Nonprofits across the country are asking employees to stay home and work remotely during the coronavirus pandemic. For one small environmental group, the San Francisco Baykeeper, the transition wasn’t simple, but the organization has already learned important lessons about how to work effectively when everyone is at home.
Early this month, in response to growing public-health warnings, the environmental group decided to close its office and have everyone work from home. Two weeks ago, employees arrived to pick up their computers, only to find that someone had broken into the office and stolen all of them. The human-resources director spent the day filling out insurance forms and buying the staff new computers, and by the next day, everyone was up and running.
Having computers, however, was just the first step to being productive while working from home. Baykeeper had a strong office culture, says executive director, Sejal Choksi-Chugh. Its scientists and lawyers often need to talk though complex issues face-to-face. The staff has had to experiment with various videoconferencing technology. Schools are closed, and children often make appearances in video calls. Parents need flexible schedules, but that shouldn’t mean they do less work than employees who don’t have kids, Choksi-Chugh says.
Everyone misses the camaraderie of working together, but employees are finding ways to keep up morale. One staffer started an open thread where he posted a picture of his home office, and soon everyone started posting pictures of where they work. They started doing a Monday coffee video call just to get together online to reconnect — and later a Friday happy hour video call.
‘Uncertain Territory’
Like so many nonprofits, Baykeeper is under additional strain. It had to cancel a gala, which puts pressure on its finances. The Trump administration recently made a filing to dismiss a case the group filed to prevent development of south bay marshlands, and the coal industry filed lawsuits to overturn a ban on coal storage that the group helped to enact in one of the cities on the bay. “It’s all-hands-on-deck thinking about how to intervene on that litigation,” she says.
A grant from the Resilience Initiative, a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors paid for by the Packard Foundation, helped lay a foundation of goodwill that smoothed the transition to telework, Choksi-Chugh says. It provides $15,000 grants to organizations to allow them to focus on often-neglected operational and staff-related issues like human resources, equity and inclusion, financial management, digital security, scenario planning, and the personal well-being of their staff — an area that groups have found most valuable.
“We wanted to offer the possibility that groups could pay attention to their staff’s personal resilience,” says Paula Morris, director of the Resilience Initiative. “If the nuts and bolts of the system are in place and solid enough, you can stay strong when tides are shifting outside.”
Baykeeper used a consultant provided by the foundation to help it address concerns about staff burnout and resilience. As a result, Baykeeper implemented several new policies suggested by the staff. The group is now closed between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It also allows more staff out on its boat to search the bay for environmental damage. While that project didn’t directly affect its changes during the pandemic, Choksi-Chugh says that it made the staff more flexible.
Because she implemented changes the staff asked for, she has built up trust. “Now we’re shifting to this uncertain territory where nobody really has any idea what’s going to be happening next week, let alone three weeks from now,” she says. “They’re not skeptical of the things that I’m asking of them. They’re not critical of it.”
