Work behind the Work - Impact Hub Vienna

Building a social venture is more than running a business. It means carrying a mission, making difficult decisions, navigating uncertainty and staying committed to a problem that rarely has a simple solution.

The work is demanding. And there is often another layer of work behind it: managing pressure, coping with rejection, regulating emotions, making compromises, carrying responsibility and trying to stay well while keeping everything moving.

The Work behind the Work is a programme by Impact Hub Vienna, supported by the HIL-FOUNDATION, designed to help social founders recognise, regulate and integrate the practices that make their work more sustainable.

We focus on experiences rather than theory, and on integration into work reality rather than artificial retreats. The sessions take place in an actual workplace, creating space to explore what wellbeing can look like in the context where you actually work.

Because personal sustainability is a strategic choice, and crucial for making and keeping an impact.

The world needs your work. It also needs you healthy.

FURTHER DETAILS

Who you are

Social entrepreneurship comes with particular pressures.

Your mission may be deeply personal, making it difficult to step back without feeling that you are stepping away from the cause. You may feel responsible not only for your team, customers or investors, but also for communities, beneficiaries or a societal problem.

There is rarely a clean exit from the problem you are trying to solve. Overwork and poor boundaries can feel like commitment. And the need to balance financial survival with social or environmental impact can create competing demands without straightforward answers.

The Work behind the Work creates a space to look at these realities directly, and explore how to work with them more sustainably. If this resonates, the program is for you!

What you get

The programme follows a practical journey: first understanding how you work and cope, then exploring how to regulate and build new practices, and finally translating what you discover into your venture.

01 — RECOGNIZE

Recognising what happens, and creating more clarity and agency in demanding situations. You explore how stress, uncertainty and rejection affect your thinking, decision-making and emotional responses. You look at the patterns and biases that shape how you work, and what happens when pressure rises.

02 — REGULATE & PRACTISE

Moving from knowing what helps to building practices that can actually become part of your work. You explore practical regulation techniques and how to make them part of your working reality. Participants experiment with practices that can be used during the working day, not only when everything else has stopped.

03 — TRANSLATE

Bringing wellbeing into the way your venture actually operates.
You explore your actual working context: your team, workload, stakeholders, responsibilities, communication, priorities and leadership. You explore how the structures and expectations around you affect your wellbeing.

04 – COLLABORATE

The program ends with an Ecosystem Convening Event, bringing together founders and relevant ecosystem actors to discuss the structural conditions that shape entrepreneurial wellbeing. The aim is to move beyond awareness and make wellbeing a shared responsibility, and exploring what needs to change to support more sustainable entrepreneurship.