Duty of Care: Understanding a Nonprofit Staff’s Experience

If you're on a nonprofit board of directors, do you know what it's like to work at the organization you lead?

It's your responsibility to know this.

Nonprofit board directors have three primary legal duties: duty of care, duty of loyalty, and duty of obedience.

Duty of care refers to a requirement for board members to treat the affairs of the organization with as much care as their own personal or professional affairs. Duty of care requires you to pay attention to what’s going on at the organization and to make decisions with the organization’s best interests in mind.

Among many other things, this means ensuring a safe, productive, and affirming work environment for the employees of the organization.

Because of the hierarchical structure of nonprofit organizations, board members are often disconnected from daily operations and staff experience, relying solely on the staff leader, typically an executive director or chief executive officer, to relay what’s happening in the organization.

Far too frequently, this allows mismanagement to fly under the radar for far too long.

Often, nonprofit staff leaders are under-resourced and lack access to the professional development opportunities required to manage every aspect of the organizations they lead. Responsible boards ensure that through their oversight, they are aware of and invest in these areas - either by overseeing the outsourcing of certain responsibilities, like financial management or people operations, or by investing in executive leaders’ development in these areas.

Sometimes, these gaps go undetected by boards, and executive directors report that all is well, leaving the organization’s leadership in the dark. However, when this happens, the staff of the organizations almost always know.

The traditional model of nonprofit leadership keeps the board of directors and staff separate. If a board isn't involved in the daily operations of the organization (and they shouldn't be), how can they know what it's like to work there and fulfill their duty of care?

Here are three ways a nonprofit board can keep themselves informed of what staff is experiencing:

1. Creating a culture of transparency and accountability - and operationalizing processes to ensure them. Effective annual executive director performance reviews include receiving feedback from the stakeholders with whom executive director works, including staff, community partners, and the community served.

2. Enacting equitable policies and practices. In addition to board-level policies, such as a conflict resolution policy and a whistleblower protection policy, the board of directors should oversee staff-level policies and practices like paid time off policies, conflict resolution policies, and performance management procedures.

3. Defining clear communication channels. Board members should not be involved in an organization’s daily operations or communicate with staff casually, but there should be a clearly defined way for staff to communicate concerns to the board. A dedicated board representative or two (sometimes called board ombudspersons) should be identified and their contact information shared with staff. This should be paired with a clear, step-by-step process for escalating concerns to the board.

If you’re a nonprofit worker, and you think your organization’s board needs to know what you’re experiencing, please feel free to contact me at hello@shannonparris.com.

If you’re a nonprofit board member, and you don’t know what it’s like to work at the organization you lead, I hope you’ll get in touch, too.