When the mission isn't enough: making the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation a great place to work

About a year ago, we made an unexpected discovery at the foundation. Typically, we love a breakthrough – but not this one. What we found was that morale among some of our staff was lower than we’d like. A foundation-wide employee survey indicated significant challenges to people’s ability to get things done. Not good – either for us, our partners, or the people in the U.S. and around the world that we try to help. 

It wasn’t all bad news. Our employees are proud to work for us, believe in our goals and the impact we make around the world, and consider the foundation a good place to work overall. But clearly we needed to make some changes. Specifically, routine decisions required too many approvals, teams weren’t sharing information with other teams working on similar issues, and many of our people were experiencing burnout.

My first instinct was to move quickly to solve these problems. But, some wise people on my team counseled me to tackle this problem as we do others here: in a systematic way. So we embarked on an 18-month process to improve the way we work inside the foundation. Part of this ongoing process has involved developing four core agreements that cover our attitudes towards each other. They are: show respect, offer trust, be transparent, and create energy.

What we didn’t anticipate when we began this journey was this time of dynamic change on the world stage, when many long-held assumptions and conventions are being questioned. As a global organization – the foundation has more than 1,400 people, across four continents, from more than 100 countries – it’s only natural that our staff react to what’s happening all over the world on both a professional and a personal level. And I have found that our core agreements are helping me and my leadership team make specific decisions and tradeoffs as we navigate our path forward, including helping to foster understanding between colleagues with different points of view.

To show respect, we are acknowledging not just the current external environment, but also its effect on our people and their families, on our partners all over the world, and on the communities and individuals we try to help. We are being transparent – making sure that we hear the voices of employees, listen to their questions, and ensure they are both involved in and informed about discussions and decisions going on inside the foundation. Colleagues are demonstrating trust as they share their personal stories in more public ways.

To give one seemingly small example of what we’re doing, we made a last-minute change to a previously scheduled internal event with Bill and Melinda earlier this month to provide time for an open Q&A session with employees. The response to that opportunity has been overwhelmingly positive and energizing, and it reminds me how our agreements are not just words on paper but actions that reinforce each other.

Our efforts to make the foundation a great place to work are at an early stage. Only now are we beginning to put into practice specific policies and approaches to address concerns around decision-making, information sharing, and work-life balance. We are still feeling our way forward, and, of course, as a clinical scientist I know that improvements don’t come without setbacks along the way. Even so, our recent experience of seeing the agreements in action convinces me that we’re on the right track.

One thing we know from our endeavors in U.S. education and global health and development is that progress comes from patience, perseverance, and passion. Making it easier to work at, and with, the Gates Foundation is my passion. In 2017, I’m all in on it – and I’ll be in it for the long haul. Because I believe that energized people, working well together, fueled by great leadership in an environment in which they thrive, will do phenomenal things no matter what challenges come our way. And for us, that translates into both more opportunity for the poorest and most marginalized people, and lives saved.

I’ll let you know how we get on.