At ACEsConnection we attempt to ‘walk our talk’ when it comes to our mission, values, and workplace practices. Last week, during our first all staff meeting of the year, we reflected on whether we were ACTUALLY, as an organization, creating a workplace environment that was structured to support staff wellbeing.
Encouraging self-care is not enough. We must be intentional and committed to a sense of collective care as well as build structures and systems that support our ability to do this. So often we talk about self/collective workplace wellbeing, but it can often result in random one-off events. This can especially be true in service organizations and nonprofits. The urgency of our work, our passion for our mission, the strong sense of purpose that drives many of us in our roles actually encourages unhealthy workplace behavior. We also understand that many of us who have high ACE scores use workaholism as a coping mechanism, which can lead to burnout.
Just before the holiday break we collectively agreed that we would all take two weeks off and truly attempt to ‘unplug’ from work. What are some of the structural steps we took to support staff ability to ‘unplug’?
- We made a plan to cover key work, so that when we were off, we were off!
- We agreed that we would not send emails or Slack messages to each other.
- Some of us attached this out-of-office message to our emails:
Hello, Thank you for your message.
Please know that ACEs Connection is providing staff with a restorative break and opportunities for self-care during the holidays. As such I am out of the office. I will review and respond to messages after I return on Monday January 4th. For urgent matters, please text me.
Wishing you opportunities for rest and self-care too.
We received a few responses from people who said that they wished they could do the same and that they were grateful that ACEs Connection was demonstrating their commitment to self-care.
Before the holiday break, we acknowledged that we were “spent” — past the point of exhaustion. When we talked about what we did over the break to restore ourselves, everyone owned up to sleeping for most of the first week. We had to do so to have enough energy to do anything the following week. None of us liked that. We never want to get to that level of depletion again. It’s not healthy for us or our family and friends. We committed to prevent that in the future.
When we gathered for our first Zoom of 2021 last week, many of us were actually glowing. You could see the physical difference even virtually. We start every meeting with an opening reflection of some sort. This week we reflected on what practices helped us achieve our healthy glow.
So how did we spend our “required” time off? Napping, walking, no Gmail (removing email apps!), sleeping late, no peeking at the ACEs Connection site, luxurious long stretches of uninterrupted time to read, sitting outside and watching the world go by, taking photos, guiltless binge-watching favorite shows, having muddy adventures on a bike ride, checking off items on a household to-do list, volunteering in a food bank, avoiding the news, taking long quiet hot baths while kiddos were in the care of partners, losing a sense of time while playing video games with a partner.
Our challenge now is to become more aware of sticking to norms and a structure so that we’re never “spent” again. Ironically, this is not our first attempt — we wrote a blog post last September entitled: We’re creating a restorative work environment at ACEs Connection. Five staff members and the community manager from the Greater Richmond Trauma-Informed Community network contributed lots of great ideas.
And one of our guiding principles, which we created LONG before that blog post, already addresses this:
Organizational Model.We model trauma-informed, resilience-building internal and external practices, and encourage self-care and well-being for ourselves, our staff, and all the people within the organizations, communities, and systems we work with.
We wrote that because we want to model what a sane, healthy, restorative workplace looks like in policy and in practice. We plan to encourage each other to slow down and enjoy the ride. Our commitment is to pay attention, to be aware when we see this happening, gently call it out, and take action to right our course. If we cannot care for ourselves and each other, we cannot continue this important work. We strive to be an organization where people not only find purpose and passion in the work but love the workplace (even if it is virtual) and want to be here. We don't always get it right, but we’ll keep trying.
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