Charity Workers Report Feeling Extreme Pressure

Charity workers are eager to bolt from their jobs, according to a new survey conducted by The Chronicle, and many of them continue to feel the effects of the economic downturn.

Four out of five charity workers are actively seeking new positions—or would be if the economy were stronger, according to the survey of 672 people. Nearly 40 percent of employees said they are dissatisfied with their work.

The results echoed those of studies released in October by the staffing firm Professionals for Nonprofits, which found that 70 percent of workers at nonprofits in New York and Washington characterized their jobs as either disappointing or only somewhat fulfilling.

The new studies paint a far darker picture than that of a landmark survey conducted by the Brookings Institution 10 years ago, which found only 5 percent of nonprofit workers were dissatisfied with their jobs.

The difference is probably the result of the tough times that continue to face charities, says Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University who studies the nonprofit work force and conducted the Brookings survey.

“The last three years have been terrible for nonprofits, and there is an anxiety in the sector that’s palpable,” says Mr. Light. “This is a beleaguered work force. They are wondering what the future is going to look like, and they’re right to wonder.”

State of Anxiety

The Chronicle survey revealed just how deeply the economic downturn has cut into the charity work force.

Nearly half of workers said that their organizations had laid off employees since the end of 2008, while 12 percent said that their organizations had ordered employees to take unpaid leave during that period.

And even workers who consider themselves fortunate to have held onto their positions during the darkest days of the recession continue to deal with the damage left in its wake.

“You’re never sure if your position is going to be next,” says Kenia Sandoval, who has spent three years as a fund raiser at the Rotary Foundation, in Evanston, Ill., which raises money for international projects.

Security at Work

Many nonprofits that laid off workers during the downturn have not staffed up again to pre-recession levels. The increased workload that has resulted for employees that survived the recession’s cutbacks may account for another survey finding: 75 percent of workers said they feel either very or somewhat secure in their jobs.

At Thresholds, which provides mental-health services to Chicago-area residents, the layoffs in the fundraising department have forced the remaining employees to work harder than ever before, says Greg Salustro, the organization’s vice president for external affairs.

“We lost the equivalent of five full-time people,” says Mr. Salustro. “There are six of us left, and we’re raising 40 percent more money.”

The recession survivors’ duties have changed to meet the demands. “We’re all generalists now,” he says. “The database manager is now an administrator, the director of institutional giving does major gifts. Our roles just keep expanding.”

Job dissatisfaction is highest among midlevel charity workers, notes Jan Masaoka, a veteran management consultant and the author of The Nonprofit’s Guide to Human Resources. “It’s people just below the management team that are the grumpiest, not the people taking minimum-wage jobs,” she says. “That’s because their expectations are very different.”

She says she’s “skeptical” of surveys that show widespread dissatisfaction among the nonprofit rank and file. “We need to, on one hand, value people’s input saying they’re unhappy and at the same time understand that in context,” she says. “It’s not socially acceptable in nonprofits to say you like your job. Socially acceptable is to say ‘I have way too much to do, and I’m unhappy.’ It’s like, in high school, it’s also not socially acceptable to say, ‘Gosh, I love my teachers.’”

Training Managers Helps

Charities can try to improve job satisfaction among their employees by putting more effort into training and supporting managers, says Wendy Gradison, chief executive of PRS, formerly Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services, a social-service group in McLean, Va.

“None of us are born knowing how to manage,” she says. PRS brings in consultants to teach supervisors sound management techniques and requires that all employees, including managers, meet with their bosses at least every other week.

Nonprofits often provide training in new skills as a way to improve job satisfaction among rank-and-file workers, but that’s only successful when employees can apply what they learn, says Caroline McAndrews, director of leadership and communications at the Building Movement Project, a group in New York that seeks to help social-change organizations function more effectively.

Wanted: New Jobs

The combination of anxiety, mounting workload, and stagnant pay is a recipe for job dissatisfaction, says Mr. Light.

“Workloads in the nonprofit sector have only gotten heavier, and there’s no end in sight to the pressure,” he says.

High levels of dissatisfaction may be fueling a rise in the number of job seekers. About 43 percent of employees told The Chronicle that they are actively looking for a new job, while 39 percent said that they would be searching if the economy were stronger.

Heather Malin spent five months searching for a new position and will start her new job this month as the director of institutional advancement at the Cancer Research Institute, in New York. Ms. Malin, who has spent the past two years working as the assistant dean for development at New York University, says that high staff turnover is increasingly common among charity workers.

“Organizations are investing less in their staffs, and the result is that churn and turnover are on the rise,” says Ms. Malin, who worked as a fundraiser at two other colleges before her stint at New York University.

“The amount of time most frontline fundraisers stay at an organization has gotten shorter,” she notes. “The most striking place I see it is in résumés I review when hiring for fundraising staff: Candidates, for the large part, have two- to three-year stays at most organizations.”

Even charity workers who say that they are satisfied with their current positions are keeping an eye out for brighter prospects ahead. Anita Buckmaster, who works as the operations manager at the New Haven Preservation Trust, in Connecticut, would like to find a job that pays a higher salary-someday.

“If the economy were better and there were more jobs out there, I’d start looking. Everybody always looks,” says Ms. Buckmaster.

A Brighter Future?

While the Chronicle survey points to persistent gloom among charity workers, some signs of improvement are on the horizon.

More than half of workers reported that they have received a pay increase in the past year.

Just 11 percent of charity workers said that their pay had been cut since 2008, a sign that perhaps the worst of the damage done by the economic downturn is in the past.

And sometimes a little dissatisfaction can be a good thing, suggests Ms. Masaoka, who says that having happy, satisfied workers doesn’t necessarily equal effective work.

If a charity has 100 employees and they’re all very happy, she suggests, it might be a sign that supervision isn’t tough enough.

“Having 100 out of 100 people feeling happy about their jobs shouldn’t be the goal,” she says. “Effective work should be the goal.”

But in a time when nonprofit workers are asked to do more with less, some managers say that compassionate leadership can make a difference in workers’ satisfaction and commitment.

At ARTworks, an arts council in Beaufort, S.C., the recession hit hard; the tiny group saw its staff cut from five people to two full-timers and one part-time worker.

Lisa Annelouise Rentz, the nonprofit’s public-relations coordinator, was one employee whose hours and pay were trimmed. But she says her morale hasn’t suffered because the group’s executive director, J.W. Rone, has gone out of his way to offer flexibility and consideration; she now works at home frequently and is given first dibs on many paid teaching opportunities supported by the school district, such as creating arts programs for local students.

Mr. Rone says that keeping morale high is a top priority.

“No matter how depressed we get as managers, we have to keep a stiff upper lip and know that things are going to work out,” he says. “We have to try to translate that down to our staff and hope that things will get better.”

Noelle Barton, Heather Joslyn, Marisa López-Rivera, and Nicole Wallace contributed to this article.