Posted Under: Human Resources President's letter

This month we released our Salary and Benefits Report & Dashboard. While we have been producing these reports for nonprofit decision-making since 2003, this year our report is bigger and better than ever thanks to a partnership with the state nonprofit associations in Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Certainly, this type of data has been useful in the past but right now the nonprofit workforce is at the nexus of events that likely will result in a lasting shift for current and future employees. We have reported over the years on the challenges nonprofit employees and employers face, which sadly have not changed much because few organizations ever feel like they are fully staffed or financially flexible enough to deploy the team they have in all the ways they think… Read more »

Posted Under: Board Development Human Resources Leadership Development President's letter

Our collective workforce woes are real, and we are all searching for what we can do to attract and retain a great workforce. Some of the obvious tools for compensation are outside our reach at the moment, but we do have tools in house right now that we can use to engage and understand our workforce more fully. One of those is meaningful evaluation. There is an art and a science to getting helpful feedback, and if you are the executive director or CEO, you likely know better than most how difficult evaluations are to come by, and meaningful ones are a bit like unicorns. That said, it is not just appropriate to expect some form of helpful feedback, but if you are the executive, it is part of the… Read more »

Posted Under: Human Resources Leadership Development President's letter

Seventeen-percent – that number represents the average of Alaska’s workforce that works for nonprofits. In rural and remote rural Alaska, it can be as high as 40%. Rarely is the sector talked about as an industry, but if we were, we would be the second largest Alaska industry based on employment – right behind oil and gas. The data is compelling for many reasons. One is the opportunity to look closely at what we are doing in the sector to both attract and retain this workforce. In 2006, Tom Tierney published an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review called The Leadership Deficit in which he articulated his view of our future as a sector. A key element of that future was a high turnover of Baby Boomers and a… Read more »