Insights, Leadership

Is Your Organization Set Up for Sustainable Employment?

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The Opportunity for All Hiding Inside the Nonprofit Talent Crisis

Nonprofits are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain staff. Nearly three-quarters of nonprofits that responded to a recent National Council of Nonprofits workforce survey reported job vacancies, with frontline program and service-delivery roles the most commonly unfilled. This matters because the sector employs nearly 13 million people—about 10 percent of the U.S. workforce—many of whom provide essential services, including healthcare, social services, education, housing, and food assistance.

While the talent crisis is real, it also creates real opportunity. It provides nonprofit executives, HR leaders, and boards a reason to examine a question that is far more consequential than how to fill their next vacancy:

Is our organization designed to be a workplace where people can build sustainable careers?

Sustainable employment means creating work employees can perform well over time without sacrificing their health, financial security, family life, or opportunities for growth. It combines fair compensation, realistic workloads, effective management practices, professional development, psychological safety, flexibility, and a clear connection between role and mission. Together, these conditions help an organization deliver consistently on its mission.

At DSG Global, our team has placed more than 3,000 nonprofit and social impact leaders. We have seen firsthand that leadership transitions and persistent vacancies often expose unclear priorities, expanding roles, below-market compensation, unsupported managers, and unrealistic expectations. A search can fill a role, but it can also serve as an important reflection point to clarify what the work requires and what staff need to be set up for success.

This is where opportunity hides within the crisis. Organizations that focus on sustainability can attract and retain talent while strengthening performance, culture, and mission continuity. Organizations can distinguish themselves through both their impact and the quality of employment they provide.

The Impact When People Cannot Stay

Workforce instability is not just a human resources issue. When a nonprofit is unable to recruit or retain employees, responsibilities shift to already-stretched colleagues. Managers spend more time covering vacancies and less time coaching, planning, and improving programs. Institutional knowledge leaves with departing staff. Relationships with donors, partners, clients, and communities must be rebuilt. Remaining employees may initially respond with extraordinary commitment, but repeated cycles of urgency can turn dedication into exhaustion.

Eventually, mission delivery takes a toll. Programs operate below capacity. Waiting lists grow. Outreach declines. Caseloads rise. Funding opportunities are missed. Services are reduced or eliminated. The people who feel the consequences are often those with the fewest alternatives.

This is why burnout should be recognized as an organizational red flag, not simply a staff wellness issue. Wellness benefits can help, but they cannot compensate for chronically low pay, unmanageable expectations, poor supervision, or unreliable staffing.

Commitment to mission is powerful, but it is not an infinite resource. When organizations rely too heavily on employees’ commitment, staff may end up carrying the cost through added stress, exhaustion, and personal sacrifice.

You can’t sustain the mission without sustaining the people who deliver it. An organization cannot be resilient if its operating model continually consumes the resilience of its people. The leadership challenge is to actively change the conditions.

Seven Levers for Sustainable Employment

The work begins with a candid assessment of organizational health and a focused set of choices. The following seven levers give executive teams and boards a practical place to begin.

Align compensation with the market
Benchmark salaries for the labor markets and talent pools from which you recruit, not just similarly constrained nonprofits. Review benefits, paid leave, retirement contributions, and healthcare costs as part of total compensation. Identify roles with the greatest gaps and create a multiyear plan to address them. If resources are limited, be transparent about tradeoffs rather than presenting mission as a substitute for fair pay.
Redesign workloads before replacing staff
Before reposting a vacant role, examine how the position has evolved. Which responsibilities are essential? What was added without anything being removed? What decisions require unnecessary approvals? What work could be stopped, shared, automated, or outsourced? A vacancy provides an opportunity to rebuild a manageable role rather than transferring accumulated responsibilities to a new employee.
Invest in managers as workforce infrastructure
Employees experience culture most directly through their supervisors. Train managers in feedback, delegation, performance management, conflict resolution, inclusion, and workload planning. Set reasonable expectations and ensure managers have time to manage. Strong managers create clarity and trust; unsupported managers can increase turnover even in deeply mission-driven organizations.
Make advancement visible and professional development accessible
Nonprofits often lose talented people because advancement pathways are unclear. Define the skills necessary for progression, discuss career goals regularly, and offer stretch assignments, mentoring, and professional development. Growth can mean deeper expertise, broader influence, new credentials, or leading a significant initiative—not just a promotion. Employees are more likely to stay when they can see a future with the organization.
Build flexibility around outcomes
Where roles allow, offer meaningful flexibility in schedule and location. For frontline positions that must be performed in person, consider predictable scheduling, adequate PTO, shortened workweeks, shift choice, transportation support, or greater input into scheduling. Equity requires thoughtful options that reflect the realities of different jobs.
Fund the full cost of people
Connect workforce planning to budgeting and fundraising. Include realistic compensation, benefits, technology, training, supervision, and staffing coverage in program costs. Help funders understand that these investments are not overhead detached from impact; they are what make impact possible. Revenue diversification, multiyear funding, and appropriate financial reserves can reduce the instability that forces organizations into hiring freezes or emergency reductions.
Plan for leadership continuity
Succession planning should be an ongoing organizational practice, not an emergency response to a resignation. Identify critical roles, document key relationships and knowledge, strengthen internal talent, and establish interim leadership protocols. Boards should regularly review executive support, performance expectations, and retention. A thoughtful transition protects the organization while creating space to assess what the next chapter requires.

Start with an Honest Organizational Health Review

HR leaders and nonprofit executives can get started by bringing workforce data into financial and program performance reviews. Track vacancies, time to fill, turnover, promotions, pay equity, workload indicators, PTO use, and employee feedback. Disaggregate the data to determine whether certain groups or functions experience the organization differently. Numbers alone are not the full story, so pair them with stay interviews, exit feedback, manager conversations, and confidential opportunities for employees to describe what makes their work sustainable or unsustainable.

Choose an achievable number of measurable, well-resourced priorities. Correcting pay inequities for high-turnover roles, reducing caseloads, strengthening managers, or building internal advancement pathways is more useful than a long list of aspirations. Explain what will change, what cannot change yet, and how progress will be evaluated. Transparency builds trust.

A More Sustainable Future for Mission-Driven Work

The nonprofit talent crisis is a warning, but it is also a call to build stronger organizations. Nonprofits offer purpose, community, and the chance to contribute to something larger. Paired with fair employment practices and well-designed work, these strengths can provide employees with both meaningful and sustainable careers.

The organizations that respond most effectively will not be those that become better at persuading people to tolerate burnout, but those that treat sustainability as mission-critical and make decisions that enable purpose, performance, and well-being to live in harmony.

The opportunity is to create a workplace where talented people can join, grow, contribute, and stay—and where the mission is stronger because they can.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2026

Paul Towne is DSG Global Managing Director who offers expertise in executive search, talent assessment, and client relationship management for the nonprofit and social impact sectors.

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