Reduce staffing shortages and fatigue by putting your people first
Reduce staffing shortages and fatigue by investing in your organizational health, and in your most critical asset—your people.
While data and technology are incredibly important, they would be irrelevant without focusing on the people who drive the strategic and day-to-day work of your organization. This focus is even more important with a growing number of job openings due to burnout, aging workforces, and low compensation compared to cost of living. These staffing challenges demand a focus on how we attract, retain, and grow talent in a sector that's notoriously resource-strapped and focused on mission impact. There's an outdated view that ‘overhead’ is an inefficient use of funding; however, the challenges around attracting and retaining talent and the need to upskill your workforce demonstrate the importance of investing in your organizational health, and in your people. It’s time to recognize that people and operations are critical to scale and reach an organization’s programmatic goals.
For nonprofit organizations, training and upskilling in a rapidly evolving landscape is a challenge for any organization. Focus on the most important skills needed to reach your organizational goals and provide your staff with the time and space to learn. Additionally, work to understand your people's challenges and how to meet their needs to preempt burnout. Depending on what you’re hearing as needs and opportunities from the people in your organization, this could be an opportunity to provide growth through advancement, mentorship, and coaching, or you can assess your organizational culture by listening to the common challenges and looking for ways to build trust and collaboration. In any situation, however, providing the opportunity for feedback and demonstrating that you hear what your employees are experiencing can go a long way.
For grantmakers, it’s even more important to recognize the operational challenges that your grantees are facing—impact tracking becomes impossible without the ability to retain and upskill your staff.
This topic isn’t devoid of opportunities for technological advancement—the two can coexist. You can take care of your people and leverage automation tools to reduce burnout by streamlining administrative tasks so that your employees can spend more time on tasks that further your mission. For example, AI will be a game-changer as giving transforms with modern technology and can be used with your systems to better find resources internally, answer questions based on our targeted mission space, and quickly upskill and onboard. This can take the form of onboarding new team members, summarizing documents, building chatbots into your FAQs/help desk, and streamlining administrative tasks like scheduling.
The world is changing faster than we can grasp. As companies rush to use AI to harvest profits, we’ve been helping our mission-driven partners quickly adopt AI for public, environmental, and societal good.
We think this is the most impactful technology we’ve ever seen to accelerate our most important dreams!
NAVIGATING THE CHALLENGE OF STAFFING SHORTAGES AS A NONPROFIT.
One of the most visible examples of the increasing staffing challenges facing nonprofits is the nursing staffing shortage our healthcare nonprofits face. And as the perfect storm of COVID-19 burnout, increased profitization of the healthcare system, and the baby boomer retirement wave hits, the American Association of Colleges of Nurses predicts the U.S. will continue to experience a nursing staffing crisis until 2030. Across the country, hospital systems, healthcare staffing agencies, and government organizations are focused on solving the RN shortage problem—a solution that will positively impact clinical outcomes, patient safety measures, and financial viability.
We’re seeing organizations innovate the future of healthcare staffing with solutions that combine people, processes, and technology to meet the problem. Solutions to consider are: local per diem (per day staffing) that gives staff flexibility to work closer to their “home” location; future-proof staffing plans with a healthy mix of staffing options that keep patient-to-nurse ratios low; and use of AI to free up time for staff to focus on patients and the people they serve.
Learn more about ways to address staffing shortages in healthcare nonprofit organizations.
