Have you ever considered how fair or “just” your behaviour at work is?
It matters more than you might think. In fact, research shows that if managers behave fairly their staff are more likely to feel committed to their jobs and perform better overall.
The good news is that justice can be embedded into the culture of your organisation – particularly through the improvement of policies and procedures – which can ultimately improve the impact your not-for-profit organisation is able to make.
Do you know what your staff are thinking?
As part of our annual survey of the EthicalJobs.com.au community, last year we asked jobseekers who are currently working in the NFP sector to tell us what advice they’d give their current employer to “help improve the workplace, processes and practices in your organisation?”
Almost 1,000 people responded to the question – anonymously of course – and the results provide a fascinating insight into the state of NFP organisations through the eyes of their staff.
“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.
It’s no secret: in the NFP sector, burnout happens.
But according to one NFP leader, there are some common myths about the sector that feed this culture of burnout.
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.
Office Politics: in most organisations they’re probably unavoidable. But when manoeuvring for power or influence becomes more important to staff or volunteers than your NFP’s purpose or mission, then organisational dysfunction is probably just around the corner.
When a group of people come together in a work context, the strategies and schemes they might employ to their own advantage can be difficult to stamp out. So what can you do as an NFP leader or HR professional to stop office politics taking hold?
With almost 15,000 employees, Facebook has some serious experience with office politics – and they’ve come up with five tactics that they’ve found useful in preventing politics taking hold and keeping their organisational culture healthy.
It’s difficult to talk about power. Mentioning power can conjure up memories of encounters with parents, teachers, bosses, the law, family or partners who have exercised power over over us in negative ways.
But power relationships are woven throughout our lives, and throughout our workplaces. And being clear about who holds power – particularly the power to make decisions – in your organisation, as well as ensuring that structure reflects your organisation’s shared values – will mean that staff and volunteers understand how and why power works as it does. And that can mean the difference between an empowered staff member, and a disempowered, disengaged one.
We have known for many years that humans are driven by an innate desire to find or foster meaning in what we do, even under the most extreme of conditions. Given how central work is to most people’s lives, it is a key place to seek meaningfulness. Recent research with 135 people in a wide range of jobs set out to discover what they considered meaningful work, how work can be made meaningful, and how this sense of meaningfulness can be erased or destroyed.
Did you know that staff who bring their pets to the office experience a drop in stress levels of around 11 percent? So if you’d like to explore how to make your office pet-friendly, here’s the story of how one Australian NFP organisation did it to staff acclaim.