Resilience Roundtables: Honest Discussions about Hard Topics Improves Culture at Nonprofit
Upon completing the Connected Cultures training with Anthony, my colleague Mo and I volunteered to be Resilience Ambassadors. Resilience Ambassadors are responsible for figuring out how to make Connected Cultures sustainable at Our Minds Matter and how to hold ourselves and our team accountable to making space for intentional time together.
After reviewing the results of an employee wellness and satisfaction survey in September 2022, our team realized that we had an ongoing problem with our workload and workflow. Despite having our largest team to date to share the load, we still were struggling to maintain balance.
Mo and I thought that addressing workload and workflow with our team might be our first try at the “C skill” – an activity unique to our organization that builds resiliency. We named our pilot “C skill” Resilience Roundtables, a place for honest discussions about hard topics and pain points within our organization.
For our first series of Resilience Rountables, we sought to understand the challenges and root causes of a seemingly unmanageable workload and unsustainable workflow. From there we chose strategies to collectively respond to these challenges and then assessed our response.
In addition to landing on concrete solutions, we wanted to provide our team with a safe discussion space to think more deeply. We believed that if we could dig deeper into the challenge at hand rather than looking for a quick fix, then hopefully we could find a more long-term solution.
Before the first Resilience Roundtable, Mo and I circulated a survey to better understand the current landscape of workload and workflow for our team. We presented our team with the survey findings and provided some time for silent reflection, followed by an open discussion with guided questions.
Team members shared some of their own internalized expectations for themselves around work. Some folks shared feelings like they need to work more. Or that they need to accomplish things to feel productive. We also discussed disruptions to workflow such as suboptimal use of work systems or platforms to organize our work. Waiting on approvals was also causing delays.
At the end of the discussion, we encourage team members to take time to reflect over the next couple weeks about factors that impact their workload and workflow and what makes work experiences better – or worse. Mo and I took some time to let the discussion sink in.
It seemed to us like there were a number of unspoken or implicit expectations around work that had never been set by the organization. People were acting out of their own individual or personal expectations of themselves about work rather than norms explicitly enforced by the organization.
At the next Resilience Roundtable, we wanted to think more about the root causes of this challenge. We created a model, shown here, of how individual belief systems impact other’s and ultimately, the organization’s expectations around work.
We then shared how we thought this feedback loop could be disrupted two ways:
The first was establishing systems that encourage behaviors that align with the desired belief system, such as reminders to take paid time off (PTO) and lunch breaks. The second was to make people more aware of their internalized expectations and beliefs around work and to challenge them with positive disruptions.
While we did not explicitly encourage people to take any action, we found that over time, team members started taking measures to promote their own wellness at work. Some people started to take more PTO and others commended them for doing so. There was a greater sense of peace knowing that as an organization, we can ease this sense of urgency, knowing that if we prioritize our wellness, we can do our work better. The next Resilience Roundtable will be an activity where we develop ideas for a work culture statement to define how we can live out our organizational values and hold ourselves accountable to them. Ultimately, the Resilience Roundtables are getting us closer to the work culture of compassion, care, and balance.
Catherine Royston
Senior Program Coordinator at Our Minds Matter, a mental health nonprofit in D.C.