The Changing Work Culture in Social Impact

Transcript:

Jonathan Hicken [00:00]:

Eric, I want to talk to you about the changing work culture in the sector and frankly, across the world

Eric Ressler [00:06]:

There's different new 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 I think that that is a good recalibration.

Jonathan Hicken [00:19]:

He asked me to continue to come back into the office and I refused to do so. Having an infant at home and being able to do my job remotely and I was terminated shortly thereafter. I've actually learned to really embrace the changing work culture, but by and large, I actually think remote work is more challenging for the social impact

Eric Ressler [00:37]:

Sector. 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.

Jonathan Hicken [00:46]:

I'm going to challenge all of you out there to be the best in this particular area, but because I think it's a unique advantage that we have.

Jonathan Hicken [01:00]:

Eric, I want to talk to you about the changing work culture in the sector and frankly across the country and across the world. But I want to start with a little personal story. So when the pandemic hit, I was working at a homeless services housing advocacy organization and March 10th, March 11th, something thereabouts, I sounded the alarm. I was on the executive team and I sounded the alarm to the executive team and the CEO and said, we need to move those who can work remotely, allow them to go home and work from home. And disclaimer, look, the CEO of that organization I deeply respect. He is an effective leader and has some really progressive and effective solutions to housing homelessness in our community, and he did not like that particular position I was taking. He asked me to continue to come back into the office and I refused to do so having an infant at home and being able to do my job remotely and I was terminated shortly thereafter for that and thus began my remote work experience. I imagine lots of people share stories like this. I've actually learned to really embrace the changing work culture, but by and large, I actually think that remote work is more challenging for the social impact sector than it is in other sectors. And that's the argument I'm going to try to make today. What do you think?

Eric Ressler [02:24]:

I think it's an interesting argument and yeah, I'm excited to dig into it

Jonathan Hicken [02:27]:

These days. I run a science center, it's called the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and being a physical destination and attraction and educational center, my lens on the issue today is a little bit different because most of my team needs to be present in person to welcome our guests and our visitors and the students that come through. But there are some individuals that can and do work remotely when the opportunity arises and we encourage that. I take advantage of that actually when I need to do deep focused work. And we've seen some benefits, for example, especially for working parents as you and I can absolutely relate to that ability to work remotely can really help you keep a handle on your family schedule. I'd also say, I mentioned already that 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.

[03:24]:

And actually for some people I think 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 has worked and we have created a healthy experience around it at our little science center. But you run a fully remote creative agency, and I'm dying to hear what your experience has been making that transition and also what you're hearing from your clients as they have made those transitions to.

Eric Ressler [04:07]:

Yeah, I think it's been an interesting journey. So similar to your current setup, actually before the pandemic, we had a studio downtown. We've had a couple studios in Santa Cruz, but our most recent studio before going fully remote was downtown. It was one big room, and I distinctly remember 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 was also a lot of distractions, so we were pretty religious about headphone use in that office. And so I do sometimes look 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. And so I missed some of those things for sure. I

Jonathan Hicken [05:14]:

Remember when you had a speakeasy party at the studio one year to bring all your clients and your friends together. That was a great experience.

Eric Ressler [05:22]:

We turned that big table into a big dinner table, right? Yeah, we definitely leveraged the space and it was awesome. And while we're on the subject, I also miss commuting, which is kind of funny to hear, but my commute was a 10 minute bike ride along the river, not 45 minutes in horrible traffic. So with all that to say, the transition into a fully remote team for me has largely been positive. And I think the same can be said for my team, and I think it is important to just acknowledge that there is no one answer to this question. In my opinion, we're in a position where we can work fully, remotely and be in my opinion, just as if not more effective in our work than working in person. But certainly for an organization like yours where you have a physical space and a huge offering to the community is that you're inviting people into this space to experience science in person.

[06:20]:

You can't have a fully remote team. Obviously even a hybrid team probably has its list of challenges that you have to work through. But let me just talk about some of the experiences that I've had running a remote team and the perks of that. There's a couple big ones in my opinion. So going remote was very much aligned with raising my oldest daughter who was about six months old at the time that the lockdowns really started. I distinctly remember watching Facebook and Google go remote and realizing like, okay, this is getting real. And I think a couple of days later we chose to go remote as well thinking it would blow over in a couple of weeks. I remember at the time 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.

[07:13]:

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. Some of the bigger unexpected benefits for me 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. 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.

[08:10]:

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, I think that's often how people feel in those situations. That's been a really big benefit. I think for me personally, as our founder and our creative director, I can easily get pulled into almost anything that happens at our agency, whether that's for a client project or for internal work. And so I often felt myself in our in-person space being pulled in a lot of directions. And that still happens to this day, don't get me wrong, but I find it personally a lot easier to do time blocking and to just have that silence and focus time in my current studio where we're recording this podcast where I have my own space, I don't have the constant pull of real world distraction happening. And so that's been a really good change. But certainly I think there's also been some challenges too.

Jonathan Hicken [09:43]:

I actually think that 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. And so I wonder what the impact is 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.

Eric Ressler [10:29]:

Yeah, I mean, I completely agree and I think 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. I never would've expected that. I used to spend a lot of time driving around the Bay Area meeting clients even for initial meetings, right before we even had a contract. That was kind of how you did it. You would meet in person, you would kind of figure out if it's a good fit, and I miss that at some level. And I do think that there is something about in-person conversation and connection that is just never going to be possible to reach digitally. It's actually one of the reasons why I've been so excited to have you here in person as my co-host and not doing this remotely because we've done some test episodes remotely and as we were kind of putting outlines together, and I think we both realized, wow, that just did not have the same energy.

Jonathan Hicken [11:31]:

No, no. I am feeding off of you smiling right now.

Eric Ressler [11:34]:

So all of the nonverbal communication, I think we're all probably pretty acutely aware of the difference between in person digital communications. And so I think I agree that 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 I think it's also probably really clear that this is going to have to be very dependent on the type of organization that you are. The obvious example is like, yeah, homeless services or if you're a food bank or a lot of, if not, maybe most social impact organizations are acting in the real world, delivering some kind of physical change in many cases, even if you're just doing research. So some exceptions to that would be social impact organizations that are a little bit what I would call 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 I'm 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 in my experience. On the flip side though, other organizations that we support who are more like the Seymour Center, 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. Is there anything that you can

Jonathan Hicken [13:19]:

Detect from all of the clients that you're working with that let's just take the subset of clients where there are boots on the ground employees doing that high touch work. Have you detected anything about what those organizations are doing particularly well or particularly poorly in terms of managing remote or hybrid teams?

Eric Ressler [13:48]:

So I've seen it work well in both cases and I've seen it work poorly in both cases. So I really think that the big thing is having a clear approach and that can change right as work culture is changing. The biggest thing I'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 and people felt like they signed up for something and they're getting something else. So 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 the 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.

[14:39]:

And there wasn't in a lot of cases 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 I think that's tough to navigate because I do think that any organization, organizational leader has a right to change organizational culture as the world changes, as needs change. So I think it's really mostly about how do you handle that behavior change and that culture change with empathy and clarity of communication and fairness.

Jonathan Hicken [15:29]:

Taking the example of those big tech companies that are doing this big back to office migrations, why are they doing that, right? My understanding is that has to do with team culture like collaboration and also some claims about lost productivity. Is there anything else that you've heard?

Eric Ressler [15:49]:

So that's what I've heard, and I think it's frankly been pretty heavily contested because I think there is actually some data that shows that remote work is just as productive if not more productive, especially for the knowledge worker class. A lot of these tech firms have, again, this is different for an organization like yours or an organization where boots on the ground in-person work is essentially critical to delivering the impact. But a lot of people are kind of claiming that the productivity is just a guise for control, is that managers and executives feel like they don't have as much control or oversight or influence over their team when they're remote. And I think that that is kind of built on a lack of trust between executives and managers and employees. Frankly,

Jonathan Hicken [16:44]:

I can see it being true and real and I can see being a manager at Google or whatever and struggling to manage my own team remotely though. I think ultimately what it comes down to is 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? Whether you're working in social impact or not, those things matter in a team. And so all the more reason that I'm making the argument that this can be more challenging for these social impact organizations because 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.

Eric Ressler [17:35]:

And I do think that in-person can be a shortcut or a cheat code or feel that way. And if you don't have that, I do think it leaves a pretty big burden to fill that without being in person. And this brings up a couple thoughts for me. 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 these kind of working sessions, these kind of brainstorms or work through, 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, this is, we can't continue working in this way in a remote fashion.

[18:28]:

What do we have to do instead? And really it's put a little bit more emphasis on preparedness in terms of 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 sink on any given client with some developed ideas to get feedback on rather than a blank canvas where we're all kind of doing it together. And I have to say, I think that is a really good shift in general, and I think we were actually being a little lazy. I don't think we thought about it in that way at the time, but I think it actually was just 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.

[19:23]:

It also makes me think about there are also, and again, this only works for certain types of organizations, but 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 it requires, I think, to go that far, and this is true for remote work in general, but especially fully asynchronous work, 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 GitHub or GitLab rather, but that could excel at the Seymour Center for example. We've been talking about

Jonathan Hicken [20:22]:

Team cohesion, team collaboration, emphasizing and growing the sense of connectedness to the mission as a part of this. But I think 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 is it has to do with fundraising. And actually the next two that I'm going to suggest 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 eighties and nineties and really how work has changed over that timescale. And one of them is this for donor relations for example. I think that there are exceptions, but I think 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 close, physically close to the donors that you're shepherding, I think that's a really hard barrier to get over one that maybe somebody in tech sales might not struggle with.

Eric Ressler [21:43]:

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I see where you're coming from there, and it instantly also makes me think about when we are acquiring new clients at cosmic and generating new relationships with clients. In my work, I haven't met most of my clients since 2020 in person ever and never will. And so part of me thinks if I can do that and build what I consider to be really deep relationships with some of our clients who we've worked with in certain cases for many years, who I've still never met in person, I have to imagine that for the right type of organization, fundraising could happen in that way too. And I think, again, you are looking at this probably through the lens of a local organization where people in the local community are used to meeting locally, building locally, attending community events together. And I think that there's definitely some truth in that, but I definitely also know of many organizations who are a little bit more nationally focused or even internationally focused, where fundraising definitely has gone virtual too.

[22:50]:

It is possible. I think it's really, it's just about a different approach. 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 I think that's really the calibration that you need to be doing in your brain if you're a fundraiser, because I think the benefit, if you can break outside of your local community, if you're a regional organization, similar to my talent pool example, 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,

Jonathan Hicken [23:40]:

There's the issue also of the technology itself. And I wonder about if you look at this as an aggregate collection of social impact organizations versus other sectors, the technological advancement of these organizations, and do they have the infrastructure to run the software and to manage the project management software and the CRMs, and 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? And I'm sure there's a spectrum here, but I'm going to go out and limb and suggest that I think probably by and large, if you looked at the bell curve in social impact versus not, we're probably further closer to the side of the spectrum that is less technologically advanced. And so is that transition to remote work more challenging?

Eric Ressler [24:40]:

I mean, I haven't really seen that, to be honest, other than maybe 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 as well in addition to in-person meetings and online meetings. I mean, I think that the pandemic did really pretty quickly accelerate digital transformation at large in culture through Zoom and webinars and people getting used to attending events. And I think that is a silver lining, and I think we have arrived, in my opinion, at a really good post pandemic place where there is an appetite for in-person and virtual events in a way that there just never really was before in person and virtual communication in a way there never really was before.

[25:41]:

And I think that we just need to continue to strengthen our capabilities in each of those ways. I mean, I think for me, it's been interesting because I feel it's like weird when I meet in person with people now in a professional setting, even to some degree in a social setting because I am focused very much on work and raising my kids, and I have friends and stuff and I go out, but not nearly as much as I used to when I was downtown, we were hosting events. So I think there's this muscle that needs to be built or it will atrophy either for in-person or for just building up, working virtually, working remotely. And I would 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 I think a hybrid approach for organizations like yours really, in my opinion, is the best approach. I do think it gets a little hard. I've heard stories from people in tech who are the most frustrating thing is I have to go to the office three days a week to hop on Zoom calls with people that I could have done from my house. That's not a good hybrid culture. So it sounds like you've found a better approach.

Jonathan Hicken [26:57]:

So we've been focusing on remote work is the fundamental sort of element of a changing work culture, but I don't necessarily think that's the only thing that's changing in the conversation. One of those has to do with work-life balance and how much of myself am I willing to put into my work? And on one hand, I think that the social impact sector is actually better suited to embrace that value. And in other ways, I actually think we're not in the sense that we have a reputation of grinding employees to the pulp with little pay. What are you seeing boots on the ground and then I'll share how I think about this.

Eric Ressler [27:38]:

Yeah, I mean, I think there's been a pretty fundamental shift in how we think about work fitting into our lives in general. I think part of that is the pandemic and remote work. I think 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. I think the big thing that I'm seeing or that I've seen and experienced is that people are no longer willing to sacrifice the rest of their life just for work. And work has been, I think in a way that's pretty transformational, more decoupled from someone's identity than it ever has been before. I think that's not always true. A lot of people still consider their work a huge part of their identity. I think that will always be true to some degree, but not to the same extent that it used to be. So I think 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 I think that that is a good recalibration.

Jonathan Hicken [28:49]:

I feel like I'm at my most balanced work-life state maybe ever. And I have the biggest job I've ever had. And I sometimes ask myself, how have I done that? Because I kind of expected it would be the opposite. I took on this big job and I'm a dad now, I'm a single dad. So I would think like, oh my gosh, I should be just absolutely dying. But I'm actually feeling quite balanced at the moment. And one of the big aha moments that I've had, actually, it started with a fitness routine that I've undertaken. And really what happened is I started recognizing very clearly that my ability to show up and do my best work was at its maximum level when I had been exercising, and we've talked about exercise already, but I started to actually have this mental shift where I started to think about exercise as part of my work where I was like, this is a necessary ingredient for me to be able to show up and be the best leader I can be.

[29:56]:

And I've actually now started to defend that time and those priorities against demands for my time because I know that I must continue to hold that line even when I'm being asked not to. And I got to say the pandemic was a part of this learning that I had to nurture different parts of my life in order to be the best leader I can be. And make no mistake, my work is a major part of my identity, and I know and I've learned that I have to nurture these other parts in order to be successful.

Eric Ressler [30:33]:

Yeah, I mean, I think you're preaching to the choir on this one. And I know we've talked about this personally outside of the podcast as well, but I think this is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. I mean, we developed a four day workweek regimen at Cosmic, I want to say in 2011. So we were pretty early adopters of the four day workweek. And I think it's especially important for the type of work that we do because we do creative work. And what I've learned over the years and what science supports is that creativity is only possible if you are not in a state of over chronic stress or burnout. Burnout is essentially just the kryptonite of creativity. And so I realized pretty early on in our trajectory that having a balanced, and people are currently, it's very in vogue to kind of shit on work-life balance right now. I don't know if you've noticed that.

Jonathan Hicken [31:31]:

No,

Eric Ressler [31:32]:

Yeah, we could talk about that too. But a lot of people are, especially executives, especially coming out of this hybrid slash remote conversation or saying work life balance is not really the way to think about it. And whatever it

Jonathan Hicken [31:47]:

Sounds like bullshit to me.

Eric Ressler [31:49]:

I think that 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. I don't know, it feels very botanic to me. But what I wanted to get at the original point is that I want myself and my people and my team to show up at their best as many times as they possibly can. And 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? And I think 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. So social connection, exercise, time in nature, time in quiet, and to yourself and to think and to reflect.

[32:42]:

And I know that for myself, whenever I don't have enough of any of those things in my life, my work absolutely suffers. And I could feel it happening, and I know it's happening, and sometimes you just have to work through that and push through it. But I spend a lot of time thinking about how to give my team and myself the right support systems and the flexibility and the culture to support that as best as we can within the constraints that we have. I think that that is obviously something that you've stumbled upon for your own life and it sounds like also probably for your team as well. I'm a

Jonathan Hicken [33:18]:

Basketball fan and LeBron James is this 40-year-old basketball player who's been the best of the best for 22 years now. 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 and 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 I actually think about my own work in that way. I know that I need to be the driver sometimes, and I'm learning when to take my foot off the gas knowing that I need to save up that energy for the right moment.

Eric Ressler [33:59]:

Yeah, I think that second part is the hardest part, especially as a leader, because there's always something you could be doing. This is something I struggle with a lot, and there are times where I've been able to take my foot off the gas a little bit, and I do sometimes find myself feeling guilty for doing that. And I've learned also that I need to just give myself that time and pay attention to my internal battery around my burnout meter, maybe is a better metaphor to use. And especially there are times where I do have to push, I do get a little burnt out, and there are times where I can do that recharge and it's so important to do it.

Jonathan Hicken [34:41]:

I'm going to make a challenge to CEOs, executive directors and nonprofits, and I think 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 as much as we try. And I have tried to pay my people as much as they could get paid anywhere else, and I'm proud of where we're at, but we're not as high as I know some of my people could make elsewhere. So I come to work thinking I can't be the best in that, but I can be the best in work-life balance and work culture. And so I'm going to challenge all of you out there to be the best in this particular area, but because I think it's a unique advantage that we

Eric Ressler [35:27]:

Have. I completely agree, and I think we did an episode on pay, and I think we didn't really hit on this point as hard as we probably could have. But 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 I think work towards obviously improving both pay and culture and work-life balance. But I mean, I can speak from experience. This has been, I have zero regrets on these choices that I've made. I've been able to hang on to a really solid team, I think 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 I mean the dividends pay off immediately

Jonathan Hicken [36:22]:

Here, here. All right. Well, hey, thanks for breaking down the change in work culture with me, Eric. Appreciate you.

Eric Ressler [36:28]:

Yeah,

Jonathan Hicken [36:28]:

It'll keep changing.

Eric Ressler [36:29]:

We'll keep talking about it.

The Changing Work Culture in Social Impact

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