NONPROFIT MANAGEMENT: Tackling COVID Fatigue in Your Administrative, Back-Office Staff

If you have attempted to schedule an appointment for your car, been but running errands, or have even just been to the drive-thru lane of your favorite fast-food joint lately, you have experienced the impact of the state of the 2022 job market. The shortage of workers we are experiencing spans across a broad spectrum of industries and organizations. Consequently, the customer experience is often slower and well, you just get less. We’ve all probably seen this when we interact with the front-line workers of businesses we know are understaffed. And you likely worry about the “customer experience” of your own organization’s customers as well.

The people who work in your back-office and administrative functions are feeling the effects of this, too. In these administrative roles, the stress is often less about the customer experience and more about managing through the competing deadlines and demands that are typically tracked only by each individual’s “to-do list.” To-do list items that aren’t finished today will be sitting there tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. Continuously being presented with additional and often uniquely challenging “to-do” items during this disruptive time elevates stress. You know it’s bad when one of the items people write on their to-do list is to re-organize their to-do list.

The cumulative effect of this is tired back-office and administrative personnel. We’re all tired. This is COVID fatigue, not in a medical sense, but in the sense of operating in a heightened state of stress through this now two-year period of uncertainty and change. 

So how do you address this fatigue in your organization? Well, there’s no magic answer, but here are six practices that organizations are adopting, embracing, and using to find success.

1. Acknowledge the stress and people’s efforts related to it. Sounds simple, right? But truly acknowledging the stress level of your back-office personnel requires active listening and a degree of empathy that may not feel natural in conversations with professionals in accounting, human resources, information technology, and the like. Make the time to have a conversation with people in these functional areas of your organization about their overall situation rather than specific items on their to-do list. You likely have employees who “just get it done” and have reliably done so throughout this COVID disruption period, regardless of what challenges are thrown at them. Are you acknowledging those individuals’ efforts in a manner that confirms their contributions to the cause are not taken for granted? For employees who have struggled or are struggling, do you acknowledge their efforts and share words of encouragement in a meaningful way? 

People often associate this acknowledgement process with some sort of monetary compensation element. However, many organizations are getting noteworthy value from the acknowledgement process without even spending money. The focus is taking the time to acknowledge the effort and make a connection.

2. Prioritize ruthlessly. You may have heard the term “ruthless prioritization” utilized by a variety of consultants and even celebrity business leaders, including Sheryl Sandberg. Don’t let the buzz-word factor of the term distract you. What does ruthless prioritization look like? One of its most-notable features is the idea that items will be removed from the to-do list rather than simply re-ordered on that list. Don’t prioritize just to decide what you are going to do next. Instead, think about what you shouldn’t be doing at all. It’s about prioritizing based on a real evaluation of the value of each task and removing items with less or no value. 

This concept is easy to agree with in theory, but hard to execute. However, it is possible. I was recently talking to a CFO who had just cut her organization’s monthly reporting to the finance committee from a packet of nearly 70 pages down to closer to 15 pages, eliminating hours of work. She had initiated a conversation with the committee about the relative value of the old 70-page reporting package, which had evolved over many years. She brought to their attention all the organization’s accounting team could do with the time they typically spend every month putting all of it together. Fifty pages of reports and schedules are now eliminated from the to-do list. 

3. Evolve to an interactive communication style. Many forward-thinking organizations have shifted their focus of communication. They conduct more “stay interviews,” which are similar to an exit interview, but for employees who are not leaving. We see fewer emails to all personnel, more small-group discussions, and fewer “all-staff” Zoom meetings set-up for senior management to talk and everyone else to listen. And there is more talk about why we do what we do, in the context of the organization’s mission and culture, and less focus on to-do list tasks. 

At the start of the pandemic, communication was almost exclusively top-down. Your staff needed to know what was happening, what it meant for them, how the organization was reacting, and what they needed to do right now. Decisive top-down communication was necessary under those circumstances. Since then, many organizations have shifted to a more open and inclusive communication style that is focused on listening at least as much as it is on top-down communication.

4. Proactively respond to communication. Companies that have moved to a more interactive communication style obtain information about their workforce that they may not have had good data on before. This presents the opportunity to act on that information in response to your people’s input. The risk here is that you fail to act on people’s input, causing frustration among your people as a result. High-performing organizations plan for this and understand in advance that they need to be flexible enough to consider what they’ve learned and make changes that align with what their staff have indicated they want. To get the most value from this process, your people need to feel not just listened to but heard. They must feel their organization’s leadership cares enough to act on the feedback in some way, shape, or form.

This does not have to mean drastic or expensive action. For example, an organization heard from its employees that since they were working late more often (until after dark), they would appreciate better lighting in the parking lot, so the organization made lighting improvements. Another company’s employees expressed the desire for more frequent and meaningful performance feedback. As a result, the organization modified its performance-appraisal process to provide formal feedback to employees twice a year instead of only annually. Certainly, there is a cost to these things, but there is also a benefit in the form of improved morale, improved employee experience, and, hopefully, improved retention.

5. Overhire. Get into a mindset of continuous hiring for back-office personnel. Don’t wait until your controller gives notice of her resignation to think about hiring the next controller-level person. Instead, open your company to the practice of identifying and bringing in qualified people who can help move the organization forward all the time, not just when turnover happens. Many organizations are concluding that the fear they would hire one additional person and have nothing for that person to do is probably less scary than being routinely under-resourced and having essential tasks not getting done timely or at all.

Yes, this may mean you end up over-budget on payroll costs for some of these back-office functional areas for a time. In the long run, is that worse than essentially being continually understaffed due to turnover, absences, and the ever-growing demands of the current environment? Change the narrative from one focused on cost to one fixated on the value delivered by having adequately resourced support functions for your organization.

6. Outsource. The frequency with which organizations have outsourced administrative and back-office functions is accelerating significantly. An increasing number of not-for-profit organizations are finding that they can successfully outsource their entire accounting function, billing process, human resources, information technology, internal audit, fundraising, and/or other functions. 

The cost-benefit evaluation of outsourcing versus handling these functions in-house has evolved to include specific considerations related to the cost of turnover, recruiting, training, orientation, and temporary fill-in resources while positions are vacant. Outsourcing for functions like accounting and information technology have taken hold more at smaller nonprofits, where they may have had a one- or two-person accounting department, and therefore one person’s departure had an incredible impact. But even larger organizations are taking a hard look at outsourcing as an option to increase the stability, consistency, and bench strength of key back-office functions.

One thing we hear almost universally is that organizations believe they can’t do things like they used to, and they don’t think things will ever go back to how they were in 2019. Whether or not these six trends fit your organization, keep an open mind to change how you interact with your back-office and support personnel and how those functions will be conducted going forward.      

Bettina Lipphardt is a partner and the team leader in The Bonadio Group’s Healthcare/Tax-Exempt Syracuse/Utica Division. She provides consulting and auditing services for a variety of tax-exempt clients. Contact her at blipphardt@bonadio.com