Social impact organizations sent their staff home a year ago. Here’s what they’ve learned about remote work so far.

When Oxfam Canada started hearing about the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, it took action quickly. 

The organization’s 75-odd staff had been testing out a remote work system shortly before Canadian public health officials implemented the first COVID-related restrictions, spurred on by news about the virus’s spread across the globe.  “The week before lockdown, we had gone remote for several days to test our IT systems and make sure all of the infrastructure was in place,” says Kelly Bowden, acting deputy executive director of Oxfam Canada. “And then, essentially, we just never came back.” 

For over a year, many of Canada’s social impact organizations have tried moving to remote work wherever possible. This isn’t easy. Operating budgets to upgrade computer services and phone lines are often minimal. Staff frequently juggle duties outside of their workplace like child or elder care. Organizations that do successfully make the transition are realizing that replacing weekly meetings with Zoom calls is only half the battle. 

The last year has forced social impact organizations to examine their administrative, digital, wellness and HR processes like they never have before. This means taking innovative approaches to fighting isolation and anxiety. For care-based organizations, it means understanding the limitations of remote work. Above all, sector leaders say, it means experimenting with new approaches to service delivery that improve on pre-pandemic methods.

The work-from-home divide

Not all Canadian social impact organizations made as smooth a transition to remote work as Oxfam Canada. Last April, weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, Imagine Canada surveyed 1,458 charity leaders about the virus’s effects on their sector. Roughly two-thirds told the charity advocacy organization’s Sector Monitor report that they had implemented remote working policies. With the exception of organizations earning modest annual revenues, between a fifth and a quarter of Canadian charities had difficulty supporting remote workers. (The report found organizations earning under $150,000 annually had less of an issue mainly because they were less likely to have staff performing remote work in the first place). 

There are a number of reasons why. Effective remote work depends heavily on reliable IT infrastructure, something Canada’s social impact sector has traditionally not invested in. Grantmakers willing to fund an organization’s administrative and operating costs, rather than just social delivery, are also rare. But perhaps the most significant hurdle is that social impact work focused on care, especially the care of marginalized people, is much harder to transition to a virtual setting. Some missions simply simply cannot be as effective in a remote environment.

Before the pandemic, the small staff of the Elizabeth Fry Society of Manitoba would visit prisons around Winnipeg on a weekly or biweekly basis. They would help incarcerated women plan for their release, interview candidates for their bail program, and do advocacy work. Quinn Saretsky, executive director of the Elizabeth Fry Society, says since last March, all of this work has been done over the phone— and all calls are recorded. If there’s something wrong at a particular institution, it can be difficult for Saretsky and her colleagues to find out. “Sometimes we don’t hear about it until people are released,” she says. 

As a work-around, Saretsky says her organization tries to let incarcerated women know about their programming through word-of-mouth as much as possible. Inmates often have limited time to place calls, although Saretsky says institutions have been fairly accommodating if the Elizabeth Fry Society needs to get a hold of a particular inmate. Their calls are also free, unlike most calls made by inmates. However, Saretsky says their staff is trying to keep their office and other programs running. “We wanted to make sure that we have staff in the office every day so that we can maintain some sort of normal contact with folks in the community,” she says. 

The difficulties experienced by the Elizabeth Fry Society and other organizations involved in care work are showing up in analysis of remote working. In a 2020 report by McKinsey & Company that examined over 800 occupations, the consulting firm concluded only 8 to 12 percent of potential time spent on “assisting and caring for others” could be done remotely. The report says activities such as assisting people during emergencies simply cannot be done at a distance, period. 

Many of the women the Elizabeth Fry Society of Manitoba works with do not have adequate housing or cell phones. Keeping in touch remotely can be extremely difficult unless they physically show up to the organization’s office. But Saretsky believes the ability to work remotely in an emergency will be very beneficial to her staff’s overall health. “We now have the infrastructure now to be able to work remotely and…we know that we’re set up to be able to do it,” she says.

Expanding during the pandemic

Some social impact organizations have found a silver lining in the past year’s transition to remote work. Reaching communities and clients digitally rather than face-to-face has been an option for years, but it has not always been a priority for sector leaders. Chris Duff, director of engagement at the Canadian Council for Youth Prosperity (CCYP) says his organization began a series of national youth employment virtual town halls last June. “What the pandemic allowed us to do was really invest in our virtual presence and our digital infrastructure so that we could reach across the country,” he says. 

Before the pandemic, he says, CCYP was mainly focused on bringing youth employment organizations within Quebec and Ontario together. Last summer, they managed to hold a virtual town hall in every province and territory. “Our team would not have been able to go to Manitoba or these different regions had it not been for the virtual environment,” he says. CCYP has a limited budget, but their mission — supporting the youth employment ecosystem — is critical right now. Youth, especially women under the age of 24, are especially vulnerable to layoffs during the pandemic, and Duff says youth have largely been left out of discussions around economic recovery. 

The Elizabeth Fry Society of Manitoba is also expanding its digital horizons during the pandemic. Saretsky says her organization plans to launch a pilot project next month to bring their Winnipeg-based addictions, anger management, and theft and fraud workshops online to rural communities. “Now that we’ve been forced to undergo this shift to be accessible remotely, it’s given us an opportunity to look at what we can do for folks that maybe couldn’t access us normally,” she says. 

YWCA Metro Vancouver was forced to temporarily shut down its health and fitness centre, along with its childcare programs and employment services and hotel in the first wave of the pandemic. Running these facilities and services in an entirely remote fashion simply wasn’t possible. “We had to go site-by-site and program-by-program across the organization and make decisions on each of those particular circumstances,” says Deb Bryant, the CEO of YWCA Metro Vancouver . At the moment, their childcare facilities are totally open (albeit with restrictions), while the YWCA’s administrative staff are working entirely from home.

Their hybrid in-person/virtual employment services program, as well as a fully virtual single mother’s support group, came about because of the pandemic. But Bryant says their new online services may very well survive the pandemic. Instead of having to travel across town, single mothers who want to join the YWCA’s Metro Vancouver support group can simply log on from anywhere in the Lower Mainland. “Our staff will try to ensure that we have both of those options for people, but where we’ve seen that it’s increased access…to programs and services, we’ll keep that hybrid model in place,” she says. 

The pandemic has also pushed some organizations to offer services in entirely new ways. The Richmond Food Bank Society once depended on a local church as an alternative food distribution site to their main location. Hajira Rahim-Hussain, the society’s executive director, says they lost access after the pandemic began — the church’s elderly volunteers were vulnerable to the virus. Instead, Rahim-Hussain says, the society converted their refrigerator van into a mobile food bank.

On their first day, she estimates the society served just eight people. Now they’re up to 40 clients a day in a parking lot. This simple response to rising numbers of food bank users across Metro Vancouver — thanks to the pandemic and subsequent economic downturn — simply wouldn’t have happened had public health restrictions not forced the Richmond Food Bank Society to get creative. “We never had to think about a mobile food bank solution,” Rahim-Hussain says. “But now that we’re doing it, it’s like — why didn’t we think of it before?”

Reinventing the watercooler

The real challenge of remote working began after everyone left the office. HR experts have blamed widespread burnout among office workers, rising levels of anxiety and depression, and longer hours on the practice of remote work. Vancouver therapist Dominic Brennan recently told The Globe and Mail that digital communication itself can make staffers feel unsupported. There is a big difference, he says, between assigning a major project to a staffer at a one-on-one meeting and doing so by email. 

Duff, the director of engagement at CCYP, says remote work can have a noticeable impact on an organization’s internal culture. “If you’re not intentional about maintaining or building a culture within a virtual context, it can very quickly become something that impacts productivity,” he says. At Oxfam Canada, Bowden says empathy and flexibility are crucial to making a remote working environment run smoothly. “As an organization based on feminist principles, we’ve always understood that flexibility in a work environment is key to enable people to have balance…and that good balance enables passionate productivity,” she says. 

One simple way CCYP is trying to build this remote-friendly culture is through mimicking the serendipity of an office. Every week, CCYP staffers are required to virtually meet with someone who isn’t on their team for just 15 minutes. This may seem frivolous, but the Globe’s recent reporting on white-collar burnout seems to back it up. “Informal conversations in the office kitchen with coworkers outside your regular team can help people tap into the grapevine of company news and make people feel more connected to the broader organization,” the report reads. “Sometimes a little gossip is even good for the soul.” 

This is especially true for new recruits. Walking into a new workplace is intimidating enough, but Oxfam Canada’s 25 or so new hires had their first days on the job at a distance without any idea of when — or if — they’ll be able to meet their co-workers in person. “It’s hard for them because there isn’t that collegial environment where they can run into somebody who they don’t work with regularly,” Bowden says. There’s currently a team chat at Oxfam Canada for new recruits where they can ask each other questions. “It’s in part for that solidarity…other people (they) can reach out to in an informal way,” Bowden says. 

On top of helping out newcomers, Bowden says Oxfam Canada also offered wellbeing training throughout the past year to combat mental health stigma in the workplace, unpack the basics of illnesses like depression, and explain the impact of isolation on work. She says an important lesson learned during the pandemic is that everyone’s reactions to remote work are completely different, depending on their circumstances.  “We have staff that have families and parents that they’re caring for at home: their house is full of people” Bowden says. “And then we have other staff who live by themselves and are dealing with the experience of their colleagues potentially being the only people they’re talking to for long periods of time.”

Death of the office?

There is still no end in sight to videoconferencing, pajama-clad meetings, and a chaotic mix of childcare and work-related duties. Canada’s public health officials are bracing for additional waves of more infectious (and potentially deadlier) COVID-19 variants in the spring of 2021. In Canada’s social impact sector, organizations have buckled down and tried to set up remote working arrangements whenever possible. 

It isn’t clear how the pandemic will affect the social impact sector’s working arrangements over the next year or more. Bryant, the CEO of YWCA Metro Vancouver, says her organization’s administrative staff intend to work at least partly from home after the pandemic ends. What does seem apparent, a year into the pandemic, is that organizations with secure budgets, digitally-based programming, health and wellness checks, and flexible work arrangements are poised to do well. 

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