The Changing Work Culture in Social Impact

This article is a summary of Episode 35 of our Designing Tomorrow podcast. Each episode is a conversation between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. 

We’re going to talk about the changing work culture in the sector and across the country and across the world. But we’ll start with a little personal story. 

When the pandemic hit, Jonathan was working at a homeless services housing advocacy organization. On March 10th, or sometime thereabouts, he sounded the alarm. He was on the executive team and they sounded the alarm: we need to move those who can work remotely, allow them to go home and work from home. 

The CEO of that organization is someone Jonathan deeply respects. He is an effective leader and has some really progressive and effective solutions to housing homelessness in the community. But he did not like the particular position that Jonathan was taking. He asked Jonathan to continue to come back into the office and Jonathan refused to do so — having an infant at home and being able to do his job remotely. 

Jonathan was terminated shortly thereafter for that and thus began his remote work experience.

Jonathan’s story serves as an example of the need to embrace the changing work culture. By and large, remote work is more challenging for the social impact sector than it is in other sectors. At least that's the argument we’re going to explore today.

The Reality of In-person Social Impact Work

The Seymour Marine Discovery Center is a physical destination and attraction and educational center. Most of the team needs to be present in person to welcome guests and visitors and the students that come through. But there are some individuals that can and do work remotely when the opportunity arises, and that’s encouraged. Leadership takes advantage of that when they need to do deep focused work.

There are some benefits, for example, especially for working parents — that ability to work remotely can really help you keep a handle on family schedules. Also, it has created the opportunity for people to do some deep focused work in an environment that has a lot of people kind of bustling around day in and day out.

And actually for some people, it allows for them to access some extended time off or extended vacations knowing that they can plug in remotely for a few days if they're working across the country at a family's house or something. They know they can extend that vacation in order to continue doing their work remotely. So it can work and Jonathan’s created a healthy experience around it at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center.

Cosmic’s Journey to Fully Remote

Before the Pandemic

Before the pandemic, we had a studio downtown. We've had a couple of studios in Santa Cruz, but our most recent studio — before going fully remote — was downtown. It was one big room, and distinctly, we all worked around one huge desk that we had custom built amongst these two huge pillars in the middle of the room. And so it was about as open of an office environment as you could imagine, and that came with a whole host of pros and cons.

So there was a lot of serendipitous collaboration and creativity that happened because of that. There were also a lot of distractions, so we were pretty religious about headphone use in that office. And so there is sometimes looking back fondly on those times also because of just the benefits that having a physical space gives you. So we hosted events, a lot of community events all the time. We curated these design focused events and opened them up to the community and that was a really cool way to just be connected with the community and meet people and network.

There was a speakeasy party at the studio one year to bring all clients and friends together. That was a great experience. We turned that big table into a big dinner table. We definitely leveraged the space and it was awesome.

And while we're on the subject, there's also missing commuting, which is kind of funny to hear, but the commute was a 10 minute bike ride along the river, not 45 minutes in horrible traffic.

Making the Transition

With all that to say, the transition into a fully remote team, for Cosmic, has largely been positive. It is important to just acknowledge that there is no one answer to this question. We're in a position where we can work fully remotely and be, just as if not more effective in our work than working in person.

But certainly for an organization where there's a physical space and a huge offering to the community — you’re inviting people into this space to experience science in person — a fully remote team can't happen. Obviously even a hybrid team probably has its list of challenges that you have to work through.

But let’s talk about some of the experiences of running a remote team and the perks of that.

Childcare Advantages

Going remote was very much aligned with raising a young child at the time that the lockdowns really started. Watching Facebook and Google go remote, we realized, okay, this is getting real. And a couple of days later, we made the choice to go remote as well — thinking it would blow over in a couple of weeks — or months at the worst case. And we never went back. We realized pretty quickly that this was going to be at least a multi-year pandemic that we're going to need to get through.

And as much as we watched other people starting to come back, we didn't feel like the risk or cost/benefit analysis made any sense for us. And by that time, we had actually already developed a pretty healthy remote work culture.

Unexpected Benefits

Some of the bigger unexpected benefits came in a couple different flavors. One was: We were instantly able to draw from a much larger talent pool. So being based in Santa Cruz, we're pretty connected to Silicon Valley in the Monterey Bay, San Francisco. But it is a smaller town. And it's extremely expensive to live here. The cost of living is really high. And so we had a small talent pool, we'd moved people here before. But that was always hard for us, especially when we were trying to increase diversity of experiences and backgrounds and lived experience in our own team culture. It was really hard to do that in Santa Cruz. We were pretty limited.

And so pretty instantly we had a much larger, more diverse, more broad talent pool that we could draw from in building our own team. And that's served us extremely well. All of our employees are still based in the US and we have equal pay amongst employees even when some employees are in higher cost of living areas, we've chosen to just put everyone's pay up at that size versus trying to punish people for living in a cheaper area, for example. Even if that's not the intention, that's often how people feel in those situations. That's been a really big benefit.

It's easy to get pulled into almost anything that happens at our agency, whether that's for a client project or for internal work. So in our in-person space, it’s easy to get pulled in a lot of directions. And that still happens to this day. But it's a lot easier personally to do time blocking and to have that silence and focus time in a home studio where there's personal space without the constant pull of real world distraction happening. And so that's been a really good change. But certainly there have been some challenges too.

The Single Biggest Challenge

The single biggest challenge with this change in culture for mission-driven organizations and social impact organizations is the fact that so much of what we do is fueled by a passion for a cause. And that passion can get fueled by other people. What’s the impact on fully remote teams doing social impact work when they're not being fueled by their team in the same space, celebrating this love or celebrating this dedication with other human beings day in and day out?

This is something that has been a difficult challenge for us to work through, both in terms of our own team culture as well as building relationships with clients. We never meet most of our clients in person these days, which is kind of wild. We used to spend a lot of time driving around the Bay Area meeting clients, even for initial meetings — before we even had a contract. That was how you did it. You would meet in person. You would figure out if it's a good fit. We do miss that at some level.

We're all probably pretty acutely aware of the difference between in person digital communications. And so there's a new skill that you have to develop if you're going to be a fully remote team or work fully remotely. And it's also probably really clear that this is going to have to be very dependent on the type of organization that you are.

Different Organizations, Different Needs

The obvious example is homeless services or if you're a food bank. A lot of, maybe most, social impact organizations are acting in the real world, delivering some kind of physical change in many cases — even if they're just doing research. So some exceptions to that would be social impact organizations that are a little bit what could be called higher up in the chain. So, think tanks or foundations or policy and advocacy organizations, maybe some research institutions, educational institutions where the work is a little bit more based on knowledge instead of physical impact.

So those organizations — and thinking through some of our clients who fit those molds — most of the organizations that we work with in those categories are fully remote these days. On the flip side though, other organizations that we support who are more boots on the ground or have a location or serve a regional community or have some kind of physical space for community building or gathering, those organizations tend to be either hybrid or just fully in person.

What's Working and What's Not

Let’s take the subset of clients where there are boots on the ground employees doing high touch work. There are things we’ve observed that those organizations are doing particularly well, and some things they’re doing poorly in terms of managing remote or hybrid teams.

We’ve seen it work well in both cases and seen it work poorly in both cases. The big thing is having a clear approach. And that can change as work culture is changing. The biggest thing we’ve seen — and this is in and out of the social impact sector — is when promises were made about remote work and then those promises changed. 

This is very common. This happened a lot in the tech world where there was a huge hiring spree in 2022 and most of those jobs were remote. And then there was this big ‘remote work is dead’ reckoning, and all of a sudden there's ‘back to office’. And it started with one day a week and then three days a week. And now a lot of organizations are back to five days a week.

In a lot of cases, there wasn't a reconciling of that major change with things like pay or commute time or expectations. A lot of people made life choices and decisions, and maybe even moved, because they had signed up for a remote job. And then when that opportunity went away, it feels like a little bit of a bait and switch. And that’s tough to navigate.

Any organizational leader has a right to change organizational culture as the world changes, as needs change. So it's really mostly about how do you handle that behavior change and that culture change with empathy and clarity of communication and fairness.

The Real Reason for Return-to-Office

Taking the example of those big tech companies that are doing big back to office migrations — why are they doing that? The understanding is that it has to do with team culture like collaboration and also some claims about lost productivity.

That premise has been pretty heavily contested because there is actually some data that shows that remote work is just as productive if not more productive — especially for the knowledge-worker class — like a lot of these tech firm. Again, this is different for an organization where boots on the ground in-person work is essentially critical to delivering the impact. 

But a lot of people are claiming that productivity is just a guise for control, that managers and executives feel like they don't have as much control or oversight or influence over their team when they're remote. In our opinion, that is built on a lack of trust between executives and managers and employees.

We can be seen being true and real. But ultimately, what it comes down to for social impact leaders is some questions: 

• Am I able to motivate this team? 
• Am I able to help them connect with the purpose of their work and the impact of their work? 

That’s all the more reason that this can be more challenging for social impact organizations. Not only are you trying to manage a team and help them connect with each other and connect with the systems and the processes and the work, but you're also trying to facilitate them feeling connected and passionate about the mission.

Adapting to Remote Collaboration

‘In-person’ can be a shortcut or a cheat code or feel that way. And if you don't have that, it leaves a pretty big burden to fill that without being in person. And this brings up a couple thoughts. 

One is some reflections on how we've had to change our culture at Cosmic to make up for that lack of in-person.

So an example is: A lot of times we would get into a conference room or a breakout room for a project team and do working sessions, these brainstorms. We would whiteboard a lot of stuff together. And obviously we can't really do that quite in the same way remotely. Sure there's virtual whiteboarding and stuff, but it just doesn't feel the same. And so we actually realized, hey, we can't continue working in this way in a remote fashion. What do we have to do instead?

And really it's put a little bit more emphasis on preparedness — if we're going to come together as a team virtually, we have to be a little bit more prepared individually. So for example, a lead designer on the project is now expected to come in to a sync on any given client with some developed ideas to get feedback on rather than a blank canvas where we're all doing it together.

And that is really good shift, in general. We were actually being a little lazy. We didn’t think about in that way at the time. But it actually was easier to get everyone in the same room and just try and work it together instead of having the diligence to make sure that we were really prepared to have feedback and to get feedback.

The Fully Asynchronous Approach

There are organizations that are fully remote and fully asynchronous — meaning that they rarely, if ever meet at all. So GitLab is an example of this. They're an open source GitHub. If you're in the software world, it's like a repository for code. And they run their company completely remotely and completely asynchronously.

That's an even more difficult challenge — and you could talk about the pros and cons of that. But to go that far — and this is true for remote work in general, but especially fully asynchronous work —  it requires extremely diligent and strong written communication skills. And not everyone has that. And there could be a really ‘A’ player who's not as good with written communication or those types of skills that would just absolutely fail at a place like GitLab, but that could excel at the Seymour Center, for example.

Beyond Team Cohesion: Other Remote Work Challenges

We've been talking about team cohesion, team collaboration, emphasizing and growing the sense of connectedness to the mission as a part of this. But there's a couple of other reasons why it may be more challenging for folks who work in the social impact sector to go fully remote. And one of them has to do with fundraising.

Let’s explore a couple of things that might be connected to how work has changed over a longer period of time — not just from 2020 to 2024 and 2025, but going all the way back into the 80s and 90s and how work has changed over that timescale.

1. The Fundraising Challenge

Take donor relations for example, there are exceptions, but by and large, developing meaningful donor relations — especially with individuals who are accustomed to doing their philanthropy through relationships — that's a difficult transition to go to a fully remote donor relationship structure. And if you as a fundraiser are not physically close to the donors that you're shepherding, that can be a really hard barrier to get over, one that maybe somebody in tech sales might not struggle with.

When we think about acquiring new clients at Cosmic and generating new relationships with clients — most of our clients since 2020 we’ve never been met in person ever and never will. And so part of our thinking is that if we can do that and build what we consider to be really deep relationships with some of our clients who we've worked with — in certain cases for many years, who we've still never met in person — we imagine that for the right type of organization, fundraising could happen in that way too.

When through the lens of a local organization — where people in the local community are used to meeting locally, building locally, attending community events together — there's definitely some truth in that. But we definitely know many organizations who are a little bit more nationally focused or even internationally focused, where fundraising definitely has gone virtual too. It is possible. 

It's just about different approaches. You can't take the same approach that you would in person, where it's a little bit more about organic relationship building, as you would in a fully remote setting. And that's really the calibration that needs to be done in your brain if you're a fundraiser. Because the benefit — if you can break outside of your local community, if you're a regional organization — is similar to the talent pool example from earlier. It opens a whole new world of fundraising opportunities — if you can build the skills to fundraise virtually, of course online through recurring donors and smaller donors, but even for major donors.

2. The Technology Question

There's the issue of the technology itself. If you look at this as an aggregate collection of social impact organizations versus other sectors, and the technological advancement of these organizations — do they have the infrastructure to run the software and to manage the project management software and the CRMs? Do they have the expertise throughout the team to be able to manage that technology, all the way from small social impact organizations to national ones?

There's a spectrum here. But going out on a limb — to suggest that probably by and large, if you looked at the bell curve in social impact versus not, we're probably closer to the side of the spectrum that is less technologically advanced. 

To be honest, that hasn't really been what we’ve seen — other than if you were to compare it to tech — where tech organizations and tech companies are usually ahead of the bell curve. A lot of our nonprofit clients are pretty modern in their communication. Even if they do work in person, they usually also are pretty proficient in project management or use something like Slack or Discord or Microsoft Teams to communicate in addition to in-person meetings and online meetings.

The pandemic did pretty quickly accelerate digital transformation at large in culture through Zoom and webinars and people getting used to attending events. And that is a silver lining. We have arrived at a really good post-pandemic place where there is an appetite for in-person and virtual events and in-person and virtual communication in a way there never really was before.

We just need to continue to strengthen our capabilities in each of those ways. It's weird when meeting in person with people now. So there's this muscle that needs to be built or it will atrophy either for in-person or for working virtually, working remotely.

And we could argue that a lot of the things that make working remotely difficult are worth doing — building better processes, having better project management capabilities and skills, having better data habits and collection and digital tools powering our work. So, a hybrid approach for public-facing organizations is the best approach. It does get a little hard. We’ve heard stories from people in tech who say the most frustrating thing is having to go to the office three days a week to hop on Zoom calls with people that could have been done from home. That's not a good hybrid culture.

Work-Life Balance: A Changing Landscape

We've been focusing on remote work as the fundamental element of a changing work culture, but that's not necessarily the only thing that's changing in the conversation. One of those has to do with work-life balance and how much of themselves are people willing to put into their work. And on one hand, the social impact sector is actually better suited to embrace that value. And in other ways, we're actually not — in the sense that we have a reputation of grinding employees to pulp with little pay.

There's been a pretty fundamental shift in how we think about work fitting into our lives in general. Part of that is the pandemic and remote work. Part of it is a huge generational change in the workforce — how newer generations are thinking about work and how it fits into their lives. 

In a way that's pretty transformational, work is more decoupled from someone's identity than it ever has been before. That's not always true. A lot of people still consider their work a huge part of their identity. That will always be true to some degree. But it’s not to the same extent that it used to be. So there's different, new, probably mostly healthier, boundaries around how much people are willing to give up in their personal lives to their jobs, and to their employers, and to work in general. And that is a good recalibration.

Finding Balance While Leading

We've talked about exercise previously. But there can be a mental shift where you think about exercise as part of work — the thought being that this is a necessary ingredient to be able to show up and be the best leader possible.

And it can be valuable to defend that time and those priorities against other demands for your time. The pandemic was a part of this — learning that different parts of life have to be nurtured in order to be the best leader you can be. And make no mistake, even when work is a major part of your identity, these other parts of your life have to be nurtured in order for you to be successful.

We developed a four day workweek regimen at Cosmic in 2011. So we were pretty early adopters of the four day workweek. And it's especially important for the type of work that we do, because we do creative work.

And what we’ve learned over the years, and what science supports, is that creativity is only possible if you are not in a state of chronic stress or burnout. Burnout is essentially just the kryptonite of creativity. 

We’ve seen that it's very in vogue to shit on work-life balance right now. A lot of people are — especially executives, especially coming out of this hybrid/remote conversation — are saying work life balance is not really the way to think about it.

The argument that they're trying to make essentially is that you shouldn't be trying to balance these two things, that you should be embodying work as part of your identity in a healthy way. 

But the point is, at Cosmic, we want our team to show up at their best as many times as they possibly can. We're all human. We're never going to show up a hundred percent every day. But what can we do to show up as close to a hundred percent every day as many times as we can throughout the year?

A lot of that is of course good self-care and routines and all the things that we know are important for humans to be happy — social connection, exercise, time in nature, time in quiet, and to yourself and to think and to reflect.

And we’ve experienced personally, that whenever there isn't enough of any of those things in life, work absolutely suffers. And sometimes you just have to work through that and push through it. But we spend a lot of time thinking about how to give our team the right support systems and the flexibility and the culture to support that as best as we can within the constraints that we have.

The LeBron James Approach to Energy Management

There's an argument to be made that LeBron James is a 40-year-old basketball player who's been the best of the best for 22 years. And one of the things that you can notice when you watch him play is that game to game and even minute to minute within the game, he's metering his energy output. He's taking it easy when he knows he can take it easy. But when he needs to go and he needs to grind, he can turn on the jets and be the best in the world again. 

And there's a way to think about social impact work in that way. You need to be the driver sometimes, and you need to learn when to take the foot off the gas knowing that energy needs to be saved up for the right moment.

The second part is the hardest part, especially as a leader. Because there's always something you could be doing. This is something we struggle with a lot. There are times when you take your foot off the gas a little bit and feel guilty for doing that. But you need to learn to pay attention to your internal battery — your burnout meter is maybe a better metaphor to use. There are times when you do have to push. Getting a little burnt out does happen. But there needs to be times where that recharge can happen — and it's so important to do it.

A Challenge to Social Impact Leaders

Here's a challenge to CEOs and executive directors at nonprofits. We should be the absolute best at this. We should be better than our counterparts in the for-profit sectors. Because in many cases we aren't able to pay the same competitive wages. And as much as we try, we're not as high as we know some people could make elsewhere.

As a leader, you come to work knowing you can't be the best in pay, but we can be the best in work-life balance and work culture. And so we’re challenging all of you out there to be the best in this particular area, because it's a unique advantage that we have.

If you can't get to a point where you are able to pay more and that financial compensation is a possibility, at least use this lever. Create more flexibility. Create a better culture for work-life balance. Don't underpay and overwork people at the same time. And work towards improving both pay and culture and work-life balance.

From our experience, there are zero regrets when we have made these choices at Cosmic. It's been possible to hang on to a really solid team, largely because of this culture and because of the way that people feel like they have agency and autonomy and flexibility and that they're contributing to something good all at the same time. So the dividends pay off immediately.

Check out the full conversation on our Designing Tomorrow podcast.