. It is the nature of relationships to ebb and flow, to sometimes work smoothly and sometimes run into trouble. Engagement is also required to both challenge service users when they behaviour inappropriately and also to repair the damage when your own behaviour falls short of the standards expected, as it sometimes will, no matter how good your practice is.

Created by M. Allenby. Last updated by M. Allenby on 22.8.16