…these shoes and this apron
That place and its patrons
Have taken more than I gave them
—Sara Bareilles, from “She Used to Be Mine”

Arts nonprofits often claim (rightfully) that they enrich and nourish thriving communities. But inside these same organizations, workers face long hours, low pay, and limited opportunity for professional or personal growth. What if human flourishing was not only a goal for audiences and communities through the arts, but also for the workers who make it?

As it turns out, the passion-driven nature of arts work can be part of the problem. One study found that assumptions of passion and purpose in the workforce can “license poor and exploitative worker treatment” (Kim et al 2020). Across seven experiments and a meta-analysis, the authors found that:

…people do in fact deem poor worker treatment (e.g., asking employees to do demeaning tasks that are irrelevant to their job description, asking employees to work extra hours without pay) as more legitimate when workers are presumed to be “passionate” about their work.

This “legitimization of passion exploitation” flowed from two primary factors: assumptions that passionate workers would have volunteered for the work if given the chance, and beliefs that the work itself is its own reward. Either of those sound familiar?

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But what if we countered those assumptions to assert that human flourishing should be a central goal of any organization, regardless of the perceived passion of its workforce?

The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard defines five domains as essential, with the highest measures among people doing or being well in all five (VanderWeele 2017):

Happiness and Life Satisfaction: This includes both "hedonic happiness" (positive affective state) and "evaluative happiness" (overall life satisfaction). Yale professor Laurie Santos has framed these two dimensions as being “happy in your life” and “happy with your life.”
Mental and Physical Health: Both are crucial components of flourishing.
Meaning and Purpose: This domain relates to the extent to which individuals feel their lives are worthwhile and that they understand their purpose in life.
Character and Virtue: Agency and identity anchored in prudence (practical wisdom), justice, fortitude (courage), temperance (moderation), and other values appear to play an important role in flourishing.
Close Social Relationships: The quality and satisfaction of an individual's friendships and relationships are an obvious component, as well.

It may be surprising to learn that “Financial and Material Stability” is not considered a core domain, but rather a supporting variable that helps individuals maintain well-being in the other domains over time.

If these were the metrics for your co-workers, how would your organization measure up? And to what extent do you emphasize these outcomes in your planning, budgeting, and management strategies as a Deliberately Developmental Organization (Kegan and Lahey 2016)? As a start, you can use the Human Flourishing Program’s questionnaire to see where you stand.

There are certainly practical reasons to care and attend to the whole humans who make your organization work – lower turnover, better performance, positive engagement with each other and your audiences. But the larger reason to focus energy on flourishing is that it is right to do so.

Certainly, work isn’t the only place that shapes these domains. And nobody should expect work, alone, to sustain human flourishing. But work is an essential piece of the puzzle. So, if you’re in the business of making a better world, be sure to include your own people in that ambition.

Andrew

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From the ArtsManaged Field Guide

Function of the Week: People Operations
People Operations involves designing and driving systems and practices that attract, engage, retain, and develop people within the enterprise (also called human resources).

Framework of the Week: Value Proposition Canvas
The Value Proposition Canvas encourages you and your team to explore and understand a set of customers, audience members, or constituents from their perspective: What jobs are they trying to do? What pains do they encounter in that effort? And what gains do they experience when they succeed?

Photo by Madison Oren on Unsplash

Sources

Kegan, Robert, and Lisa Laskow Lahey. An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization. Harvard Business Review Press, 2016.
Kim, Jae Yun, Troy H. Campbell, Steven Shepherd, and Aaron C. Kay. “Understanding Contemporary Forms of Exploitation: Attributions of Passion Serve to Legitimize the Poor Treatment of Workers.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 118, no. 1 (January 2020): 121–48.
VanderWeele, Tyler J. “On the Promotion of Human Flourishing.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 31 (August 2017): 8148–56.

ArtsManaged Field Notes

Helping arts workers flourish