The need for the 4-day work week, sabbaticals, and systemic solutions to burnout
By Aryenish Birdie | October 14, 2021
There’s no way around it: Talk to just about any animal advocate, and they’ll tell you they’re experiencing burnout or have in the past.
On May 26, 2021, Catalyst — a nonprofit that advocates for women in the workplace — published results from a global survey that found 92% of workers say they are experiencing burnout from the stress related to their workplace, their Covid-19 work experiences, and/or their personal lives. Catalyst went so far as to call it a “crisis at work.” Well before the pandemic, in 2018, CNBC reported that “companies are facing an employee burnout crisis.”
The World Health Organization calls burnout an “occupational phenomenon” and included it in the International Classification of Diseases. They define it as “a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed” and characterize it using three dimensions:
feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and
reduced professional efficacy.
Other definitions take people’s personal lives into account in how they discuss burnout and that’s the framework Encompass uses. For me, I experience burnout as the feeling that I simply can't go on.
As someone who has been fighting for animals since 1997, I can’t help but think of the talented people who were in our movement 10 or 20 years ago who are no longer here because they burned out or because they couldn’t take the racial harms they faced while advocating for animals. They care just as much about animal suffering as they used to, but the way our movement operates proved too difficult for them to sustain. When they left, they took all that institutional knowledge with them and the animals lost brilliant advocates. We have not solved the problem that drove those activists out, and I know many individuals who are at a breaking point today. This must change.
Our movement
It doesn’t help that our movement — and society at-large — have embraced “grind culture,” or the idea that we are always available, gain brownie points by working long and late, and engage in “performative workaholism.” I know this evolved out of the desire to fight as hard as we can for animals but has our movement ever stopped to think critically about how this impacts those who are fighting for the animals?
Our work as animal advocates is often grueling, thankless, underpaid, and emotionally challenging. It’s not uncommon to make ourselves numb to animal suffering as a coping mechanism (to carry on with advancing our cause) so that we don’t face the fact that we are confronting horrific violence every single day. This can lead to depression, anxiety, hopelessness, nihilism, and more.
If that isn’t enough, sometimes we (often people of the global majority) can’t find work cultures or colleagues who are aligned with our identities or complex belief systems, so we deprioritize our own needs while we fight for animals.
The rates of burnout are higher for Black, Indigenous, and people of the global majority, because not only do we constantly carry with us the exhaustion that comes from dealing with racism, but nearly all of us experience racism in the movement as we’re advocating for animals. This can also be called “racial burnout” as a result of “racial backlash” that happens inside organizations. In fact, this peer-reviewed study found that 100% of animal advocates of the global majority considered their experience of racism in the movement a serious contributor to their burnout.
When you stop and think about the waters in which we swim — working long hours in a challenging culture and on a disturbing issue for years without a break — it’s no wonder so many of us are burnt out.
Burnout and self-care
What if we took a step back and realized that the incessant go-go-go mentality and the 5-day/40+ hour work-week were all social constructs developed quite recently, and that we have the power to change these norms? We have the power to better balance our work for animals and our personal lives, so that we don’t burn out, which will help us lead happier, healthier lives, and stay in this fight for the long-haul.
As the founder and executive director of a small nonprofit working at the intersection of two issues I feel passionately about, I get frustrated by how often my feelings of burnout resurface. Before launching Encompass, I predicted that since I’d be directing the work and advancing such a personal and important mission that I’d be immune to burnout. That prediction was false.
No matter how excited you may be about your job, working long hours on a difficult issue for an extended period of time is challenging. I recognize how many of society's (and our movement's) harmful tropes around unsustainable self-sacrifice I've internalized. I realize that I am, like everyone, susceptible to burnout, despite my best efforts to keep it at bay.
Most of the time, I ignore it and take the minimal steps to push through and get back to work; I take a walk around the block, cuddle with my dog, take off for one — or maybe two — weeks, vent with friends, work outside, and then come back to all the same stressors and feelings from before.
After reflecting on my own struggles with burnout, I realized it’s time to replace the extreme emphasis on self-care with community care: the idea that we are responsible for and to each other. Of course, there’s a role and need for self-care, but burnout is too big of a problem to fix and prevent on one’s own. I know now that the problem is not burnout — burnout is the symptom. The root cause is our work culture. This is a systemic issue so we need to treat it like one.
What I hear time and again from animal advocates is that to help prevent burnout, we need to work more sustainable hours, which means we need to be more intentional about our workloads. We want to work, advance our passions, and feel productive. We also want to prioritize the needs of our full selves as humans, like enjoying our loved ones, being in nature, making time to care for our mental health, making time for hobbies, and rest.
Some nonprofits and businesses have made efforts to prevent burnout by offering perks like “summer Fridays,” unlimited PTO (it’s important to note that a minimum amount of required time off is important with this model to ensure folks actually take breaks), self-care stipends, and more. Kudos to workplaces that are thinking about this and implementing these kinds of interventions — they can certainly help to make work more sustainable, but more is needed. We have to integrate these concepts on the daily — not just in how we take time off, but also in how we work and what we expect of one another.
So I started to ask the questions: What if we at Encompass worked four 8-hour days a week instead of five (and kept our same salaries)? Would the quality of our work suffer? Would people notice? Would our donors divest from us? Are there examples of this working outside of the movement? And what about extended periods of time off, like sabbaticals?
I invested significant time researching best practices, successes, and learnings from companies that tried this (see below for a list of resources). Service Direct, a marketing company, found that their employees produced higher quality work when they instituted an alternating 5-day-week, 4-day-week schedule. Iceland ran the world's largest study on shortening the work week and found that 4-day work weeks were an “overwhelming success.” From 2015 to 2019 they conducted a trial of 2,500 government employees, including preschools, offices, social service providers, and hospitals. As a result, “86% of Iceland's workforce have either moved to shorter hours for the same pay, or will gain the right to,” the researchers said. Spain is now piloting a similar project, as is Unilever’s New Zealand operations, and countless more.
Eventually, in October 2019 (yes, two years ago), Encompass instituted a 4-day work week and earlier this year, we implemented a sabbatical policy. These changes have made us more focused while we work and more balanced as activists. And while burnout is still something we may struggle with, it has lightened. We have achieved so much while also making sure we can be in this work for the long haul.
Reflections on the 4-day work week
Admittedly, I had serious trepidation about going public with our decision to adopt a 4-day work week, mostly out of fear that our financial supporters would pull back. However, now that we’ve hit the two-year mark of working ~4-day work weeks, I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished. In fact, most of our supporters go out of their way to applaud how much we do and have done. From this success, I’ve overcome my fear and have chosen to share our experience and findings from implementing a 4-day work week. What does it say that not a single person who regularly collaborates with Encompass even knew we took one whole work day out of our schedules?
Of course, if there are urgent needs, travel, meetings, etc. that can happen at no other time, we will do what needs to be done. But our goal is to work as close to 4 days/32 hours (and not four 10-hour days) as possible. Despite a shorter work week, we set ambitious annual and quarterly goals and we are beholden to them, rather than an arbitrary number of hours we spend each day at our desks.
In a typical week for me, I find that I work just a little bit on my “day off,” but usually just to catch up on final tasks or emails. And then I’m able to have a personal work day to take care of “life maintenance,” such as appointments, personal tasks, chores, and errands so that I’m able to actually use my weekend for rest and leisure. And let’s not forget that so many of us care for others — family members, children, and companion/foster animals — requiring significant time and emotional labor (it’s important to note that this burden is typically higher for women, especially women of color).
With a 4-day schedule, I rarely look at social media during work hours, surf the web, schedule appointments, or submit to distractions because I know I always have Friday for personal tasks and leisure.
The need for sabbaticals
In creating a more sustainable work culture, I discovered the 4-day work week is not enough, and I began conducting research on sabbaticals. From doing this work year after year — and knowing I’m doing this work for the rest of my life — I recognize that a week off here or there is not sufficient enough to make it sustainable. In fact, I hadn’t taken off more than 2 consecutive weeks in 12 years — despite working at organizations with generous or unlimited PTO policies — because taking the amount of time off that would be needed for true restoration either isn’t seen as feasible, the amount of time off isn’t offered, or it’s seen as unacceptable and could impact the morale of the rest of the staff.
We instituted a sabbatical policy that allows full-time employees in good standing to take 6 consecutive paid weeks off every 4 years, with an additional 2 unpaid weeks off if the individual chooses. The time off can be spent however the employee sees fit — our only requirement is that the staffer is fully disconnected. We also offer additional compensation to team members who absorb the extra workload while others are on sabbatical.
More and more organizations are offering sabbaticals and kudos to them! As I developed Encompass’s policy, I looked at the policies of Vegan Outreach, Rainforest Action Network, Animal Legal Defense Fund, and Animal Charity Evaluators as guides. It is important that everyone has access to sabbaticals — not just executives or those who have access to decision-makers.
Our sabbatical policy allows for an opportunity to restore, refresh, retain, and reward our staff, allowing folks to come back to this work energized and with renewed commitment. It’s true that the opportunity to take breaks alone doesn’t solve the problem of burnout (that’s deeper and connected to our work cultures). At the very least though, it allows us to pause and take stock of how we’ve been working while giving us an opportunity to create new habits.
At Encompass, sabbaticals are just one tool to support work-life balance and mitigate burnout, allowing individuals to support the whole self by giving time and space to take care of personal wellness needs and pursue passions beyond the workplace. We’re aware that most of us could be making much higher salaries in the for-profit sector, so offering sabbaticals is a benefit that organizations, including Encompass, can provide since the greatest cost is time.
I am immensely grateful to have taken a sabbatical this past summer. It allowed me to clear my mind in a way I have never been able to do. I learned that I love puzzles, I finally had space to address personal needs that I’ve had to deprioritize despite their importance, and I was able to deeply understand that there’s no “right way” to pause (freeing myself of my massive personal to-do list). I also spent time thinking about what our movement needs more of and what I can do to be a better advocate, and I accepted that rest is valuable for rest’s sake alone.
Sabbaticals are also an opportunity to build the capacity of others in the organization. For example, when I was out, my assistant stepped up in a tremendous way and demonstrated her leadership ability in meeting the needs of the organization — it built institutional confidence, knowledge, and strength.
Far too many groups (Encompass, included) have done a subpar job of prioritizing contingency and succession planning. We often feel like no one person can leave their jobs for an extended period of time because too much rests on any one individual (individualism is a characteristic of white supremacy culture afterall). We worked to challenge this and decided it was okay to take things a little slower during my sabbatical in order for us to prioritize health and well-being. We agreed on and accepted a workflow that would support the broader health of the organization. Through strategic planning, we ensured Encompass could stay nimble and productive through this period, even with limited staffing as a small organization.
Final thoughts
If you’re familiar with the characteristics of white supremacy culture, you’ll recognize a lot of shared themes with the nonprofit industrial complex: perfectionism, worship of the written word, objectivity, binary thinking, individualism, and powerhoarding to name a few.
When we conflate our worth as individuals with these characteristics (and with how hard and how much we work), we are set up to fail.
I often think about Audre Lorde’s famous quote, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” That same principle applies here. We can’t white supremacy our way out of white supremacy. We can’t dismantle oppressive structures using the very structures that built those systems in the first place.
This is why the “nonprofit industrial complex” is criticized, because we often fall prey to the very systems and institutions we’re trying to change. Can we ever hope to make real change when we recreate harmful structures in our organizations? Can we accept that burnout is not an individual problem, but an organizational (and movement-wide) one? Can we address burnout as part of our strategy to address racial equity? Do we want to bring in Black and brown people only to expect them to assimilate to the norms of white supremacy culture?
Before I decided to develop these policies and go public with them, I was concerned about how they’d be perceived. Our society doesn’t value rest and restoration. Instead, we glamorize workaholism and use it as a form of currency. This is how capitalism thrives. We believe we should light ourselves on fire to keep others warm. And for the people for whom the fire of racism is ever-present, this is an especially damaging philosophy.
What if we recognized that taking care of ourselves is an act of resistance against white supremacy culture and capitalism? What if we were allowed the space to truly reflect and develop radical solutions to the massive problems we’re trying to solve during states of calm rather than constantly going from one thing to the next?
I’m acutely aware that animals are suffering by the trillions, and we want to do everything possible for them. But, we often fall into the trap of the false belief that if we work a little harder, a little faster, we’ll make a bigger difference.
We aren’t built to work like this, and we certainly aren’t built to work on issues of suffering, death, and injustice day in and day out, 8-12+ hours a day, for years on end. Our modern-day work culture is failing us, and that means we’re failing the animals and the people who are fighting for them. If we want to build effective organizations and long-lasting advocates we have to address burnout and our work culture first.
It’s time to integrate true balance into our lives while we do this difficult, important, and gratifying, work. It may seem like we don’t have control over how we work but we do — we have the power to change. What will you do to bring it about?
For copious additional resources on the 4-day work week and sabbaticals click here.