Have you ever struggled with a problem that will not go away, despite multiple attempts to solve it?
Adaptive leadership is a practice that helps a leader to engage members of an organisation to adapt to change, and it can help tackle problems which stubbornly persist or face unexpected resistance, despite seemingly obvious solutions.
For many workers, working 100% remotely during most of 2020 has been hard. But as states and industries look towards fully reopening in a new post-Covid-19 world, new people challenges are starting to emerge.
As many as a quarter of Australian employees say they don’t want to return to their offices until they feel safer – or perhaps ever.
So how should your organisation address this potential challenge?
Who could have predicted that 2020 would be such a challenging year for so many people and organisations, right across the world?
Challenging times can bring out the best and the worst in organisations, but whatever the impact of the pandemic for your NFP, having an HR team – or person – that has the confidence and trust of the your staff and volunteers is critical.
So how can HR professionals stay relevant during challenging times?
Many Australians are starting to head back to their workplaces as coronavirus restrictions are lifted.
Here are four strategies you can use to help your staff transition back to the workplace.
Beyond its obvious health impact, the economic impact of COVID-19 is huge. Many NFPs are unfortunately facing some of the toughest decisions in HR and recruitment — reducing work hours, standing down employees and redundancies.
These are difficult conversations to have, but there are some simple points to bear in mind that can ease the process for everyone.
It’s no secret that the not-for-profit sector has faced unprecedented instability in recent years, with uncertainty fast becoming the ‘new normal’.
The drastic drop in donations caused by the GFC, constant fluctuations in government funding and sweeping sector reforms like the NDIS are just three examples of massive change – and that doesn’t even touch on the increasingly volatile political climate both in Australia and overseas.
To start developing skills to help lead teams during these uncertain times, and to prepare for change in the future, here are three important lessons for leaders at all levels of your NFP.
“Innovation” is all the rage in Australia right now. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has urged an “ideas boom”, investing billions of dollars to promote private sector innovation.
But what about NFP organisations? NFPs need to innovate too, even though it’s by no means easy.
The rollout of the NDIS has left many in the disability services sector with questions about what their future workforce will look like. Now, there’s a free online tool that aims to help answer all your questions.
Just this week, we’ve had floods in Victoria, NSW and Tasmania and cyclonic storms in South Australia. Natural disasters – whether floods, droughts, heatwaves or bushfires – are rarely far from the headlines in Australia. Which makes it all the more shocking that 25 percent of community organisations say they might need to close permanently after an extreme weather event, while half think they’d be out of action for at least a week.
That’s why the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) suggests that community organisations are generally ill-prepared for disasters and emergencies. To help address this, ACOSS has developed a toolkit to help community organisations measure and improve their resilience in such circumstances.
In the lead-up to her keynote address at the 2016 Not-For-Profit People Conference in November, we spoke to Oxfam’s Chief Executive Dr Helen Szoke about leading teams through transformative change – the highs, the lows, and what you can learn from one of Australia’s leading international aid and development NGOs to apply to your organisation’s change processes.