Ann Mei Chang took the helm of Candid in October 2021 during the days of pandemic office shutdowns. At one of the first in-person meetings with her leadership team, she and her colleagues debated the pros and cons of whether and how to return to the office. Would the staff of about 200 continue to work remotely? Should they be required to return to the office a few days a week?
Organizations that offer flexible work arrangements have a leg up in recruiting and retaining staff. The harder part is cultivating culture and in-person connection.
“Across the board, our executive team felt like we had been able to maintain, if not improve, our productivity while having gone remote,” Chang says. “That said, there was also a feeling that, over time, there would be an erosion of the personal connections and the culture if we never saw each other.”
Nearly five years removed from the beginning of the pandemic, there’s a whole spectrum of ways to work at nonprofits. As organizations balance their recruiting needs, financial pressures, the demands of delivering their mission, and the preferences of leaders and staff, they’re coming up with a variety of ways to work.
Job seekers are increasingly looking for flexible work arrangements. And organizations that can offer fully remote or at least hybrid work arrangements have a leg up in recruiting and retaining staff.
The nonprofit job site Idealist analyzed postings on its job board and found remote positions receive nine times as many applications as onsite roles. Hybrid jobs receive twice as many as in-person roles.
One of the reasons the nonprofit world still embraces remote and hybrid work is because employers recognize that flexibility of location is something they can offer that corporate America may be less willing to do now, says Jeannie Lloyd, a senior consultant at Nonprofit HR.
“When you’re looking for unique ways to add benefits, this could be a great way to do that, which probably isn’t going to cost much or add anything to their bottom line,” she says.
As a result of being able to open up their labor pool and recruit nationally, some nonprofits that struggled with employee turnover pre-pandemic have been able to hang on to top talent, says Lloyd. “Their staff are staying longer, and it’s because they are more competitive in a national market than they were locally.”
Nonprofits continue to struggle with work-force shortages, especially in service delivery and other public-facing roles. Groups trying to hire in high-demand fields like data science and artificial intelligence also find that flexible work arrangements can help them compete for talent.
When Candid was recently recruiting for a chief data officer, for example, the going rate in the private sector was three times as much as what the organization had budgeted for salary.
“Having the flexibility both to hire from anywhere in the country — but also for people to have that work flexibility — has been a huge plus,” Chang says. “I don’t know that we could have filled some of our roles if it wasn’t for that.”
In-Person Connection
But leaders of organizations that have gone remote recognize the value of some level of in-person connection for their teams.
Remote positions on the Idealist job site receive nine times as many applications as onsite roles.
Candid, which formed in 2019 through the merger of GuideStar and the Foundation Center, landed on an arrangement Chang calls “activity based.” About half the staff live in the greater New York City area, and the rest are spread around the country.
One week each month is designated as “connect week.” The executive team, along with people in the New York area, are encouraged to work from the office on Wednesday and a few other days that week. A subset of other teams that have some purpose for being together are also invited in.
“We didn’t want to just say, ‘You have to come to the office on these days,’” Chang says. “We want to bring people together because there was something that we wanted to do that would benefit from people being in person.”
Some nonprofits, especially in direct services, have remained on site or in person out of necessity. Those groups have had to think through how to be equitable, understanding that some roles can be done from anywhere.
“We’re all still figuring it out,” says Rick Cohen, chief operating officer at the National Council of Nonprofits. “Every organization is balancing all of their competing interests the best they can.”
But experts say virtual organizations need to be more intentional about how to protect workplace culture and keep employees engaged. That’s especially important when it comes to onboarding new staff, running effective meetings, and facilitating mentorship opportunities.
Remote work “can be pretty isolating if you’re in a role where you’re not collaborating with a lot of other staff,” says Maya Simpkins, development director at the Redress Movement, a fully remote nonprofit that launched in 2022 and works to stop residential segregation.
Simpkins works from home in Baltimore, and the nonprofit’s organizing staff is in Charlotte, N.C., Denver, Milwaukee, and Omaha. She met her colleagues in person for the first time at an annual retreat in September. Other times of the year, informal conversations happen in video meetings or on a Slack channel called the #proverbial-water-cooler.
Staff members want ample opportunities to offer feedback and ideas to shape how work happens in a remote environment, she says. Fully remote workplaces succeed when “it’s not just people at the top, or people randomly chosen on a committee, who make the decisions about how the organization is going to be run.”
Work-Life Balance, Low Office Costs
Finding opportunities for staff members to connect is a major priority for Victoria Vrana, CEO of the nonprofit crowdfunding platform GlobalGiving.
The nonprofit largely operates remotely and does virtual brown-bag lunches and virtual site visits where staff members can interact with nonprofit partners. Each week, Vrana has office hours that anyone can sign up to attend. And some staff use an app called Donut to randomly pair up with colleagues for informal coffee chats.
But Vrana acknowledges that it’s hard to create shared experiences and moments of serendipity in a virtual workplace.
“That can weaken the ties that allow us to lay some groundwork, to get past challenges, to work more seamlessly together, to understand each other, to communicate more effectively,” she says. “We all need to get better at addressing some of those drawbacks and being creative.”
Experts say virtual organizations need to be more intentional about how to protect workplace culture and keep employees engaged.
Still, Vrana says, “we have no plans to ever do a return-to-office mandate” because employees report a better work-life balance with the current arrangement and because only about half of GlobalGiving’s roughly 100 staff are located in the Washington, D.C., area where the organization maintains an office.
These days, that space is largely unused, so GlobalGiving is looking to sublease. “Holding a space for 100 people does not make sense,” she says.
For some organizations, ditching the office can help ease financial strain, says Cohen, with the National Council of Nonprofits.
“There are a lot of groups that are looking at potentially needing to close their doors,” he says. Reducing their physical footprint can save them money on expenses like rent and utilities. “That funding can then go toward the mission and help keep the organization afloat.”
