High impact, high stress - Director World Resources Institute Employee Review

I found WRI to be among the more stressful place I've worked, largely because it is very bureaucratic and inefficient leading to negative impacts on teams and low morale since staff end up spending more time on the 'busy' work as opposed to the substantive mission-related work. As a new person it takes a long time to figure out how decisions are made and who makes them. WRI has had huge staff growth during the pandemic, but the systems and processes haven't been improved at the same rate, so everything takes much longer than it should. Operations, HR, and finance staff turnover has been very high as a result making every request and hiring process take 2-4X longer than it would normally leading to huge bandwidth constraint issues. This leads to teams regularly working overtime. Burnout isnt' as high as it would be in some corporate environments, but for a non-profit where you'd expect work-life balance, it occurs more frequently than it should. WRI also doesn't have clearly delineated decision-making processes and programs operate by consensus. This leads to highly inefficient systems where program leads spend way too much time discussing issues internally and not enough time trying to affect change externally. WRI's meeting culture is out of control - staff spend way too much time talking to each other and need to figure out a more sustainable and efficient way to navigate the pandemic that doesn't involve so many meetings. Finally, the business model needs significant improvements. WRI needs to diversify its revenue streams and do more to support program directors with fundraising, starting with how its rates are structured (see advice below).