The hidden cost of overwork in your charity
Can I ask you a question?
Does your organisation have a culture of overwork?
Not intentionally, nobody decides they want one, and nobody is telling staff they need to stay late when they start. Your organisational values say you care about your staff. Your job adverts highlight a generous annual leave allowance and other staff benefits. At interview, you emphasise the importance of work-life balance and staff wellbeing. But the reality is different. On a Tuesday evening when half your team are logging back on to catch up, or on a Sunday when your phone is pinging with messages that could have waited until Monday.
Most leaders, if they’re honest, already know the answer. The sector is hard, this is just how it is. The more challenging question is, are you going to accept this for your charity, or are you going to do something about it?
Because a culture of overwork doesn’t usually happen because anyone decided it should. It happens by default. Through busyness, through avoidance, through a collective agreement not to name what everyone already knows. And by the time it’s visible enough to address, it’s already costing your organisation, and the people you exist to serve, more than most leaders realise.
What an overwork culture actually looks like
It rarely looks like a crisis, it looks like an organisation of dedicated people, putting the work first. What you see is:
Constant busyness. Ask anyone how their week is going, and the answer will be busy (usually accompanied by a knowing look). The default has become responding to the urgency around you all because everything feels important. And along the way, the question of what’s actually realistic to achieve has been forgotten. Instead, people respond to the urgency by firefighting, by jumping from task to task, by overcommitting (and inevitably under-delivering), feel worse about themselves, work harder to compensate, and overcommit again. And busyness becomes a badge of honour.
Your team are working additional hours as a matter of course. Your teams start work early and stop late to fit in the work around their back-to-back meetings. They check-in on Sunday evening to mentally prepare for the week ahead. there’s a low-level hum of exhaustion that everyone has learned to ignore, because this is just how it is.
Presenteeism is the unwritten rule. People work through illness because there’s too much to do, and if they don’t, they’ll simply have to work late to catch up. And in some organisations, there is a quiet, unspoken criticism of anyone who does take time off. It's just a cold after all.
Performance issues aren’t addressed. Because we all know how busy everyone is poor outcomes, missed targets, forgotten work gets explained away, after all everyone’s so stretched, rather than addressed. You don’t want to stress them out anymore, and so what feels like compassion in the moment becomes a pattern that carries real risk, for your team, for your beneficiaries, and for your organisation’s contracts and reputation.
The strategic work is lost. Because everyone, including you, is caught up in the busyness of the day to day, the strategic work keeps getting pushed back, and it becomes the worry that nags at you.
What this is really costing the charity
We know that overwork, and stress can lead to burnout, and research tells us that 75% of charity staff have either personally experienced burnout or witnessed colleagues struggling with it in the last 12 months. This is a chronic issue, one that we can’t just accept as par for the course, and which needs to be addressed because the issues go beyond individual wellbeing.
Burnout leads to both poor work performance and is likely contributing to the level of sickness absence and turnover in the organisation. All of which have a significant impact on teams, the service you deliver, the financial health of the organisation, the culture and its reputation.
Teams: Overwork, stress and morale are contagious; if you or one of your team are working in this way, it will spread across the organisation.
Service Delivery: When we’re stressed, and working in a reactive way we’re less likely to think clearly, be able to problem solve or see the bigger picture. This will impact on how services are delivered, how beneficiaries and stakeholders are responded to, and how you meet you KPIs. Even when everyone is doing their best.
Financial Health: Stress and burnout cost organisations, through sickness absence, higher rates of staff turnover, and the resulting costs of covering, recruiting and training staff. This in turn will reinforce the overwork in other team members, creating a vicious cycle.
Culture: This creates an unsustainable work culture, where poor performance isn’t address, where resentment builds within teams, where everyone is working as hard as they can, but we don’t seem to make the difference we want to.
Organisational Reputation: And left unaddressed this can create a reputational risk to the organisation, risking service contracts and your long-term ability to meet your charitable aims.
Changing your culture of overwork
We don’t just have to accept busyness, and the consequences of it. It doesn’t just have to be like this, because it has been before. But change comes from taking stock of the reality the charity is facing, and having honest, and sometimes difficult conversations about this.
1. Start with what’s working.
Before you look at what needs to change, ask your team: where are we at our best? What does ‘good’ actually look like here? What are we proud of?
This might feel counterintuitive when the problem is overwork. But it’s strategic. Starting from strength rather than deficit shifts the conversation from blame and overwhelm into possibility and helps you see how you can use these strengths in new and different ways. It reminds people what they’re capable of. And it gives you something to build towards, rather than just something to fix.
2. Get honest about your strategy.
Is what you’ve committed to actually achievable with the resource you have? Not in theory, but in practice? This is one of the most important conversations a senior leadership team can have, and one which is often glossed over.
If the honest answer is no, the question then becomes, what would a realistic version look like? What do we stop, reduce, or renegotiate? What do we say to funders, to trustees, to the people who expect us to do everything? Having this conversation is not failure, it’s about how you make an impact for the long term.
3. Check your roles and resources.
Do you have the right people, in the right roles, with enough capacity to do the work well? This means looking honestly at how workloads are distributed, at whether roles are clearly defined, and at whether people are being asked to carry work that sits outside their expertise, or are there positions where different jobs have been put together because that’s what you could afford?
4. Look at your systems.
How does work flow through the organisation? Are there predictable pinch points, (budget management, H&S assessment, end of quarter reporting, training cycles, annual appraisal timings) that create recurring pressure points? What are you able to change in terms of how work is planned across the organisation, so staff don’t have to juggle competing priorities?
5. Make it safe to say no, to ask for help and make mistakes.
This is the cultural shift that underpins everything else. It means that leaders at all levels need to respond positively, curiously & consistently, when someone says, they’re struggling, somethings gone wrong, or they need help. It means the conversations around objectives are realistic, that conversations about mistakes focus on how we can resolve the issue and what we can learn. And this doesn’t mean that performance issues are not addressed and masked by busyness, it’s having honest conversations to understand the problem.
6. Wellbeing becomes the centre
Ultimately this means recognising that the wellbeing of staff at all levels isn’t a nice to have, it’s essential for the charity to run effectively and meeting your aims. This means that wellbeing isn’t an add on of resilience training, EAP services, and team building days, it means it plays a part in the strategic decision making of the organisation.
The bigger picture
A culture of overwork is not inevitable. It is not just how the charity sector is. It is a set of choices, which are unconscious and well-intentioned, that compound over time into something that costs people their health, their relationships, and their ability to do the work they care about.
Changing it requires someone to go first. To name it and start having the honest conversations that have been avoided. And to model, visibly and consistently, a different way of working.
That someone is you.
If you’re curious how I can help you break the cycle of overwork, book a free call