NextBillion - A WDI Publication

On paper, social entrepreneurs have ideal working conditions: As their own bosses, they can decide where, how, with whom and on what they work. And critically, they can also decide when to switch off. 

As academic researchers, we interviewed 40 social entrepreneurs from Malaysia for a recent study. They described this sense of freedom, which is commonly seen as a key perk of the entrepreneur lifestyle. Yet in the same breath, they also described being unable to use that freedom and actually switch off from work.

This inability to switch off is what the usual advice around founder burnout ignores. The burden to avoid burnout falls on individual social entrepreneurs, who receive advice that boils down to one word: stop. This guidance may focus on prioritizing self-care, saying no, or investing more time in non-work activities and relationships. But rest is restorative only if thoughts of work leave your head, and for the founders in our study, they never did.

Why social entrepreneurs can’t switch off

Our research found that the inability to switch off is not a personal weakness, but a response that’s shaped by four conditions that are embedded in the very nature of social entrepreneurs’ work. While each of these conditions exists in other professions, in social entrepreneurship they all arrive together. 

The first condition is demands from many directions. A conventional business owner answers to customers and shareholders; an employee answers to a manager. Social entrepreneurs answer to the communities they serve, employees and volunteers, investors and funders, commercial clients, and partners, all at once. To respond to these multiple, intense and often-incompatible demands, they sacrifice their own time and energy.

The second is a conflicting position of power. Social entrepreneurs have power over people who depend on them, such as community members and employees, yet they are at the mercy of those who hold the purse strings, such as commercial clients, funders or investors. And though they’re typically willing to sacrifice their own time to satisfy the demands of these customers or funders, they are often reluctant to expect a similar sacrifice from their teams. For example, they’ll stay up to field a late-night request from a client, but they hesitate to lean too heavily on their own staff because of the potential impact on their team’s wellbeing. 

The third is the pull of the mission. Social and ecological problems do not observe office hours, and progress against them is slow and often invisible. Many founders told us that what they were doing was “never enough.” For them, switching off felt shameful and even morally wrong.

The final condition is the fusion between self and venture. Founders in our study called their ventures their babies. When the venture and the self fuse like this, switching off feels like distance from the self and a threat to their effectiveness, often resulting in guilt.

What can social entrepreneurs do differently to protect themselves?

The conditions we outline above make it clear that the problem isn’t caused by a lack of willpower or discipline among social entrepreneurs, but by the unique challenges and psychological demands inherent to the businesses they’re building and the missions they’re pursuing. And it would be strange for an article focused on helping them take more time away from work to now hand them yet another list of more things to do. So instead, the suggestions below are either one-off, up-front changes or jobs handed to someone else.

Put boundaries in workflows: One founder in our study had once used WhatsApp only for her family. Over time, it filled with messages from clients and community members that never stopped and always expected an immediate response. When she tried to set a boundary around not replying in the evening, she found herself justifying the decision to her team, communities served and clients, and often had to remind them about it. In the end, she stopped opening the app altogether. The founders who managed to switch off embedded boundaries into how they worked, instead of defending them case by case. 

You can start by separating your communication channels — for example, by maintaining a separate phone that you can leave behind after work hours, or a shared inbox for community contact that others on your team can monitor. Then you can solidify this practice by putting expectations in writing, such as adding a response-time clause in your service, partnership or grant agreements that makes these limits on your availability an organisational fact.

In a small way, the same logic can be applied to daily detachment from work. If you are trying not to think about work, and failing, try catching the thoughts and ideas and parking them. For example, one founder in our study kept an ideas list on her phone, where she briefly noted any ideas that surfaced in her time off and looked at them in detail the next time she was back at work. This allowed her to create time to rest, without feeling shame or guilt over the fact that she was “missing out” on potentially valuable new professional directions.

While many of the founders in our study took time off only after burning out, some built rest into the organisation to prevent it. For example, one founder noticed that everyone in the organisation was working at an unsustainable pace — and worse, he was the one setting that pace. He introduced an annual shutdown, in which the organisation closes for a month each year so that everyone can rest, including him. He presented the shutdown as an organisational practice, giving prior notice so clients could plan around it, which was less disruptive than abruptly leaving in response to burnout. While not every social enterprise can afford to close for a month every year, you can experiment with short fallow periods built after peak times, such as a busy season of programming.

Staff the two jobs you cannot do: The first job most founders struggle with is noticing their own individual or organisational burnout. Nobody in our study spotted their own burnout, or recognised their inability to switch off themselves — they always required a doctor, a coworker or a partner to point it out to them. So name one person to act as your warning system, tell them the specific signs to watch for, and give them permission to say out loud when you need to rest.

The second job is harder. Social entrepreneurs need to separate “I am not doing enough” from “This problem is enormous and no single entity can solve it.” But if you arrive at this realisation alone, that separation feels like letting yourself off the hook. Other caring professionals doing emotionally charged work, like social workers, counsellors or hospice staff, do not have to reach this realisation alone. They often have structured supervision as a part of the job, and it has been associated with reduced burnout and enhanced staff health and wellbeing when done well. In this context, supervision has a restorative function, where a part of the supervisor’s job is to help caring professionals sort what is theirs to carry from what belongs to the system around them. When someone else has tested that judgement with you, you can trust it. 

Social entrepreneurs rarely have anything like that. The connotations around supervision as oversight may put them off; they already have boards and funders to evaluate their performance. However, what founders can benefit from is regular and confidential conversation with someone who has no say over their work, such as an experienced coach or someone trained in counselling. So make it a budget line and hire someone. If the money isn’t there, include supervision in the core costs you charge across your grants and contracts — or at least put it on the agenda of a peer group you are already in.

Loosen the fusion between you and the venture: Retire the “my enterprise is my baby” metaphor. If the organisation is a child, then taking time off to rest can feel like neglect, and leaving is tantamount to abandonment — and the language you use reinforces those misconceptions every time you use it. Keep (or find) one setting where you’re a beginner: a class, a team, a room where nobody’s interested in your mission or your views on changing the world. As a beginner, no one has high expectations or demands of you, which means you can lose yourself in the task and switch off from work. Being a beginner also gives you a sense of who you can be, in a context that does not depend on the business you’re running. The founders who sustain themselves aren’t the ones with the strongest work ethic, they are often the ones who maintain an identity outside the venture.

What can ecosystem players do to help social entrepreneurs switch off?

If you fund, support or procure from social ventures, most of what wears founders down is built into how you operate. On the plus side, that means you are uniquely positioned to help change the status quo. The following suggestions offer guidance on how you can help lessen burnout among the social entrepreneurs you work with.

Open the negotiation from your end: In our study, social entrepreneurs tried to set boundaries with their staff and volunteers, but almost never with their funders or clients. This is because pushing back on people who control your money comes with risks. So the conversation has to start from the powerful side: For instance, put a response-time clause in your own grant, service and partnership agreements, and say plainly that you don’t expect replies at night or on weekends. Acknowledge that a founder will never tell you that your partnership is hurting them. If you want the truth, route that feedback through someone who doesn’t hold the purse strings, ask specifically what isn’t working, and let the answer change something.

Fund the work at what it actually costs: Instead of offering them another founder wellbeing programme, provide social entrepreneurs with a stable income that truly covers costs. That is the best wellbeing programme they could possibly have, as founders make up for underfunded work with their own time and health. Project-by-project grants force them to deliver one thing while writing the bid for the next. Long-term, strategic or unrestricted funding removes those issues. So does costing a founder’s time honestly instead of burying it in “overheads,” and funding coverage for parental leave or illness. If you procure from social ventures rather than fund them, the same logic applies: Use multi-year contracts with invoices paid within a fortnight.

Cut the friction you create: Before you lay any new obligations on founders, look at what you’re already asking of them. For example, ask grantees how many hours they spend reporting to you, and treat that number as a cost you’re imposing. Instead of requiring them to master a complex new reporting system, accept the impact metrics they already use or delete the reporting fields you never read. Stop requiring the founder to appear in person at every meeting, site visit and photo opportunity. Don’t reach for a wellbeing workshop to inoculate your grantees or investees against burnout; instead train your own staff to spot the strain in a cohort. If you are a support organisation running an incubator or accelerator programme, build a fallow stretch with no deliverables and no check-ins. 

Advice on burnout usually asks social entrepreneurs to change. Many are willing, but the way the work is built stops them from resting and switching off. Expecting founders to notice and prevent their own burnout will keep failing until funders, investors, clients and support organisations change how they work with social entrepreneurs.

Andreana Drencheva is a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at King’s College London; Wee Chan Au is a Senior Lecturer in Management Practice at Newcastle University.

Photo credit: Pattarisara Suvichanarakul