Jah Ying Chung, Project lead

Eirin M. Evjen, Exec. Dir. EA Norway

Jørgen R. Ljønes, Ass. Exec. Dir. EA Norway

In a forum post in February, we posted our plans for organizing an operations camp aimed at improving recruitment of operations talent for EA organizations. The EA Meta Fund gave us a grant for the project in March. This is an update on this project, our reasoning for changing course, and what we have found so far.

Executive summary:

We started researching the operations bottleneck in the fall of 2018, and decided to run an operations bootcamp for which we received a grant from the EA Meta Fund.
In April, after more feedback on our plans, we took a step back and decided to conduct more research into the key operations challenges at EA organizations. With the help of Jah Ying Chung, we conducted interviews and ran a workshop with operations staff at EA organizations.
Based on these interviews, we identified twelve challenges in operations at EA organizations. To identify which of the challenges are the most pressing, we surveyed EA operations people at EA Global San Francisco and through an online survey.
Through differently weighted models of the data we collected, we have identified the five challenges which stand out as most pressing. The top two are:
- Standardization and documentation of routines and processes.
- Talent retention.
While hiring was mentioned as a challenge by several, we did not find it to be among the most pressing challenges and have decided not to run a camp to improve recruitment.
We are currently considering our next steps for testing possible solutions to one or more of the top challenges.

What is this post about?

In this post we will explain our shift away from an operations camp to our new approach for increasing operations capacity at organizations in the EA space (from here on referred to somewhat loosely as “EA organizations”). We identified twelve operations bottlenecks (including those related to hiring) and researched what the most pressing challenges at EA organizations are, according to their operations staff. Then we narrowed these down to the five top challenges, namely:

Standardization and documentation of internal policies and processes
Talent retention
Making time for strategic thinking
Sharing best practices between organizations
Onboarding and integrating new staff into the organization and community

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