The social change sector is facing a wellbeing crisis. Social change organizations work on the front lines, tackling complex societal issues and providing critical support to vulnerable populations. A demanding workload combined with ever-present pressure to achieve meaningful outcomes with limited financial or operating resources exacerbates heightened levels of burnout experienced by the sector.  

Aiming to better understand how a wellbeing orientation can positively impact organizational health, The Wellbeing Project partnered with the Center for Healthy Minds and The Tavistock Institute for Human Relations to conduct research which identified the following approaches to fostering healthy, effective, and sustainable workplace environments for social changemakers.

The Critical Role of Organizational Leadership 

Senior leaders modeling wellbeing, communicating explicitly about the priority around wellbeing, and making time and providing resources for wellbeing activities as well as developing policies and strategies that reflect this organizational commitment, ‘gave permission’ to staff teams to participate in wellbeing.

The Benefits of Co-Created Strategies

Listening to staff and creating the conditions where people can speak up about the difficulties of their role are cardinal values of organizational wellbeing. By engaging staff and drawing on their strengths, skills, and ways of working, organizations can implement wellbeing-oriented actions and policies that are experienced by staff as more vital and authentic, create less additional burden, and increase the likelihood of uptake and sustainability. Top-down approaches to wellbeing are less sustainable and can be perceived as additional demands on staff time.

Integrating Wellbeing into Daily Workflow

Implementing microshifts–small, incremental changes to organizational policies, communications, personal development procedures, structure, staffing and workflow management–over time are key to supporting the emergence and maintenance of healthy, human-centric organizations.

The eight participant organizations employed a wide range of approaches, addressing obstacles to structural wellbeing such as income inequality, discrimination, and employment insecurity as well as focusing on personal (or inner) wellbeing through practices such as mindfulness and efforts to improve emotional awareness and social bonding. 

Making Inner Wellbeing Tangible and Accessible

The program’s focus on inner wellbeing appears pivotal insofar as it provides leaders and staff with a personal experience of the benefits of a focus on wellbeing. It transforms something that may be abstract into something that’s valued and understood experientially. Researchers found that equipping staff with strategies and personal practices to enhance resilience in the face of work challenges undoubtedly protects their wellbeing and can motivate staff to drive changes within their work environments. 

Consistent and Adaptive Funding is Central to Sustaining Wellbeing 

Nonprofits operate in a competitive funding environment and regularly experience pressure to deliver more results with less funding. Our organizational wellbeing research helps funders better understand the strains placed on the sector by existing funding and reporting models. Streamlining funding requirements reduces the administrative burden on nonprofit staff. Providing flexible and comprehensive funding allows social change organizations to respond to changing circumstances. Revisiting funding requirements as well as providing direct support for wellbeing activities has the potential to increase workplace wellbeing and organizational sustainability.  

Catalysing Wellbeing

The program played a catalytic and role modeling function, especially in authorising participants to pursue wellbeing as a legitimate organizational goal. The decision to work with a group of organizations rather than to work with each organization separately appears crucial, creating a community with shared goals whose members were able to provide mutual support, reinforcement, and inspiration to one another. As representatives of the organizations met and worked together, sharing their challenges, dilemmas and successes, they initiated and continued a process of mutual authorisation, deepening their commitment to building organizational wellbeing capacity over time.

Viewing change through the lens of wellbeing encourages organizations to consider the implications of their decisions, strategies, policies, and practices on the wellbeing of employees and can foster a work environment that promotes the overall health, happiness, and success of their staff.  A broader notion of wellbeing takes into account both the social, economic, and political context and the need to address inequalities and injustices as part of collective wellbeing. Recognising the need to address these broader pressures by implementing structural changes within organizations can potentially reshape the sector and our social systems.