What if you did less?

As I sit with nonprofit leaders in group meetings and in one-on-one coaching sessions, the level of exhaustion is palpable. The circles under the eyes are darker. The enthusiasm for new ideas short-lived. The willingness to take on important tasks and conversations lags. The laughs are slow to emerge.

How can we not all be worn to a nub? It has been a relentless two plus years of global pandemic, racial violence and reckoning, climate disasters, attacks on democracy and fundamental rights, and personal loss. For people of color, injustice has been relentless for generations. 

Our enthusiasm for even the most meaningful of work wanes when the emotional, physical, and mental toll of prolonged stress is high. Persistently high levels of stress are the source of burnout; and we all have multiple reasons to be burned out.

The typical response to burnout is personal action. Launch or reinvigorate new self-care practices. Take a sabbatical. Find a less stressful job. These responses are valuable, yet they are typically available to the more privileged among us, those who can afford to to step away from work and family responsibilities. 

I also believe that we are kidding ourselves if we think that individual action is sufficient given the ongoing stress we can expect in our communities and planet. We need to think about burnout on a more systemic level. We need to reframe our organizational expectations and practices. We also need to think about it as a nonprofit sector and as American society. We need to reimagine how we work.

As I do when faced with a conundrum, I begin by searching for illuminating questions. Here are four questions that have popped into recent conversations. All seem to have potential to uncover new insights and ideas as we respond to burnout on a more systemic level.

How might we reimagine our expectations of work hours?

The 9 to 5 workday has its origins in factory work. It was introduced by the Ford Motor Company at the time that they created assembly line production in the 1920s. The forty-hour work week became standardized with the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 to prevent exploitation of factory workers (thank you, unions). Factory workers need to work in concert with one another; and the productivity of factory workers can be calculated based on hours in and product out.

Those assumptions don’t hold in a world of creative content creation, service work, and advocacy campaigns. The amount of time applied may not correlate with outcomes. Much of our current work usually does not require assembly line coordination though it may require coordination of some form. Perhaps our value as nonprofit workers is not measured by hours of work.

Even before the pandemic, for-profit companies and European countries were rethinking the expectations of work hours. A national experiment in Iceland demonstrated improved productivity and decreased worker stress from shorter work weeks. Turns out there are a lot of unnecessary meetings and activities in the typical work week.

As nonprofits, we need to think more deeply about the amount and cadence of work required to achieve our mission. What is the maximum number of people that someone doing frontline community care can effectively serve in a week? Does advocacy work require consistent hours throughout the year or are there seasons that are more intense and seasons that are less intense? What if our financial manager can finish all required weekly tasks in less than forty hours? What is fair in an organization where staff do different types of work? What schedules make sense for our people in our organization?

As you look for answers, consider: are there experiments that we want to try as an organization? It might be as simple as moving to a four-day work week without adjusting salaries. It might be as bold as having no expectations of schedule or total hours if people are achieving outcomes.

What organizational practices might help us better metabolize our experiences?

Metabolism is the series of chemical reactions in the cells of our bodies that convert food and drink into energy. Our bodies take in more than food and drink, our experiences are also an input into our health and well-being. Many of us have developed personal practices like yoga, meditation, singing in the shower, dance-offs in the kitchen that help us metabolize daily experiences of grief, anger, disappointment, and joy.

Yet, we need more than personal practice. What might we do within our organizations to help us metabolize the emotions of our work? What would help us embody organizational values like equity? What does art, dance, and singing look like in the workplace? 

What might happen if we do less?

I’ve saved the most provocative of the three questions for last. Here at Third Space Studio, we’ve been asking our nonprofit colleagues, “what happens if you do less?” The question immediately invites pushback. Given the state of our communities and our planet, the pull is to do more. Yet doing more typically means that we do it all with decreased focus and intensity. We stretch our skills and organizational capacity beyond the healthy growth edge. We generate even more stress in our people and in our systems. We choose what is urgent rather than what might be transformational.

What if we identified what we do exceptionally well and stick to those contributions? What if we encourage and support partner organizations to focus on their own unique contributions? What if we say no when a funder or partner asks us to pick up new work outside our chosen niche? Would we have greater success? Would our people feel a greater sense of satisfaction of work well done?

 What simple shifts might you make?

Given all that we face in the future, we need people who are at their very best as learners and as risk takers. We need people willing to experiment with new mindsets and new actions. We need people able to dream of a better world and able to midwife that world into being. Burned out people are not capable of riding such edges. 

We must shift our organizational practices. We need to support those who are stuck in an endless loop of urgent doing to step off  the hamster wheel and explore new possibilities. It will take funders, boards, and partners encouraging and supporting those on the frontlines to reimagine nonprofit work. 

As I reflect on this article, I realize I have articulated more questions than answers. At this point that may be sufficient as many of the  answers are not yet clear. We need lots more curiosity, inquiry, and experiments. Yes, there is more work to be done; and perhaps we can begin with simple shifts.

What are you exploring? What simple shifts might you make?