EA - Anti Entropy: Supporting ops professionals in EA by redbermejo

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Anti Entropy: Supporting ops professionals in EA, published by redbermejo on January 25, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.[‘Operations’ (in the effective altruism community) refers to everything that supports and facilitates direct work, from HR to finance to office management to recruiting]One of the key challenges facing the EA community is the lack of much-needed operational support - which drove us to form Anti Entropy. We believe that by providing guidance, tools, and resources to equip and empower EAs for effective operations management, we can help EA organizations to survive and thrive.In this post, we share our thoughts on the challenge for EA operations, what the EA community can do about this, and what Anti Entropy offers.Why is ops support lacking?We set up Anti Entropy to address a general lack of operational support in the community. What causes this situation?First, there are relatively few experienced ops professionals in the community. Second, good resources are limited or inadequately vetted. And third, EA founders and organizational leaders don’t always take advantage of existing operational support. For example, a newly-formed organization may not be aware that they can pay a hiring agency to help them with hiring; or they may not have the budget to use one even if they are aware of them because they didn’t anticipate this expense when they applied for funding.This is exacerbated by a culture of frugality and self-sufficiency in EA. Grantees feel like they need to spend their funding responsibly, which is generally good and admirable, but often they are not given clear guidance on what ‘responsible’ means and what the funders would or would not consider a ‘responsible,’ reasonable use. So they err on the side of caution and inaction.This leads to several problems:Organizations fail unnecessarilyA lack of operational support can cause promising organizations to shut down prematurely. This is often due to practical issues rather than a lack of impact or bad ideas. This is particularly concerning for new or rapidly-growing organizations, which may struggle to keep up with the demands of fast growth. A lack of ops support can lead to bottlenecks, internal cultural issues, a loss of efficiency, and an unnecessary loss of impact.Stress and burnoutEven among organizations that succeed, employees are more stressed and prone to burnout. Ops people have too much responsibility and not enough support. In some cases, employees who are not specifically trained in operations may be required to take on operational tasks in addition to their normal work, leading to overwork and burnout.While the need for operational support in the EA community has been recognized in the past, this has sometimes led to people taking on operational roles without the necessary training or support. Luckily, this has become less common, but there is still room for improvement.MisinformationPeople sometimes think, ‘I don’t need to hire an ops person to deal with taxes/write my grievance policy/deal with the bureaucracy of setting up a nonprofit - I’ll just look up how to do those things myself’. Unfortunately, this can lead to people relying on inaccurate or inappropriate information, potentially leading to legal issues.For example, a UK organization can’t use a US vacation policy since the laws are different. Similarly, some topics related to organizations’ financial status are very poorly understood - for example, what does it mean to ‘set up an entity’, ‘get fiscally sponsored’, or hire people ‘as an independent contractor’? When organizational leaders don’t understand these things, it can lead to them unwittingly breaking the law.What can I do?If you’re currently working in operations for an EA organizationCheck the Anti Entropy website for resources to help ...