Thanks for sharing this! I think that it is tough that the experiences you list are shared by many other people with ops experience. I also think that something I’ve witnessed at a lot of organizations is that growth can be somewhat stumbling—e.g. new non-ops staff are added until ops is overwhelmed, and only then are ops staff added.
To mildly shamelessly plug my own employer, Rethink Priorities has been really focusing on offsetting some of these challenges, including doing things like:
Having a pay system that doesn’t discount ops work—ops staff are paid the same as other staff at the same title level
Really emphasizing working at most 40 hours / week, and making it clear to people that if they are working more than 40 hours / week, it means we are understaffed and need to address something
Investing in ops expansions prior to other expansions, so we have the bandwidth to grow, and slack in our operations in general
Giving people a high amount of autonomy in their roles
Focusing on providing professional development opportunities
Thanks for sharing this! I think that it is tough that the experiences you list are shared by many other people with ops experience. I also think that something I’ve witnessed at a lot of organizations is that growth can be somewhat stumbling—e.g. new non-ops staff are added until ops is overwhelmed, and only then are ops staff added.
To mildly shamelessly plug my own employer, Rethink Priorities has been really focusing on offsetting some of these challenges, including doing things like:
Having a pay system that doesn’t discount ops work—ops staff are paid the same as other staff at the same title level
Really emphasizing working at most 40 hours / week, and making it clear to people that if they are working more than 40 hours / week, it means we are understaffed and need to address something
Investing in ops expansions prior to other expansions, so we have the bandwidth to grow, and slack in our operations in general
Giving people a high amount of autonomy in their roles
Focusing on providing professional development opportunities
So far, these have gone really well—we’ve had no turnover on our operations team, and the team consistently reports being quite happy in their roles. We are also hiring for a bunch of operations roles right now (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/of9qrfb5HQfwgj3Le/rethink-priorities-operations-team-is-expanding-we-re-hiring).