People who work for nonprofits often fall prey to burnout. There is always too much to do, too many lives depending on your success, too many deadlines for proposals, too little extra money in the budget for a new coffee maker. It can become “too much” and employees can develop physical ailments, emotional turmoil, exhaustion and sagging performance on the job. Of course, the pandemic has exacerbated all of this.
It might be time for you and your colleagues to do some good things for yourselves. These are not fanciful or woo-woo; they are good ideas from real-life experiences, real things we can do to head off burnout before it knocks us off the rails.
Consider whether that “regular” Zoom meeting is really necessary and if it isn’t, cancel it. Somebody once said the test of a good meeting is it allows you to take some action after you meet that you couldn’t accomplish before it. “If you can’t honestly say that about the upcoming meeting,” said Thomas Boyd, chief editorial consultant to The Grantsmanship Center in Los Angeles, Calif., “maybe it’s unnecessary or you can change its format.”
Build some guardrails around your work time and encourage everybody ese to do the same. There is probably no good reason to be texting before you get to work, emailing every hour, taking files home and writing until you fall asleep at your computer. You are not on call 24/7 for your clients or program colleagues. There will be times when you have to burn the midnight oil—just not all the time.
Break up routines and try to do things a new way. There’s evidence that a new experience, even a minor adjustment in an old experience, gives our brains a wake-up call. Instead of coffee first thing, try some breathing exercises. Pretend you’re a client of your own organization and write a letter to a friend describing the benefits of the program you’ve been a part of. Start a coffee-can collection among your co-workers and at the end of the week, vote on where to donate the spare change you’ve collected. These aren’t world-changing, they’re pattern-changing and they refresh you.
Battling burnout doesn’t have to be big and dramatic. It can be small, personal steps you take. The important thing is to make it as important as getting the report done or compiling the surveys. You won’t be any good to your organization or its clients if you run out of gas. © Copyright 2021 The Grantsmanship Center
