“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
This exchange, perhaps a staple of parent/child relationships, has no place in management. In fact, communicating to employees the why of their work — the context, value, and relevance of their work — is vital to both training efforts and effective coaching. Further, recent research, including a study conducted in a nonprofit fundraising environment, suggests that employees who know how their work positively impacts others are more productive than those who don’t.
Continue reading ‘The Power of Why’
It was my pleasure to present this week at Rutgers Business School as part of the Institute for Ethical Leadership’s 2010 Nonprofit Leadership Certificate Program. In addition to leading a plenary session on the use of social media and social networking for nonprofit organizations, I had the chance to address both the executive and emerging leaders tracks on compensation in the nonprofit sector.
The two presentations overlap in conveying information about the past, present, and future of nonprofit pay. The first presentation, for the emerging leaders, also offers a brief overview of executive compensation in the sector, as well as a primer on pay for performance approaches. The second, for established executives, provides recommendations on ways to enhance their organizations’ pay and performance management practices.
Emerging Leaders
Executives
Each of the conversations branched out in several interesting discussions, some of which I’ve touched upon in previous posts, and all of which were worthy of further discussion. You may find the following related posts of interest:
Are Your Executive Compensation Bases Covered?
The Buck Stops Where?
Development in Demand: Challenges for Fundraising Professionals and Employers
Executive Compensation at Boys & Girls Clubs of America: A Closer Look
Human Resources Maturity
A Look at Nonprofit IT Staffing
The Path to Pay for Performance
Paying Attention to Turnover in the Nonprofit Sector
Salary Ranges 101
Please feel free to share the presentations and posts with your colleagues and, as always, share your comments and questions!
Lately, it seems that any sentence containing the words “nonprofit” and “compensation” is related to the scrutiny of pay provided to the presidents and other top executives of organizations. However, for most nonprofit organizations, far more compensation dollars are paid to the broader, non-executive employee population.
Continue reading ’2010 Nonprofit Human Resources Conference: Pay for Today (and Tomorrow)’
My new post on the Mission Connected Blog, “What’s in Your Manual? Nonprofit Employee Handbooks“, summarizes general considerations for employee handbooks, details essential content and resources for creating a handbook, and highlights one important area your organization’s handbook might be missing.
My new post on the Mission Connected Blog, “Paying Attention to Turnover in the Nonprofit Sector“, takes a look at the prevalence of, causes of, and potential responses to the costly issue of employee turnover among nonprofit organizations.
I’m honored that my recent post “How to Be A Great Nonprofit Employer” was among the seven selected as the best nonprofit posts of the month in the April Nonprofit Blog Carnival, hosted by Jeff Brooks on his Future Fundraising Now blog.
“Managers are commonly ill-equipped to understand the dynamics of their compensation costs, never mind monitor and control them.”
I was struck by this statement by Chuck Csizmar in a recent post on the Compensation Cafe blog. Chuck was making a case for companies to focus on the return on investment (ROI) for employee compensation, and he went on to discuss the reasons for and consequences of managers making poor compensation decisions.
I have to agree with Chuck about managers’ abilities in this area, as this phenomenon is at the heart of a challenge I have repeatedly faced when working with nonprofit organizations to overhaul and improve their compensation practices. But, rather than ruing the fact that managers lack these skills and looking for ways improve them, I suggest that there is no real need for the vast majority of managers to develop them in the first place.
Continue reading ‘The Buck Stops Where?’
Delighted that my recent post “Human Resources Maturity and the Three P’s” on the Mission Connected Blog was included in the 4/28 Carnival of HR, which “features recent posts from the best of the HR and management blogging community”!
Much conversation and debate in the nonprofit and philanthropic communities these days revolves around how to determine which organizations are the “best”. Fortunately, there seems to be a consensus away from basing such determinations on measures such as overhead ratio and administrative expenses and towards evaluation of impact — but that’s a topic for another day and post.
Employee opinions offer another perspective on a nonprofit’s quality.
Another perspective on a nonprofit’s quality can be found in the opinions of the organization’s employees. A recent study by the NonProfit Times and Best Companies Group used such opinions as the primary basis for identifying the “50 best nonprofits to work for in 2010″.
In the study, employee’s responses to a written survey accounted for 75% of each organization’s score. The remaining 25% was based on assessment of the organization’s benefit offerings and other practices, using a proprietary methodology.
Continue reading ‘How to Be a Great Nonprofit Employer’
In my previous post on the Mission Connected Blog, I examined the first two of three basic phases in a nonprofit organizations’ human resources maturity and their implications for the design and effectiveness of key human resources processes. My new post, “Human Resources Maturity and the Three P’s, Part 2“, examines the third and final phase and outlines some questions that nonprofit managers and human resources professionals should ask about their own organization.
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