7 Workplace Practices Killing Your Nonprofit’s Culture

A Manager’s guide to building trust, retaining talent, and creating a workplace that keeps employees from scrolling Indeed

We love a good employment rant (check out our blog about red flags that make potential hires run). So here it comes. Everyone loves to talk a big talk about having a great workplace culture, but when it comes to the practical details, are you truly walking the walk? If you want an effective organization, one that not only does what it currently aims to do but has growth in its future, you need kickass employees who stay. If you want kickass employees who stay, you need happy employees. If you want happy employees, you need compassionate workplace practices and an infrastructure that empowers people to shine. When’s the last time you looked around the office and really took stock?

There are so many ways to mismanage people and resources, and getting better at both should be on everyone’s list. Here’s a list of things that are common practice but actually make workplace culture suck. We recommend you stop doing them right away.

Workplace Practices that Need to Stop

Making your employees write their own job descriptions

Your employee is the authority on what they do, but it’s literally not their job to do this (unless they run your HR). Besides, you should have already operationalized these to be reviewed during onboarding and updated every annual review. If you don’t have money to hire or consult with an HR specialist, draft an outline of what you think belongs in the description and have a conversation with your employee to improve on your draft. Make it work for their communication style: do they work best by talking it out? By making tracked edits in a shared doc? You don’t have to use the same editing approach for each person, but the base outline should be pretty standard across your organization.

Making your employees submit a doctor’s note when they’re sick

In a workplace built on mutual respect, we have to treat adults like, well, adults. Requiring a doctor’s note for a standard sick day sends a clear message of distrust, implying that your team can’t be taken at their word. Beyond the blow to morale, it creates an unnecessary hurdle for employees who are already feeling unwell—forcing them to navigate a clinic waiting room just to prove they have the flu. If you’ve hired high-performing people, trust them to manage their own health and recovery without the playground-style oversight.

Mismanaging performance evaluations

Set clear goals and a transparent process for managing evaluations. If you don’t already, make evaluations 360°, so managers and directors get feedback from their teams. And take any negative critique—especially from those who report to you—with grace. Blowing up at the first person brave enough to tell you something you don’t want to hear is really difficult to undo, and you can’t run a functional organization on mistrust and vindictiveness. Besides: we know a lot of supervisors who expect their employees to take constructive feedback well, so model the behavior you hope to see. After all, management sets culture.

Pressuring employees for info about their personal lives

Oversharing ≠ culture fit. People’s personal lives are just that—personal. If your employees don’t want to tell you about their family vacations, relationships, dinner plans, weekends, or religious observances, stop pushing them to (or creating an environment where those who do share are celebrated, promoted, or trusted more). Building a culture of belonging means creating a space where people feel safe bringing their whole selves to work—but it also means respecting the choice to leave the "whole self" at home. Psychological safety shouldn't have a social tax; trust is built through professional reliability and shared goals, not by forced vulnerability during a Monday morning icebreaker.

Giving goals without resources

Resources mean time, tools, professional development opportunities, or budget. This please-stop comes in lots of different forms, like prematurely promoting someone to manager/department head with zero training or mentorship. Or assuming that marketing staff can magically run a successful fundraising strategy or box office with no experience doing those things. Ask your employee this question: “What would you need to be able to accomplish X?” And then do that, as best you can, or adjust the expectation to meet your resource reality.

Setting baseless goals

“Let’s raise revenue 10% across all programs by next fiscal year, but change nothing about our current approach.” Um, sure Jan. Just because it sounds good doesn’t mean it’s realistic. Ask your employees what they think is possible if they are properly resourced. Look at historic trends and industry trends. Set some reach goals and some realistic goals, and then (we don’t mind saying it again!) get your team what they need to actually achieve them.

Hiring interns to increase bandwidth

Interns often work for no (or horribly low) pay, reporting to employees who are spread too thin to mentor them in any meaningful way. Not only is that unethical, it’s not a good long-term strategy. Stop thinking of growth as expanding wider and try to think of it as conditioning the roots. How can you invest in the programs and people in front of you, rather than always looking beyond? If you truly need a bigger team, focus your energy on increasing revenue to bring on full-time employees, instead of ad-hoc-ing a staff via 3 summer interns.

As a manager, you may like to think you’re writing the story of your organization all by yourself, but let’s face it: without your employees, it’s a blank page. They should get a hefty share of the writing credit. Listen to your staff, treat them with respect, and adjust your workplace practices based on their needs. When people feel truly valued, they do their best work, and when your team is functioning at its highest capacity, you’re serving your community the way your mission statement says you should be. Now go and make the smartly designed, efficient, and ethical workplace of your employees’ dreams.

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