I’m consolidating all the old stuff from blogs, business sites and newspaper and magazine articles here (although the moore-consulting.net email address you have will still work), since I’m not adding much to any web presences at the moment.

That’s about it (with a photo of a relatively recent trip to London, ‘cos why not?).

One of the things I didn’t mention in my roundup of the three years’ of photography since my previous post was some of the photo work I’ve done for Wise Fool New Mexico. They are an awesome group of circus performers who use teaching and performing circus arts to be a great force for good in the Santa Fe community and beyond.

My daughter Miss F’s been attending their summer camps for years, learning trapeze, stilt-walking and unicycling as well as less tangible but even more important things such as confidence, bravery and collaboration. After 2 weeks of camp where the kids also learn acrobatics, clowning and puppetry, they put on a performance for parents and friends.

I started photographing Miss F’s shows as in interested parent, but after I shared the images with the folks at Wise Fool, they asked me to photograph some of the other camps too. And I’m happy to volunteer my time to them, not just because the shows are great fun to shoot, but because I support their work and mission wholeheartedly. To see the great strides the children make as they help each other face their fears and overcome challenges to create these amazing performances is so impressive.

Wise Fool runs programs to offer access to its empowering classes to teens and children who might not otherwise be able to take advantage of them, and one of the performances I photographed was for the TeenBUST program for middle school girls.

Wise Fool share the images I produce with the parents of the participants and also use them for their website and busy social media accounts. I’m delighted to be able to help them out – and to have the privilege of photographing these amazing events.

(Quick technical note – most of these images are made with the Fuji XT-1 and either the 56mm f/1.2 lens for the individual shots or close-ups, or the 23mm f/1.4 for the wider images. The performance space is pretty dark (as it should be), so I tend to be shooting close to wide-open to give me fast enough shutter speed to freeze the action. The good news is I tend to get to sit literally right in front of the performers, so I get uninterrupted views and don’t need a big telephoto lens. For the aerial skills like trapeze or fabric, one key thing is to anticipate the culmination of the skill the kids are doing.

There’s normally one moment they’ve been aiming for, where the final arm movement comes up, or the head is lifted – the pose that gets the audience cheering. The trouble can be when there are two or three performers on stage at once you have to keep trying to work out who’s going to be ready next, and switch from one to the other. The clowning photos are fun too – it can look a lot like chaos with kids chasing around everywhere, but when they form instant groups, interacting with one performer with exaggerated facial expressions, that’s the shot to get.)

It’s true, folks. A full-time job as Communications Director at the building sector climate change think tank Architecture 2030 has been taking up a lot of my time. The good news is that I’ve still been taking photos – independently and for clients – so now I’m back on the blog at least this once, I’ll try and clear the backlog of news and views.

A quick summary goes something like this:

Photographing a whole school:

When the previous photographer proved to be a bit creepy and not that great, my daughter’s school asked me if I could shoot all the school portraits and group class photos for them. I’ve loved doing it, and this fall finished my third year photographing over 150 great kids from pre-K through 6th grade.

Shooting wedding number 2:

As a wedding gift for good friends of mine, I shot my second wedding recently and really enjoyed it. The documentary-style shooting I prefer went down very well, and with so much real emotion on display (and everyone looking good all dressed up), it was a real privilege to be able to capture those moments.

 

Family portrait sessions:

The day job keeps me pretty busy, but I still take commissions for family portraits every now and again – mainly from repeat clients and/or friends. One family I’ve photographed several times have six children, including triplet 1st grade boys, and while that might sound nightmarish, I actually really enjoy the challenge, and checking in with the kids every year.

My own personal work:

Some things never change, and I still, of course, photograph my daughter and the things we get up to as a family. As she’s grown, the feel has changed a little bit, but she still tolerates me and I’ve enjoyed trying my hand at sports photography as soccer/football has become more and more important to her. And a camera’s never too far away when we’re traveling, so I’ve shot in in Croatia, Italy, France, England, Canada, Denver, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and other assorted destinations.

Full-on Fuji:

I’m back to full-blown Fuji-ness now. As my previous post suggested, the Fuji XT-1 was finally the flexible, capable and badass camera I was looking for from Fuji, and I’ve been a happy owner for quite a while.

The XE-1 I still use a backup, but it’s showing its age now. For the wedding I shot, I rented an XT-2 which was just great. I’m saving my pennies for one, but since I’m not a working pro very often any more, I have to weigh my purchases very carefully. The 56mm f/1.2 lens is a portrait shooter’s dream, and the 23mm f/1.4 spends a lot of time on the camera too.

So that’s the briefest update. I’d like to think I’ll expand on those points with their own post (or posts) in the future, but on the basis that imperfect action is better than perfect inaction I want to get this post up as soon as I can at least.

Hope you’re all doing well.

It was the classic scenario for remote working — I was in a familiar location (the in-laws’ house), with fast internet and no childcare responsibilities during the work day courtesy of my wife and her parents.

Pretty much this exact scenario is described in this great post on remote working policies by Fog Creek which has a useful list of tips and approaches for the worker and the employer.

So how did it go for me? Pretty well, and here are the things that I learned in the process.

Ergonomics matter

At home I set up my laptop on a stand, use an external keyboard and trackpad, and have my chair’s height carefully calibrated to the height of my desk. At grandma’s the laptop was on a card table and my bum was sat on a folding chair. My back hurt after the end of the first day.

I moved to various locations around the house, but never got completely comfortable. There’s a trade-off between traveling light and being comfortable while you’re working, but it’s definitely worth figuring out a solution that works for you. Fold-out laptop stands (or a pile of books) and an external keyboards can help with the writers’ slouch.

The ability to close the door is crucial

Grandma’s is a pretty open-plan house — there’s only one door downstairs (to the kitchen — which as a high-traffic area isn’t great for working in) — and there were no desks or tables in the bedroom we were staying in, which meant that I was pretty exposed while working away at my card table. Most of the time this was fine — I had my headphones in, or was just cranking away at stuff and quite liked being part of the life of the house. But when I had to make phone call or jump on a quick web conference I really needed somewhere with a closable door. So I’d retreat to a couch in the den or perch on the end of my bed — which was OK but not ideal.

Being out of the office focuses you on productivity not just presence

When you’re away from the office you feel much more keenly the sense that you have to get things done, and there are fewer workplace distractions to get in your way. This is held up as being one key advantage that remote-first teams have over traditional ones, and was definitely true for my week in LA. I was much clearer about the objectives for my day, and I stuck to the plan much more rigorously than I normally would.

Part of this is that I didn’t get dragged into meetings, or called over to help a colleague with an immediate problem. (Although when the internet went down in the office, I could still login to our ISP account and immediately see that an outage had already been reported in our area). There’s definitely a sense that just being present in the office on a normal day partly constitutes what’s required of you as far as work is concerned. The transactional sense of trading of time (but not necessarily your attention) for money is more overt when you’re clocking in and clocking out to your factory (however figuratively).

But when you’re staring out at a swimming pool in a West Los Angeles backyard, you really feel like you have to get stuff done for your pay.

I got more creative about where and when I worked

I found myself thinking more deliberately not just about the work I had to do, but where and when I was going to do it. Knowing that I wanted to go to the newly-opened Broad Museum while we were there, I worked on a bunch of social media posts on Sunday (that I could queue up for a couple of days) and put in some evening hours to free up the time to go downtown when I’d normally be working. Theoretically, I could do the same thing during my regular working weeks in the office, but I very seldom do.

Similarly I took myself round to the local Starbucks for a few hours one morning for a change of scene and to work on a writing project. Again, this could be part of my routine at home (or used to break up my routine) — and it was when I worked for myself — but the tangled sense of inertia and expectation in the standard office environment often make this hard. If your colleagues are all sitting at their desks (regardless of what they’re actually doing) it can be difficult to announce that you’re taking yourself to the café. It shouldn’t but it does.

The office culture you leave behind is still important

I easily took part in a couple of online meetings while I was away (which worked fine), but I missed an impromptu brainstorming session that took place one afternoon back in the office. I could have joined in — I was working at the time, and it wouldn’t have been hard to do a Google Hangout with the laptop in the office pointed at the whiteboard — but the office folks didn’t think about it. Even though we have 2 locations in the US and co-workers in Europe, Asia and Australia, there’s still something different about being present in the room that isn’t being fully replicated with the remote workers.

This is a good lesson that where organizations have a mixture of remote and in-person employees, they need to work hard at procedures and practices that mean that the remote staff aren’t disadvantaged by not being present.

Thinking remote-first (rather than just remote-friendly) is harder than it sounds, but it can be crucial in keeping a distributed team engaged and feeling valued.

Some notes on hardware

None of this would have been possible without my laptop, of course. My office provides me with a desktop iMac, and while I appreciate the screen real estate it’s obviously not going to help me out of the office. For organizations keen to encourage working flexibility issuing a laptop (with a second screen, external keyboard and mouse/trackpad for the workplace) has to be the way to go. Fortunately I have a older but serviceable laptop so I brought that.

I was trying out the one-bag, carryon-only approach to packing I’m going to use for a European trip later this year, which meant everything went in a single smallish backpack (with no separate personal item). Man, 5-year old laptops are heavy, especially when you include the power brick. Of course this is all relative, but a quick trip to the Santa Monica Apple Store showed me the improvements in portability we’ve seen over the last few years. A MacBook Air or 12″ MacBook Pro would definitely make this all a bit more pleasant.

One piece of kit that really worked well were the Bose noise canceling earbuds. Their performance on planes is legendary, but they did a great job of cutting out the ambient noise of the house (my sister calls this ‘entering the Bose quiet room’). But they felt weird for conference calls, because even though the built-in microphone is of good quality, I could hear my own voice in head so loudly it was very distracting.

Definitely worth the effort

Especially in the US, where paid vacation time is famously limited, allowing employees to work out of the office temporarily can be a great benefit. Even though I was working, I obviously got to spend time with my extended family in the evenings, and with a bit of shuffling, got to see a little bit of L.A.

And crucially, I got at least as much done as I would have during a normal week in the office, and still returned the next Monday feeling like I’d had something of a break.

But there are an increasing number of good sites to start looking on, and from my months of research here are the best options I’ve found. I’d love your feedback and suggestions to update this list with resources I’ve missed.

We Work Remotely

Tied to the book Remote by Basecamp’s Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssonm which makes the case for the office-less future, this listing site is technology and programmer-heavy, and is kept up to date often.

Remotive

A side project of Buffer’s Rodolphe Dutel, which includes a good newsletter of remote working tips and resources, along with the jobs list. It too is startup up and tech-heavy, but if you’d like to work for a company like Buffer, this is a good place to look.

AuthenticJobs

Has remote and local jobs (by the way, we need a better word for in-person jobs now, for when the idea of a job is not tied automatically to a place), but with a handy filter to view only the remote jobs. You’ll see some overlap in the jobs with weworkremotely and remotive.io, so again, tech heavy, but it also has some freelance and contract options that you won’t see on the other sites.

Remote OK

An aggregator with a useful list of filters and a weekly email list. Nicely done all round.

AngelList

A great resource for startup jobs with some innovative features, but I’m not sure how well some of them actually work. It’s good that job listings include a salary range that you can see up front, and you can express your interest in jobs through the site after you’ve filled out a profile. You can also filter by remote jobs, job type and other characteristics. The company profiles allow you to get a good sense of the organization that’s hiring.

The downside might be that since it’s so easy to express your interest, there’s not the sense of obligation on the company’s side to get back to you if you’re not what they’re looking for, so you can be left hanging. Also, you’ll be sending all applications the same profile, which doesn’t allow you to do the optimal adjusting of your resumé for individual openings. I’ve applied for a couple of positions through the site and heard nothing, so if you can find the same listing elsewhere, it might be better to find the apply in a more traditional email-y way that could be more likely to get you a response, one way or the other.

Virtual Vocations

A clearing house of remote jobs — they research and compile listings available elsewhere and bring them all together in one place. It’s a paid service, but there is a free version that lets you see the opening but not who it’s for — with a bit of googling you can sometimes find the original listing, but in the end if you’re serious in your jobhunting the subscription might make sense.

There’s a much wider number and more diverse set of jobs displayed here than some of the more tech- and startup-heavy boards, but their categorization isn’t great. The categories don’t seem to be sorted by actual people, they’re just based on search results, so, for example, you’ll see ‘social’ work jobs in the ‘social media’ category. (For what it’s worth, I’ve emailed them about this while I was a paying customer, and they never replied to me.) That said, I’ve seen jobs here that haven’t shown up on any of the other sites, so it’s worth its spot here.

FlexJobs

A lot like VirtualVocations, it’s another paid service with a wide range of jobs, including some with large multinationals such as IBM and Aon. The categorization here is well done, and you can also create a profile (or more than one) and the site will suggest jobs that meet your requirements. There are dozens of new jobs every day. Well worth a look

Indeed

One of the few large recruitment sites that makes it easy to search for remote offerings. Its saved searches feature helps for repeat visits, and there are a lot of jobs to choose from.

jobsRemotely

Not a ton of jobs, but it’s kept up to date. Mainly IT and developer jobs.

offsite.careers

Given the site’s name, it’s weird that its first filter box is by location, but there’s a set of tags to help sort out jobs by type of work, all within the developer and software engineer arena.

Remote.co

Run by a co-founder of Flexjobs — but this is a listing site not an aggregating site, so some of the jobs here might not appear elsewhere.

Working Nomads

Tech-heavy curated list of jobs — but there are lots of to choose from, if that’s your thing.

inbound.org

Lots of content marketing jobs, with a good option to search only the virtual positions.

Outside of office hours, I was also trying to break into freelance journalism, contributing arts and features pieces to the Irish Times newspaper and other publications. Dublin is full of good writers — you could throw a stone into any pub and it would hit someone better than than me — so it was a struggle, but I really enjoyed crafting 800 smart words about a TV show or movie that would be completely forgotten the day after the paper came out.

The day job wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be doing, but the steady pay was welcome, and my fellow employees were a nice bunch to hang around with, and I even enjoyed the bike ride across town to get to work. But after a few months there, I was being worn down and couldn’t find the time or inclination to work on as much freelance work as I wanted. So I had an idea that seemed to make sense to me, and I was too young to know how unusual a request it might be at the time.I asked to have every Friday off (and take 80% of my salary).

I was smart enough to ask straight after a favourable performance review, and for whatever reason they said yes, for a trial period.

The new arrangement worked out brilliantly, and I ended up staying at the company for much longer than I would have otherwise. Aware that I didn’t want to leave any of my colleagues in the lurch while I was off, I was definitely more than 80% as productive as I had been, and when taxes and the small amount of money I got from my extra freelance work were taken into account, I ended up with more than 80% of my former income.

And I got Fridays to myself. I’d go to press screenings for new films, work on pitching stories, and drift around Dublin bookshops, cafés and bars (a regular afternoon favourite habit was to sit reading the paper in the Stag’s Head pubarmed with a coffee and a gin and tonic). I had a long weekend every week — I was happy, I appreciated the great gift my employers had given me, and I returned to the day job every Monday rested and ready to work hard.

Not Working Just Works

I’m not the only one to discover that four-day weeks have many benefits. This recent excellent video from The Atlantic shows the business and personal benefits of the approach at Treehouse (ironically an online education firm).

Online project management tool Basecamp work four-day weeks over the summer, and their experience of productivity is the same as mine:

“In general, the same amount of stuff gets done in four days than in five, mostly because when you have less time, you tend to compress stuff out that doesn’t matter,” says Basecamp CEO Jason Fried in a Fast Company interview. “We don’t feel like we’re losing a lot of output; maybe 5%.”

It’s not just small firms — KPMG and tax services firm Ryan are two multinationals who have adopted similar flexible approaches. The same Fast Company article reports that after they started four-day weeks, Ryan’s employee turnover rate dropped from 30% to 11%, revenue and profits almost doubled, client satisfaction scores reached an all-time high, and the firm has received multiple “best place to work” awards.

For a time the state of Utah put workers on a compressed work schedule, with staff working four 10-hour days with every Friday off. The Guardian looked at the results:

Eight out of 10 employees liked the four-day week and wanted it to continue. Nearly two-thirds said it made them more productive and many said it reduced conflict at home and work. Only 3% said it made childcare harder. Workplaces across the state reported higher staff morale and lower absenteeism.

40 Hours or 32?

Based on my own experience, and that of Basecamp and Treehouse, I’d say it’s worth just pulling the band-aid off all in one go and only working 32 hours. It’s debatable if there’s really any productivity benefit in the extra hours — it’s filled with what Jason Fried calls the stuff ‘that doesn’t matter’.

So it’s good for employees and good for the organization. It works for tech firms on crazy deadlines, large consulting firms and state government. And why aren’t we doing this, already? As with a reluctance to adopt remote working, the reasons we’re still clinging to the old ways aren’t that great, but what is great is that more and more organizations are showing the vision required to embrace the four-day week.

Aussie digital nomad James Clark has a great list of resources and links to the blogs of other folks doing a similar thing, which often revolves doing web-related or at least web-enabled work that doesn’t depend on being in a particular location to fund their living in relatively affordable countries (often in south-east Asia).

Having travelled reasonably widely, lived in three countries and even written a travel book about my adventures, I have a great deal of time for people prepared to head out on their own and use remote working to travel. But now I’m at a different stage in my life, I see how remote work is also key to ensuring quality of life even if you’re not going anywhere.

Nicole at Buffer recently wrote a great article about what their remote working structures meant for their team (and the team’s families), and what really stood out was how brilliantly mundane a lot of their experiences were.

Helping to bring family members on the company retreats (and realizing that families might want different accommodation from single people) is a great example. It’s obvious that one parent traveling for work will necessarily create some disruption at home, but it’s a rare organization that would even think of this as an issue, let alone help pay to bring the family along.

Similarly, Buffer’s Kevan Lee looks after his son during the day, and works more in the mornings and evenings. It doesn’t sound much, but Buffer grasps that this means a great deal to one of their employees and their family, and then takes steps to accommodate that need. This flexibility can change lives and create loyal happy people who want to work of you, and yet it is still so rare as to be worth commenting on.

I love this appreciation of flexibility either in a day, or in geographic location, not just for abstract reasons, but for very personal ones too. I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico with my wife and daughter. It’s a nice town to be in, my daughter loves her school, her friends and her soccer team, and my wife runs her own architecture firm — we have no plans to leave any time soon.

But staying here while working remotely would open up a wider range of professional opportunities for me. I expand all the possible jobs for me to all the remote-friendly opening in the world, rather than looking just within my town of 80,000 souls. I don’t have to compromise on the job I want to live in the place i want.

That’s looking at things from a macro level — the job I do and where I live — but as Kevan Lee’s example shows, remote working has lots of micro-level benefits: small daily improvements that add up to a markedly better quality of life both for the employee and their family. Being in the town you like is great, but not so great if you never get the chance to see much of it during the day, or you can’t coach your kid’s sports team or attend their end of year concert because you’re always in the office.

Remote teams replace showing up to a particular location for a set time with a much more nuanced set of tools for measuring performance and communicating with their colleagues regardless of time and space, giving everyone more flexibility to set their own hours and working arrangements.

So digital nomads might be the poster children for this new way of working, but creating opportunities for globe-hopping is really just a fringe benefit of the move to remote working. The key changes are more mundane, but much more far-reaching and valuable — the potential to change the way a huge number of families live, even if they stay exactly where they are.

“Many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment. And imagine living your whole life like that, where always this moment is never quite right, not good enough because you need to get to the next one. That is continuous stress.”

That sounds like a description of running or working in many startups. The ‘continuous stress’ used to be considered a necessary part of the startup experience, but an increasing number of investors and startups are turning to mindfulness as a more positive approach to running an organization.

Trevor Loy, a VC funder who blogs on mindfulness explains why we need to take a closer look at this issue.

“It amazes me that over the last decade we’ve re-invented product development; popularized customer development; laid out the canvas for business model development; and completely ignored our leaders and their psychological, social and emotional development.”

As defined by prominent mindfulness and meditation expert Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, mindfulness is “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally.”

That sounds a little vague — we all think we’re paying attention most of the time — until we start a practice like meditation that forces us to examine what we’re actually thinking about.

Dan Harris describes an early meditation attempt in which he was supposed to be paying attention to his breath:

“The repeated attempt to bring the compulsive thought machine to heel was like holding a live fish in your hands. Wrestling your mind to the ground, repeatedly hauling your attention back to the breath in the face of the inner onslaught required genuine grit.”

If mindfulness is a kind of mental fitness, and meditation is one possible training method to get you there — in the same way as running or weight training are different ways to achieve physical fitness.

Benefits for Individuals

So how does this difficult work of improving your mindfulness help you deal with a fast-paced startup? Repeated research has shown the benefits include greater creativity, productivity and willpower, improved physical health and even reduced fear.

A study at Yale University reported in Entrepreneur showed that people who regularly practice meditation are better able to concentrate, switching off areas of the brain linked to daydreaming and lapses of attention, while Dr Kelly McGonigal from Stanford University describes meditation as key to increasing willpower.

Extending Mindfulness to the Organization

One obvious step is for employees at startups and other technology companies to be encouraged to start practicing meditation, and companies such as Medium, Google and Dropbox offer meditation classes and workshops to their employees.

However, if the expectations, values and processes within an organization don’t also encourage mindfulness, then the classes alone won’t fix the problem.

Medium co-founder Ev Williams asked Jonathan Rosenfeld, Medium’s Change Strategy and Leadership Consultant, how they could build a company where people were productive, creative, and engaged but not working crazy hours.

Rosenfeld replied,

“We remove as much pointless, non-productive anxiety from the workplace as possible . . . If you reduce anxiety, you get the productivity and creativity without the crazy hours. Mindfulness also reduces interpersonal anxiety. This frees people up to be better colleagues and collaborators.”

This cultural shift has to come from the top, and needs to include systems that allows for everyone to deliver and receive careful feedback: too often, organizations react quickly rather than respond thoughtfully.

Changing a strictly hierarchical organization structure can also help to improve mindfulness — if employees can make decisions on what and how they work on projects, they’re more likely to take a considered approach.

Rosenfeld argues that improving communications skills is also valuable: “In an environment that favors curiosity, compassion, generosity, identification, and appreciation, it’s relatively safe to have tough conversations.”

The Future of Mindfulness

Events such as the Wisdom 2.0 conference show mindfulness is currently a hot topic in the US tech world, and it’s part of the broader trend of lifehacking as we investigate techniques and approaches to wellness and self-improvement that include Fitbits and habits apps like Coach.me.

But the unarguable individual benefits of improving mindfulness are more than just a fashion, and working on mindfulness at an organization level also suits the tech startup model of trying a range of approaches and sticking with those that deliver measurable value.

We’ve recognized that the old-style workplace is full of distractions such as too many in-person meetings and emails. Working on mindfulness in a startup might be the best way to work on the biggest source of distraction of all — our own brains.

Heroic, right? They must be the sort of committed and dedicated employee we need — someone you’d want in you foxhole when the shooting starts.

Except not really, because work isn’t war (despite all the military idioms that some businesses employ), and in the long run that sort of behaviour doesn’t help.

Organizations know that absenteeism is a problem — that is, people not showing up even though they’re fine. Pulling a sickie might suggest a number of culture and leadership issues, but people showing up when they really shouldn’t is at least as worrying.

Presenteeism can be defined in a limited way as coming to work when you’re sick, but more generally it describes employees being physically present at work when they’re physically or mentally distracted to the point of being significantly unproductive.

Sometimes this might be as obvious as someone who is clearly ill coming in to save limited sick days, or because they have no paid sick days in the first place.

Another reason for sick people showing up might be a workplace culture that emphasizes attendance as part of a performance review — or just a culture where putting in crazy hours is the norm.

These sort of practices are often set up to counter absenteeism problems or because of the misguided sense that progress is best achieved by just throwing lots of hours at an issue.

But working excessively can end up creating more problems than it solves. Even though it’s easier to manage, presence is not performance, and the irony is that trying to avoid fake absences can in the long term cause more genuine absences.

That’s because the downsides of presenteeism go beyond just getting your coworkers sick. Reduced productivity and creativity, along with disengagement and lack of motivation create a potent negative cocktail.

Some workers might be resentful — they’d rather not be there but feel they have to be — while others might want to be there at all hours to impress the boss. Both groups can be vulnerable to burnout, with symptoms such as depression, sleeplessness, and chronic fatigue. The work, the worker and employee retention all suffer, even though the office might be full.

Fixes to presenteeism problems

The solutions to presenteeism can be both practical and cultural:

• Tie reviews to performance not to presence at work
• Create a culture of being interested in the person as a whole not just their capability as a productive employee
• Set a good example as leadership by taking vacations and working reasonable hours
• Create a minimum vacation time
• Don’t count sick days but make sure employees are paid for them
• Implementing a workplace wellness plan (look at this from the the UK Department of Work and Pensions for an example)

Especially in the US there’s a sense that working hard and being seen to work hard are crucial to success, but there’s a growing sense that how we judge what counts as working hard needs to be re-evaluated.

Getting lots of good stuff done while taking time off to ensure the progress is sustainable might not sound as exciting as burning the midnight oil, but sooner or later the oil will run out.

But many non-profit organizations would also see a great range of benefits from adopting similar approaches, and in many ways non-profits have more to gain from these measures, including helping to attract smarter people and allowing them to do more while spending less money.

Let’s look at some of the key reasons non-profits should be in the vanguard of these future work approaches:

1) Attract and retain better employees

If you can’t pay top dollar, then you need other ways attract talented employees. Offering them a flexible and/or completely distributed working environment can be a great draw, as can self-managing teams. Especially for younger people, the appeal of no commuting, increased autonomy, generous vacation time and other thoughtful benefits can outweigh purely monetary gains, especially if they will also be working on something they consider worthwhile.

For the non-profit, the ability to recruit from a global talent pool rather than one limited by geography can mean they get the best person for the job, not just the least bad candidate in their town.

2) Lower overhead

For better or worse (and it’s often worse), funders look carefully at non-profits’ operating expenses, especially as they compare to the amount they put into their programs. There’s a strong case to be made that this can be very short-sighted: if my expenses are $1,000 and I raise $20,000 for my programs, is that really better than if my expenses are $3,000 and I used that extra expenditure to raise $500,000? That said, there’s no doubt that a commitment to reduce unnecessary overheads can funnel more money towards programs and development. The cost of running an office is increasingly becoming an expensive and unnecessary overhead.

3) Lower carbon footprint

If your non-profit works in the environmental arena (but even it if doesn’t), you should make sure you’re causing as little environmental damage as you can while doing your work. In the same way as investors and consumers are increasingly interested in a company’s corporate social responsibility, so foundations and individual donors are looking to non-profits to do the right thing in all their dealings, not just their core mission.

Making people commute to work increases greenhouse gas emissions from transportation (unless everyone is riding their bikes or driving a solar-charged Tesla), but the biggest source of emissions for most organizations is their building itself. In the US, building operations (which includes heating, lighting, cooling, running the computers) areresponsible for nearly half of all CO2 emissions. And that doesn’t factor in the embodied carbon in the materials used to construct the buildings in the first place.

Some nonprofits take this issue seriously — the Packard Foundation have a great zero-net energy headquarters that generates all the energy it uses — but others would better not to have an office at all. We all need a place to rest our heads, but having a completely separate place to do work that we could do at home is environmentally hard to justify.

4) Flexible working forces better management

It’s harder to run a nonprofit than a commercial organization. This is partly because of the misguided efforts to cut operating expenses explored above, which leave most organizations understaffed and overworked, but also because of the unique challenges that non-profits face. Their goals are often harder to measure, and their teams and boards expect much more consensus-building than more traditional top-down companies have to deal with.

The detailed communication and clear procedures that distributed teams and self-management require can provide a much more solid basis for success in this context than the more usual death-by-a-hundred-meetings management style seen in non-profits.

5) Progressive organizations should work progressively

By their very nature, most non-profits are working to make the world a better place. They see the current situation as flawed, and want to improve it. It’s ironic then that this aspirational approach in many cases doesn’t extend to how they plan to bring about this change. There’s something wrong if you’re aiming towards the future, but doing so in an old-fashioned way. Progressive organizations should be the first to consider new ways of working, rather than not even thinking about how they do things.

If I were a foundation looking to fund a non-profit or one of its programs, I’d be looking for evidence that the non-profit was carefully examining and reflecting on not just what its mission was, but on how it was going to achieve it. Which includes considering how to express its values through the way it works.

And non-profits don’t have to be a distributed team to reap some of these benefits. For example, a recent job advertisement from the MacArthur Foundation for a Director of People and Culture clearly shows they are asking good questions about how they want their organization to succeed.

If other non-profits started addressing their working practices with a similar bravery and imagination, the sector could achieve so much more, which would benefit everyone.