When we all return to the office, will social impact organizations keep supporting parents and caregivers?

The burnout at inPath became obvious last December. 

Halfway into inPath’s programming year, the Montreal arts-based education non-profit was staring down all the stresses of life amid the COVID-19 pandemic, along with a rapid expansion. In just six months, inPath had nearly doubled its staff. By April, several of them quit. Co-founder Katie Green says the organization’s relentless pace couldn’t continue. “We were going too fast, we were doing too much, and everyone was exhausted,” Green says. 

In May, the entire staff of inPath took two weeks off and decided to adopt a four day work-week during the summer to decompress. But work wasn’t their only stressor. inPath staffers were also trying to balance family obligations and other commitments to their local communities. Public health restrictions have periodically closed schools, shuttered daycares, and drastically reduced recreational opportunities across Canada. For parents and caregivers across the social impact sector, the last 15 months have not been easy. 

Anyone privileged enough to escape the dangers of frontline service work found themselves working remotely, sometimes wrangling toddlers or running errands for elderly parents during business hours. Their struggles with the ‘double day’ of caregiving were caught on Zoom calls for all to see,  including their managers. As public health restrictions are set to ease across Canada in the near future, some social impact leaders and advocates are saying that social purpose organizations who want to retain parents and caregivers on their teams cannot return to the status quo. 

Sector experts, workplace culture consultants, and social impact leaders say COVID-19 is prompting some organizations to consider shortening workdays and improving leave policies. Neither of these ideas are new, but the sector has traditionally relied on promoting a healthy work culture, rather than formalizing these policies in an HR manual or collective agreement. There are now signs that sector leaders may be willing to offer more tangible benefits to their staff, in writing.

Flexibility is a loaded word

‘Hybrid model’, ‘remote worker’, ‘Zoom town’, ‘The Great Resignation’ — the jargon in discussions about the post-COVID future of work proposes a world where freedom will be the most important aspect of an organization’s workplace culture. In the eyes of some advocates, such as The Workaround founder Amanda Munday, organizations who will not offer this level of freedom to parents and caregivers will simply miss out on — or lose — good employees. The Pulse of the American Worker survey, released in April 2021 seems to confirm her theory. It found that 20 percent of workers surveyed switched jobs during the past year, with the most popular reason being: “better work-life balance.” 

Perhaps the most contentious term thrown about by workplace analysts is “flexibility.” To Jim Stanford, the director of the Centre for Future Work, the definition depends entirely on who offers it. “Employers want a certain kind of flexibility,” he says. “They want flexibility where workers are available and ready to work when the boss wants them, and can be easily disposed of any other time. But workers will have a different idea of what kind of flexibility works for them.” That may include the ability to work from home or adjust working hours to meet the needs of one’s family, but Stanford says workers also want security and predictability and reliability from their jobs. Flexibility can be a deceptive concept. 

In the non-profit world, Pamela Uppal, a policy advisor at the Ontario Nonprofit Network (ONN), says she’s already hearing of office-based social impact organizations like policy centres and foundations who are considering formal remote work policies. “I don’t think it’s a prediction,” Uppal says. “I think it’s happening. Decent work is really catching on. People deserve to have fair, productive, stable work, and employers want to offer that.” In ONN’s Decent Work For Women project conducted in 2018, Uppal found that 69 percent of women workers said they believed working conditions in Ontario’s non-profit sector were flexible. “This was across senior leaders and frontline workers,” Uppal says. Anyone working at the senior leader level or in middle management found their work was very flexible. Frontline workers, particularly those doing care work, found their jobs were not as flexible, Uppal says.

Stanford agrees that the employment practices of non-profit organizations can be more progressive than their private sector counterparts in some cases, but says non-profits have their own troubles. They often don’t have a lot of money to compensate staff in the first place: “You may see non-profits who are always strapped for funds trying to leverage the right to work from home in return for the right to work for cheap,” he says. 

Amid the uncertainties of a post-pandemic economy, caregivers in Canada’s social impact sector are just trying to get by. Some sector leaders are trying to cut some slack to parents and caregivers on their teams by letting them run errands during work hours, log off suddenly, or by extending key deadlines. Other organizations, such as inPath, are trying to preempt the needs of their staff and offer a fundamentally more equitable place to work. 

Everyone is a caregiver

As someone with a background in entrepreneurship, Green has never worked a 9-to-5 job. inPath doesn’t have them, either. “We do flex schedules,” Green explains. Everyone at inPath is required to be online from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, but can dip in or out on either end. Maybe someone prefers working from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., or 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Or, quite possibly, someone’s kid is acting up as they’re getting ready for school. “Just having to be somewhere by an exact time can be one of the most anxiety-inducing things in your day,” Green says.

Another policy inPath has is hour tracking. inPath’s employees are on salary, but Green says inPath tracks their hours to ensure they aren’t overloading their schedules during busy periods. “Our months are peaks and valleys, and so we really wanted to honour that and make sure that we weren’t exploiting people’s time,” Green says. But a lack of clarity around inPath’s policies and procedures made it difficult for new hires to adjust to the non-profit at a time when it was going through some drastic changes. 

Over a six month period, Green says the team nearly doubled from 12 to 23 staff members. A wave of tighter pandemic restrictions last December began to really take their toll on staff members the following spring. Some of them quit. Green says inPath then began to work on a formal HR manual, something the organization had been considering for years but balked at the cost. After the year’s turmoil, inPath decided it had to go ahead with one. “We just kind of made it happen,” she says. “We didn’t really have a choice.”

Green is using the drafting of the HR manual to ensure the co-executive directors could implement the hard stop inPath took in early summer, without the approval of the organization’s board of directors if needed. “We really want to build that agency as an organization to be able to say — OK, we need to pause, we need to shut down,” Green says. inPath is also offering breaks like special leave — a catch-all term for days off to attend to personal appointments or health issues. Another idea in the works is ‘civic leave’: five days a year for staff members to participate in community involvement. That could include anything from participation in an Indigenous ceremony to volunteering outside an organization.

Perhaps the most profound idea Green is considering for iPath’s new human resources manual is expanding the concept of caregivers. In most Canadian workplaces, the immediate assumption is that a caregiver is a parent or, perhaps, someone caring for their elderly parents. inPath does a lot of work with Indigenous communities who Green says have a far broader understanding of the term. “Many people that we work with end up being a primary caregiver to younger siblings, or to older parents or to grandparents,” Green says.”We’re responding to the reality that it’s not just folks who have an elderly parent of a kid who are caregivers, the concept of caregiving actually extends into a community responsibility.”

Not all organizations will necessarily take this approach, but there are far simpler ideas leaders can adopt to ensure they’re properly supporting caregivers. One is just listening to their needs. 

Empathy is key

At Girls E-Mentorship (GEM), a Toronto-based charity that helps high school-aged girls build professional skills, executive director Wendy Sung-Aad oversees a small team of three full-time staffers. When one of them contracted COVID-19 from one of her children, who picked it up at school, Sung-Aad says giving her time off to recover was a no-brainer. “We accommodated it without any question,” Sung-Aad says. This sort of empathetic response from a manager may seem obvious, but it can make all the difference in the world for employees, especially those taking care of others.

Empathy isn’t just a way for managers to offer employees the support they need as caregivers. It also helps managers understand exactly what their employees need in the first place. “Managers need to know how to have an empathy-based, coaching-style conversation,” says Patti-Jo Wiese, managing partner at Six and a Half Consulting, a Vancouver based firm. “But they’re not managing people for key results. They’re being with them as human beings. That they’re able to be present, that they’re able to name and reflect and articulate emotions, and to stay with people’s emotions.”

That empathy goes beyond just listening to the frustrations of a burnt-out caregiver. Agnes Tseng, a people and culture advisor at Bloom, a workplace design consultancy, says some of her clients are still in that position — but others are in the next stage: thinking about how to empathetically reconsider their operations. “What is the give and take here in regards to office hours, or projects, or even technical limitations?” she says. “What are the different options that you can think of that won’t cause a limitation for you or even won’t impact the way that your business is run on a day-to-day basis?” 

The trouble with relying on empathetic leadership alone is that it ignores a simple truth about all workplaces — managers and employees are not equals. This power imbalance is also present in those empathetic one-on-one conversations between managers and employees. Avoiding it is next-to-impossible. In fact, Tseng does’t advise it at all. “I think the best way to approach it, in a very general sense, is to actually call it out and acknowledge it in front of everyone,” Tseng says. “I think the best thing you can do as a leader is to not brush anything under the rug.” 

Workplace cultures encompass an entire team, office, or company, but leaders set the tone. Managing work-life balance for caregivers requires leadership to buy into the idea that preserving the energy and time of their staff is more important than accepting a million projects. One of the lessons Casey Prescott, CEO of the Yukon Arts Centre (YAC), has learned about maintaining work-life balance is that it requires saying no to opportunities. Maybe the YAC can’t put on an extra day of events at their Whitehorse theatre if they’re already booked for six days straight. Building the sort of workplace culture where saying ‘no’ to preserve the capacity of staff, especially caregivers, requires the boss to be on board. As Prescott succinctly puts it: “It all comes from the top.” 

Work comes second

Many organizations are still deep in thought about their post-pandemic workplace arrangements. After all, at the time of writing, most Canadian regions are still in the process of easing public health restrictions. Organizations as small as GEM or and as large as Oxfam Canada say they’re still discussing with staff members how best to return to the office, or continue on with remote work in some capacity. Uppal says offering more time off and adjustable work hours is within the realm of possibility for social impact organizations. “A lot of executive directors I talked to had said  — I can’t give them salary raises, I can’t give them parental leave top-up, I can’t give them more benefits, but I can give them time off and I can give them flexibility because that actually doesn’t cost me anything,” Uppal says. 

Not everyone is considering drastic changes to workplaces policies to better suit caregivers. Prescott, with YAC, says the union that represents his workers is pretty happy with their performance . No one at YAC was laid off from their jobs during the pandemic. New cleaning requirements for their theatre helped slow down the number of events they staged, which led to better work-life balance on its own. And while offering extra time off or flexible start and stop times may be difficult for a small performing arts organization, Prescott says they’ll try and maintain a decent work-life balance wherever possible. “We can work with what we’ve got and make that work as well as we can,” Prescott says. 

There are times, however, when caregivers must drop absolutely everything in the service of those they love. The Indigenous communities where inPath works take that commitment to a level rarely seen in most Canadian organizations. “If there is a herd of caribou going by the community, or the geese are flying late that year and that’s the only opportunity that folks are going to get to go and hunt, that takes priority that day and we need to honour that,” Green says.

Accommodating that level of flexibility is not always easy. For the Indigenous communities they serve, however, it is an act of caregiving for an entire community: an obligation far more important than any deadline. 

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