How the social sector can thrive in the new work-from-home normal
Remote work brings real benefits for nonprofits — and requires real culture change to realize them, including a broader view of diversity and clear communications standards
By Kristin Fischer
Remote work has been a roller-coaster ride for the social sector: first a hair-raising plunge into the unknown, then an exhilarating climb in anticipation of tapping a continentwide pool of talent to boost skills and diversity. Now the sector faces an unpredictable twisty stretch as employers and employees alike adapt to our new normal and realize we need to actively foster connection, inclusivity and collaboration.
The shift away from the office is dramatic: Nearly 70% of nonprofits are considering permanent remote work for their teams. The promise of new opportunities to build teams with the perfect mix of skills and make swifter progress on justice, equity, diversity and inclusion goals is real. We’re learning, though, that realizing this promise is going to take more sustained effort than many of us anticipated. While remote work significantly expands the pool of potential candidates, it has spawned equity issues of its own, revealed or exacerbated cultural challenges and created a whole new communications environment to navigate.
As human resources director at the nonprofit accelerator Multiplier, where I work with our core team as well as more than 50 project teams, I’ve witnessed a wide range of reactions, successes and missteps. Personal experience and research bear out that building a truly equitable and inclusive organization that supports all team members in doing their best work requires significant investment in trial and learning, professional mentoring and mindful communications. When most teams lived near and worked in the same office, trust tended to build naturally through casual interactions around the proverbial water cooler, making it easier to navigate real or perceived missteps. In distributed, diverse organizations, cultural issues can be laid bare and harder to overcome.
We’re all still learning, but the following lessons are clear pathways for teams to create and scale the positive impact we’re all striving to achieve.
Thinking broadly about diversity maximizes benefits
Team diversity gives organizations a competitive advantage in areas including creativity, problem-solving and employee satisfaction, according to research published in 2015 by McKinsey. Hiring people with varied lived experiences gives teams a wealth of perspectives to draw from, which is especially important for nonprofits working on issues that disproportionately impact communities of color, people with disabilities and others who have experienced exclusion and discrimination.
Hiring for broader diversity means seeking out people of different abilities, genders, races, sexual orientations, ages, geographic locations and personal backgrounds, reflecting the communities your organization works with and has an impact on. Teams that are diverse in multiple dimensions have broader insights on challenges, devise more-creative solutions and can make better-informed decisions about programming.
A 2016 Harvard Business Review article explored the contributing factors that make diverse groups smarter than homogenous ones. First, they focus more on facts while pushing each other to scrutinize personal biases and assumptions. They also process facts more carefully, benefiting from multiple perspectives that let them look at information from different angles. As a result, and as the McKinsey study pointed out, diverse groups are also more innovative, “dodging the costly pitfalls of conformity.”
Organizations that embrace remote hiring are better positioned for success
The rise of remote work has varied ramifications for organizations of different sizes and scopes — a boon for one could be a challenge for another.
When the COVID-19 pandemic first presented nonprofit teams with the opportunity to seek candidates outside their communities, some in high-cost areas initially thought of the new trend as a savings opportunity. Why pay New York City salaries to team members living in rural Kansas? But when remote hiring is also a diversity strategy, geography-based pay can perpetuate racial wage gaps. Plus, people who’ve moved from high-cost cities won’t accept less pay for the same work, and as the labor market has grown more competitive, people with in-demand skills are able to demand commensurate salaries regardless of their location.
This may put small, hyperlocal organizations at a disadvantage financially, but awareness of the situation can help them clarify their own benefits — such as deep, rich community roots and an internal culture that honors those ties — and promote them assertively when hiring. Nationally distributed organizations, in contrast, may struggle to build a cohesive and truly inclusive culture. This challenge hits close to home: We’ve discovered at Multiplier that while our enhanced geographic diversity allows us to better serve our far-flung project teams, it also requires us to make a conscious effort to restore our original close-knit culture. It’s a work in progress: We’re continuously experimenting with ways to not only bring that culture back but also acknowledge and honor our transformed team.
Setting communications expectations upfront limits guesswork and discomfort
Remote work all but eliminates the kind of casual, chance conversations — chats in office break rooms, hallways and the like — that help to build goodwill. And when face-to-face interaction is limited or takes place mostly on a computer screen, it can be hard for team members to translate tone and meaning, especially when their only experience of each other is in a strictly professional capacity.
Meetings can be especially tricky. Team dynamics can get thrown off, for example, by tone policing — when someone responds negatively to the emotion behind a person’s message while ignoring its content (“You’re being too sensitive,” “That’s not what they meant,” and the like). Also, some people are more direct than others, and those on the receiving end of bluntly phrased feedback may feel offended or shut down, even if the comments have merit. Videoconferencing presents challenges as it can lead even people who aren’t habitual interrupters to talk over others, while others may limit their contributions.
Formally defining expectations and norms for interpersonal conduct during meetings can help teams avoid these pitfalls by limiting uncertainty and increasing participant comfort.
Remote work complicates already difficult decision-making processes, which are far easier to work through and communicate about in person. Leaders must work on overdrive to make sure lack of transparency doesn’t lead to alienation or poor decisions. Setting decision-making protocols and sharing them with the whole team can make this easier. One good resource for developing these is MIT Human Resources’ Decision-Making Models, which describes five methods for making decisions, when each may be most effective and how to reach a consensus without some team members feeling like they’ve “lost.” Another is the DARCI model, which provides a framework for mapping who will make the final call, who will manage the project, who will do the work, who needs to be consulted and who needs to be informed before decision-making takes place.
Multiplier encourages our projects to develop consistent communications guidelines and has even drafted a template to use as a starting place. Our own core team’s guidelines are a work in progress, but they clearly describe how every team member — leadership included — is expected to model our core values through positive communications habits, such as using inclusive language and seeking input from others. The guidelines also cover inadvertent negative language habits to avoid and offer guidance on what to do when the road gets bumpy. We’re also addressing the goodwill dimension by setting aside time during the workday for teamwide gatherings that have nothing to do with work. Once a week we gather on Zoom in breakout groups to answer one of 150 randomly selected prewritten questions. They include topics like our first jobs, books we are reading or favorite family traditions. While this kind of interaction may sound silly and seem like it should be a low priority, we’ve found it builds trust when co-workers get to know each other on a personal level.
Investing in management training pays off for diverse teams
Research on representative group styles of communication, which incorporate the preferred practices of a full spectrum of constituents, shows that organizations can achieve and sustain greater levels of diversity when they find out how team members are most comfortable participating and develop a structure that allows everyone to contribute.
All executives and managers can benefit from training in how to do this — especially those who are leading newly remote, newly diversified teams. Many nonprofit leaders unconsciously follow norms characterized by personalized politics — an academic concept that describes a white, middle-class corporate culture emphasizing “intensively participating individuals who are articulate and confident in self-presentation.” The norms can stymy culturally diverse teams by constructing barriers for those unaccustomed to or uncomfortable with this communications style.
The most successful managers across our projects are those who trust people to work in ways that are most effective for them rather than forcing everyone into a box that fits the leader’s style. Micromanagers, on the other hand, have the highest attrition rates. Early in the pandemic, some managers insisted on seeing everyone’s face on Zoom all day, every day for fear of declining productivity. That led to the loss of several key employees, which prompted a pivot to allowing team members to work more independently and participate in small team check-ins. The teams proved that they were well equipped to hold each other accountable and that removing hierarchy and control led to more collaboration, better outcomes, fewer bottlenecks and reduced turnover.
There’s a role for funders and boards, too, in ensuring that nonprofits can develop and keep the people they need to advance their mission. Funders can prioritize more-general support funding, including money to hire additional HR staff and provide professional development opportunities for all team members. And boards can step up by encouraging leaders who ask for this support and prodding those who don’t.
The rewards of culture change are worth the work
Nonprofits are hard-wired to think outwardly — “how can we serve our constituents and stakeholders better?” — and often don’t have the expertise or resources to think deeply about what happens within their own organizations. This needs to change so nonprofits can seize the opportunity remote work presents to build broadly diverse teams equipped with the insights needed to solve complex social and environmental problems.
The inherent disconnection caused by wide geographic spread leads organizations — nonprofit and for-profit — to revert to old management methods because they’re easy and familiar. It will take active, ongoing effort to create a new and improved normal that includes fair compensation based on skills, clear and inclusive communication standards, and investment in leadership training for all team members. The hard work of culture change will be worth the result: nonprofit organizations that can scale their impact to the size of the world’s challenges.
