At the time this episode is being released, we have just completed yet another Giving Tuesday and are heading into the final year-end fundraising sprint. A lot of nonprofit professionals are simply wiped out and maybe you’re one of them. This time of year of fraught with uncertainty, stress, and overwhelm. It’s no surprise many of us nonprofit professionals end the calendar year simply burnt out.
To help us set the tone for the rest of the year, let’s revisit how nonprofits can prevent burn out in staff.
Here’s what you can expect to take away from this episode…
⦿ Why nonprofit professionals are particularly at risk for experiencing burnout
⦿ An understanding of the causes and mitigating factors for burnout
⦿ How to approach solving burnout in your nonprofit
SNEAK PEEK AT THE EPISODE…
⦿ [6:13] People get into nonprofit work to find meaningful work. Many of us have a strong drive toward prosocial values and when we can attach our skills and intelligence to prosocial work that we find meaningful, there is a great deal of satisfaction that nonprofit workers and leaders can achieve.
⦿ [8:38] This model essentially theorizes that job demand and job resources both affect work stress, and high job demand combined with low resources is a recipe for stress and burnout.
⦿ [10:14] I also think it’s interesting that the authors of this paper and others that I’ve read and researched for this episode, they all seem to indicate that burnout is an occupational hazard of the human services sector.
⦿ [13:02] The results from this study are really eye-opening. Like we would expect, and consistent with the researchers’ hypothesis, job demand and burnout were strongly positively associated.
⦿ [15:15] Putting this information together, we can see how the dark side of meaningful work, coupled with high job demands, and low job resources could create a scenario for burnout. But, what’s the solution?
⦿ [18:43] So, now that we know quite a bit about burnout, it’s causes, and mitigating factors, now we can begin to think about what hypotheses we can test to solve this problem in our own nonprofits.
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LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
⦿ Article: Beyond ‘psychic income’: An exploration of interventions to address work-life imbalances, burnout, and precarity in contemporary nonprofit work
⦿ Article: Job demands and resources, burnout, and psychological distress of employees in the Chinese nonprofit sector
⦿ Download “The SIGNALS Framework” e-book
