Last year The Gilbert Center conducted a survey of 433 professionals in civil society and published a series of papers on some of the results. We are now embarking on a new form of presentation and announcing the full report on the results, entitled Doing Well by Doing Good?: A Report on Work Satisfaction in Civil Society. We are dedicating a website to this report (rather than just presenting it as one large PDF, although both and PDF and hardcopy versions are available), so that you can comment on or point to any particular section or conclusion that you like.

The conclusions are interesting. Many are intuitive, but deserve real world confirmation and some which may surprise you. For example, while overall satisfaction levels between civil society and the rest of the workforce are similar, only half as many people in our survey report that they are “completely satisfied” compared to society at large. We invite you to peruse the report, consider our conclusions, and form your own.

This study was conducted as part of The Gilbert Center’s longstanding interest in quality of work life issues in civil society. We offer a mid-career seminar on the topic called Course Corrections. We do ongoing career coaching and counseling for individuals, in addition to our organizational level practice. And Michael Gilbert is currently writing a related book called The Authentic Organization.