Talks from the heart: how to keep engaged in times of uncertainty?
Last week, the Zero Waste Europe team gathered for our yearly team retreat. With the borrowed motto Polako*, we embarked on three days of deep dives into zero waste topics, workshops on our principles for working with our members, further tailoring our impact framework and how to capture and amplify stories from our network.
Our objectives for the retreat were to connect, re-energise, and take a step back to assess our priorities for the year. This year, team engagement – meaning our team’s sense of purpose, morale, and wellbeing – is particularly high on the agenda given the context in which we operate. And I would like to share what specifically came out of this.
Needless to say, civil society at large is going through difficult times with geopolitical uncertainties in Europe and beyond; an increasingly challenging funding landscape; and, last but not least, attacks against NGOs and a shrinking civic space across the board. Getting together as a team is essential to taking stock of this reality and discussing our role in this context, considering that it all affects us differently.
Times of hope
We entered this space of reflection with many questions: what does this context mean for each and every one of us? What does this mean for our work? How do we react to such a context as an organisation? How do we keep our motivation and morale high? And how do we keep being a community of care as a network?
We (tried to) create spaces for each individual to show up as they are, allowing for self-reflection and understanding in a group setting. We opened up to difficulties, then asked ourselves this question: in times of uncertainty, where do I see hope?
One main takeaway from these three days is the hope for a civil society that does not back down, where each voice is represented, that shows the way forward, and helps align a wide range of players around a vision for a healthy and just world – a world where we remain committed to fight for the causes we believe in.**
Our initiatives at Zero Waste Europe
People & Operations is a large domain of work. Where larger organisations may have separate functions for each HR process, financial process, and internal project management, smaller organisations do it all with a small yet powerful team (sometimes even as a one-person show!). Organisational change is not something small to manage, and given that we want organisational change to be alive (and not just a new written procedure), we need each team member to be on board.
At Zero Waste Europe, we have a strong culture of “learning by doing and experimenting” where team members join internal task forces to suggest new organisational initiatives that are then shared and implemented. Take, for example, our Habits Team: it has brought the most innovative ideas back when we were (re)defining our core values. This has led to our (not compulsory) 4-day workweek and (compulsory) meeting-free Fridays initiatives, set with the objective to manage our personal work habits better (e.g. the elimination of evening and weekend Slack messages, reducing pseudo-work, becoming better at prioritisation, and removing the urgency bias).
Introducing a habits journal helped us observe how we start and end the day: what triggers make a day harder than needed? What are our individual motivators at work?
More recently, we’ve been working on building project management (PM) habits with the support of our PM Ambassadors, who are observing our blind spots and engaging our colleagues in habits across teams.
You may wonder whether all these initiatives are time-consuming. The reality is that, when the challenge is to build as many light-weight processes as possible so that our work is not hindered, change takes time, and we see change happening when each team member is engaged and pulls their weight.
Moving forward, one step at a time
We live in a complex world, and there’s no ‘’sure-fire’’ way to keep going when everything around us is uncertain. Such initiatives are a way to live our purpose-driven and care values, using our own agency to create ways of operating that keep us focused on our long-term impact, while caring for ourselves and our members.
To quote our team, “it’s often more about the person than the process’’ – and that’s our strong commitment at ZWE.
*Meaning slowing down in Montenegrin – thank you to Zero Waste Montenegro for introducing us all to your motto!
**If you want to read more on this topic, our colleague Stephanie recommends Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit.
