Is Your Charity Asking Too Much of Its People?
Let me ask you something about your organisation’s culture. Not the values on your website or what you say to new staff. The real culture, the unwritten rules, the expectations that nobody says out loud, but everyone understands.
Does your charity ask its people to give their all?
Because most charities don’t set out to create that culture, they talk about valuing their staff and promoting their wellbeing. Nobody says “we expect you to sacrifice your evenings, your weekends, and your sense of who you are outside this work.” But many charities have created exactly that culture, gradually, unintentionally, and with the very best of intentions.
And it’s costing charities more than most leaders realise.
What this looks like from the inside
This doesn’t look like exploitation; it looks like a belief in the mission and a commitment to that, it looks like staff doing their absolute best to make a difference in the world. And in your charity, that commitment is celebrated, people who go the extra mile are praised, people who are always available are seen as dedicated, long hours are worn as a badge of honour. The mission creates a shared sense of purpose that’s energising & the camaraderie that comes from working towards something that matters is one of the best things about the sector.
But somewhere along the way, that culture of purpose tips into something less healthy. The work stops being something people do and starts being something people are. It starts to feel like you don’t just work for the charity, you are the charity. And when work becomes who you are, it becomes very difficult to protect anything for yourself.
The trouble is knowing where the fine line between commitment, and overidentification & self-sacrifice is isn’t easy. But we all know it’s there. Research found that 70% of charity leaders have become more concerned about employee burnout in the past year, and 66% say their concerns about recruitment and retention have got worse over the same period.
These two figures aren’t coincidental, they’re connected.
A culture that asks too much of its people leaves them overwhelmed, which makes them feel ineffective, leads to poor decision making, and creates a culture of firefighting, which means staff overwork, struggle to switch off, and the guilt they feel means there is no escape from work, they are their work. This becomes the perfect storm for burnout, resulting in retention and recruitment issues,
Why does this happen?
The sector’s greatest strength is also its greatest risk.
When people feel their work is a calling, when it’s tied to their sense of meaning, purpose, and who they are, it’s easy for them to give more than is sustainable. This often starts because they really enjoy the work, they have a huge sense of achievement and they’re energised by it. But over time, work can start to feel more important than they do, and they start to make choices which put work first.
That sense of mission is one of the charity sector’s most powerful qualities, but without intentional leadership, it becomes one of its most significant risks.
Staff watch how leaders work and absorb it as the norm. They see dedication modelled from the top, and they replicate it. The culture becomes self-reinforcing. And new starters walk into an organisation where this is simply how things are done and will follow suit.
Your values and language may be sending messages you didn’t intend.
This is something that leaders often find most uncomfortable, because the intentions behind it are genuinely good.
I worked with a charity whose organisational values included “go the extra mile.” The senior leadership team understood this to mean their commitment to the people they served, they never gave up on clients, however complex the situation, they’d offer support that other organisations wouldn’t. It was an expression of their dedication to their mission.
But the majority of the workforce understood it differently. To them, it meant staying late, taking on extra tasks, not saying no, pushing through illness to get the job done. An admirable intention, completely lost in translation, and creating an unhealthy workplace culture in the process.
It’s worth asking what do your values, your language, and your leadership behaviours actually communicate to your team? Not what you intend for them, but what do they actually hear, experience, and believe is expected of them?
The culture of presenteeism is unintentionally set from the top.
Think about the signals you send day to day:
When you email at 10pm.
When you say “don’t worry about using on-call, just call me” to a colleague working after you’ve finished.
When you praise the person who stayed until 8pm to get the report finished.
When you say it’s okay to call, because you’re not doing anything with your day off.
These gestures come from a place of care and commitment, you want to help your team out. But they send a message, that availability equals being a good worker and leader in the sector. That the work comes first. That the right thing to do is always give more.
And your team is watching. All of it.
What you can actually do about it
Changing a culture takes time. But it starts with being honest about what your culture currently is, and taking responsibility for the part you play in maintaining it.
1. Audit your culture.
Look at your values, your language, how you recognise and reward staffs work and achievements, and your own behaviour. What messages are they sending?
Talk to your team. Ask them, what does it feel like to work here? What are the unwritten expectations? What happens if someone doesn’t go the extra mile? You might be surprised, even unsettled, by the gap between what you believe your culture to be and what your team is experiencing.
But beware, if you don’t have a healthy culture, you might not get an honest response, and if you are your leadership team can’t be honest, it’s likely the rest of the organisation can’t say how they feel.
2.Actively challenge presenteeism.
This means more than having a wellbeing policy. It means noticing and naming overwork when you see it, and not praising it. It means being explicit that you don’t expect people to be available outside working hours, and then modelling that yourself. It means looking at whether objectives and job roles are realistic. Are you setting your organisation up to fail by asking people to do more than is possible.
This is particularly difficult for charities, because the demands are so much higher than resources, but to create a healthy culture, the question has to be what can we realistically do? How can we make a difference in a sustainable way? Because this is what will make a bigger difference, if your team are working in a sustainable way, you won’t have the same risk of burnout, you won’t have the same retention and recruitment issues, and you’ll all be working more effectively.
3. Invest in wellbeing that goes deeper than training.
Resilience workshops and Employee Assistance Programmes have their place. But if the culture underneath still expects people to give everything, those interventions will only scratch the surface. Real wellbeing investment means developing psychological flexibility in your teams, so they can manage stress, stop firefighting, problem solve, and switch off at the end of the day, and then building a culture and ways of working that actually support those skills. There is no point telling staff to take breaks if the workload and culture make that impossible. The training and the culture have to work together.
4. Get every leader on board, not just the senior team.
Culture change doesn’t happen from the top down alone. Every manager, every team leader, every person who sets expectations for others needs to understand and model the shift. That means leadership development that goes beyond skills and techniques, that addresses the beliefs and behaviours that sustain an unhealthy culture at every level. Because if middle managers are still sending emails at 9pm and praising people for staying late, the message from the top won’t be heard.
The bigger picture
Your charity’s culture is either asking your people to live to work or work to live. And the uncomfortable truth is that many charity cultures, however well-intentioned, are asking for more than is sustainable, and as a result, they’re making it harder to meet their charitable aims.
That doesn’t have to be the story. But changing it requires someone to name it, to honestly review the culture, to ask the difficult questions, and to decide to do things differently.
That someone is you.
If you don’t know where to start to shift your culture, book a call to find out how I can help.