If you’re reading this, keeping your nonprofit employees happy — along with keeping them at all — is probably high on your mind. We’ re working our way through a period of tremendous employment reshuffling. You can call it “the Big Quit” or the “Great Resignation” or whatever you prefer, but the bottom line is that 13 percent more people quit their jobs in 2021 than in 2019.

By comparison, during the 2007-09 Great Recession, the United States lost roughly nine million jobs. Today, the  same number of people are voluntarily walking away their jobs every two months.

Beyond the work itself, bosses, peers, and employers now have the added responsibility of ensuring that workers are not simply productive but also cared for. To be fair, the workplace was always supposed to do that. But now it’s front and center. And if we want to keep our teams engaged and thriving, we have to do a lot more than day-old donuts in the break room.

This really matters, and here’s why

Happy teams lead to better business outcomes. Research has found that employee happiness drives a 13 percent increase in productivity. As Virgin’s Richard Branson has said, “[If] the person who works at your company is 100% proud of the job they’re doing…they’re gonna be happy and therefore the customer will have a nice experience.”

Growing your nonprofit is certainly one value-add. But how do you keep an employee proud and happy?

Other research has found that a healthy, non-toxic work environment can be “10 times more important than pay” in retaining employees. The conversation around earning a living wage is long overdue, and now we must go further and look at the things that go above and beyond salary and other “perks.” There are a few straightforward ways to celebrate your most important resource: your people.

Start with yourself. There are few things I can promise you about organizational life, but one of them is that attitudes are contagious. Good ones can be transformative, and poor ones can sink an entire organization. If we expect others to be positive, bright, and productive, we can’t simply demand it of them. We have to do it ourselves first, showcase and model what we want to see in others.

The Leadership Challenge co-authors Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner have been advising on such things for over 30 years, and I love their sentiment about modeling the way: “Titles are granted, but it’s your behavior that wins you respect. If you want to gain commitment and achieve the highest standards, you must be a model of the behavior that you expect of others.”

Give little gifts. I don’t care what anybody says; people love getting “stuff.” I’m not talking about expensive or costly gifts. Small, meaningful, heartfelt demonstrations of appreciation have always gone a long way, and these days they go even further.

You have to know if your people like public or private recognition, but there’s always something you can do for everyone. For the extroverts, show off their wins at a staff meeting, with board members and close donors, or in some sort of public forum — Slack chat, group email, giant Post-it notes in the break room. Perhaps have a company breakfast or lunch and let that person pick the cuisine.

For your shy colleagues, give them some private praise, let their boss know that you notice how well they’re doing, or pen them a handwritten note. Bob Reticker, a senior performance consultant at HR firm Insperity, advises: “A personal note written with sincerity and specifics can sometimes mean the most to an employee.”

#TakeTheBreak. I reference this hashtag a lot, especially as advice for fundraiser self-care. Over the past 30 months, I have often used it to encourage people to be radical owners of their own time. It’s easier to get burnt out now more than ever, and sometimes that can creep up without warning, especially in high-stakes environments.

Making space looks different for everyone. It could be as simple as giving individual nonprofiteers or teams periods of intentional downtime — ideally before they need it, or before they think they will need it. Or it could be something that helps build community, like taking a poll on workers’ favorite community organizations and proposing a volunteer day.

My career extends back nearly 20 years, and I have always found that intentional breaks from work, in any capacity, are a boon for employees. That, in turn, has a big impact on entire companies.

Last words

“There is a talent exodus,” LinkedIn CEO Seth Morales muses. That’s not up for discussion, we’re seeing it happen in real-time. What is up for discussion, however, is how we participate in preventing that in our own organizations. The notes above are three very basic opportunities you can practice right now — and always. It doesn’t take any other special moment to make our people feel great.

And don’t put this off. It doesn’t matter if you’re a three-person nonprofit startup or a multi-million dollar shop. Punting this down the road is an easy thing to do, but it can (and often will) decimate your business from the inside out.

Evan Wildstein is a fundraiser and nonprofiteer in Houston, Texas. His first book on servant-leadership and philanthropy will be published in 2023.