The ability for employers to motivate, inspire and engage employees is fundamental to the success of any nonprofit — that much is obvious. But how nonprofit employers go about engaging employees to drive organizational change or achieve their mission is far less clear.
For those who have worked in the nonprofit sector, the problems associated with a lack of employee engagement are all too familiar. Participants at the 2011 National Summit for the Charitable and Nonprofit Sector identified a need to improve conditions to attract and retain employees. A recent US survey on nonprofit workforce engagement warned about high levels of staff burnout. And a report released last month by WorkforceConnect labelled the fallout from poor leadership and a lack of nonprofit employee engagement a “perfect storm”.
While recognizing that there are still many obstacles to overcome, nonprofit leaders are beginning to propose solutions to address how can nonprofit organizations can improve employee motivation, reduce staff fatigue, alleviate workforce turnover, and perhaps most importantly, engage their own employees as catalysts for organizational change and success.
Understanding the psychology of motivation and engagement
As director of strategic partnerships and former manager of employee engagement at WWF-Canada, part of Monica Da Ponte‘s role is to create opportunities for employees and partners to engage in conservation initiatives. Tapping into what employees think about WWF-Canada, listening to how they feel about environmental issues, and understanding what motivates them are all aspects of that engagement process.
“Conservation and success in conservation is something that’s valuable to WWF employees. People are here because they’re intrinsically motivated by the work they get to do,” says Da Ponte. “So how can you create opportunities for employees to see that in action and to participate? How do you connect employees with a driver that’s already intrinsic and has brought them to your organization?”
Issues related to employee motivation and engagement extend across the field. As Da Ponte recognizes, the nonprofit sector is one of the best positioned to take advantage of incentives to recognize and reward employee engagement. Unsurprisingly, the impact of that recognition and reward is great. Evidence suggests that employee engagement is positively associated with key organizational outcomes such as increased workforce productivity, higher levels of job satisfaction and reduced turnover rates. “Connecting employees with something that is intrinsic and meaningful excites them and makes them much more effective and efficient within their day job,” maintains Da Ponte.
WorkforceConnect’s report similarly found that among employees working in nonprofits — regardless of their length of employment — being valued for their contributions ranked higher than wages, compensation, working conditions, job security and opportunities for professional development and advancement.
Employees therefore not only need to be engaged for an organization to thrive, they want to be engaged as part of their jobs. In the wake of economic difficulties that have impacted the nonprofit sector, combined with high levels employee turnover, staff burnout and the emergence of generation flux, the need for change and engagement is evident. But how that change and engagement happens is far more complex. Does organizational change create the conditions for employee engagement, or does a more engaged workforce create the conditions to implement organizational change?
The process of employee engagement
In 2008, Shaleen Jones joined Laing House, a Halifax-based peer support organization for youth with mental illness, as their executive director. As part of her role, Jones led the redevelopment of Laing House’s strategic focus, looking at the benefits and barriers of engaging employees, along with the value of receiving input from consultants, clients, funders and the general public.
“Employee engagement is not a thing, it’s a process. Everyone has something to contribute and a unique perspective,” explains Jones. For employees and team members it’s important for them to have a sense of “what’s the big picture, how does what I do fit into the big picture, and how does it all connect together.”
Jones, however, is also keenly aware of the investment it takes to engage employees and the potential barriers that may prevent that process from taking shape. “One of the challenges with engagement is that it’s more time consuming up front. It isn’t always successful and it can be really exhausting…if staff are used to having an organizational culture that is top-down, they’re really weary of people trying to engage them — it’s a new thing.” Jones says that while there’s a tendency to want to skip the employee engagement step because of the amount of work involved, the process is necessary for strengthening and deepening whatever it is a nonprofit is trying to accomplish.
In the end Jones saw value in bringing in an outside consultant to capture, as she so passionately puts it, “the magic that we’re doing,” while also engaging employees to help shape the future direction of Laing House. When undergoing strategic change, an impartial expert can offer a fresh perspective, ask tough questions, guide discussions, and free up staff, team and board members to fully participate in the process. “With day-to-day staff they’re immersed in their work — so they have expertise at that level — but it’s challenging for employees to pull themselves out of the day-to-day and look at the big picture when that hasn’t been what they’ve been doing.”
But bringing in outside help doesn’t mean neglecting the talent, knowledge and ideas that already exist within an organization. Laing House directly involved staff in the strategic planning process and eventually tied employee performance plans and reviews into that system. The organization also looked for creative ways to collect data and engage employees though art projects, informal conversation and staff journals, along with more traditional survey and focus group methods to establish an overarching evaluation framework.
WWF-Canada also recognizes the power of employee engagement. “Employees are the ones that control the billions of decisions an organization makes,” says Da Ponte. As one of Canada’s leading conservation organizations with multiple offices across the country, communication, collaboration and training are integral to improving the capacity and engagement of staff. “WWF-Canada does a lot from an employee engagement perspective. We have regular communication with employees that really create an understanding of the breadth of work happening within the organization. We invest significantly in employee training and development — and try to understand where an employee is along their career path and where they want to go.” The organization also supports the creation of self-driven initiatives, such as their sustainability at work committee that helps to make WWF-Canada even greener.
For both organizations however, employee engagement needs to start with assessing where an organization is and where they want to go. Da Ponte recognizes that creating a baseline is an important first step because it identifies what to work on and what gaps may exist in terms of engagement. As she questions, “Have employees been submitting suggestions and you haven’t been listening, or have they not been engaged in providing suggestions at all?”
Up until 2008, Laing House had spent the past seven years running innovative programs and receiving positive feedback without effectively capturing data on the impact of their work. “We didn’t have good data to improve our programs and we didn’t have good data around where we would focus resources,” explains Jones. “So we needed to take a step back and figure out what do we need to track, what’s important to measure, and how are we going to measure it.”
With the establishment and measurement of a baseline, organizations can then set specific goals related to engagement, better identify barriers that prevent engagement, and begin to develop and implement programs to improve staff motivation and change organizational culture. One such program is WWF’s Living Planet @ Work initiative that supports engaging an organization’s employees in sustainability. The program, available to both corporate partners and nonprofits, provides a series of free tools that range from how to set up a green team to ideas around reducing your energy footprint in the office and conducting a waste audit.
As one small example of how an engagement program can support sustainable change, WWF-Canada partnered with Sears Canada to design an initiative that encouraged employees to turn off their computer monitors at night to reduce energy consumption. After work hours, members of the Sears Canada green team looked at who had turned off their monitors and who hadn’t and rewarded those who had with an anonymous gift — an apple. The next day the apple reward generated curiosity, conversation and engagement. Members of the green team later followed up with communication explaining the situation, asking people to turn off their monitors and raising awareness about energy efficiency. The initiative, says Da Ponte, highlights a simple and inexpensive way an organization’s can engage employees and encourage organizational change. “What [Sears Canada] did was actually stimulate conversation and education around a key important issue and they recognized and rewarded behaviour that they wanted to establish within the organization.”
These types of activities, believes Da Ponte, can be scaled to work within smaller environments, adapted for use across disciplines, and developed to overcome specific barriers to change. “If education and collective understanding are a barrier? Newsletters or integrated team meetings with consistent messaging could be strategies to address those problems. If the barrier is recognition, then start an awards program. A lot of times these don’t have to be expensive. Employee engagement is one of those things that requires ongoing, regular investment and has a long-term payout.”
Whether it’s changing from the inside-out, or the outside-in, the process of employee engagement is clearly cyclical and iterative. Organizational changes do indeed create the conditions for employees to engage with their day-to-day work and the larger mission of a nonprofit. But an engaged workforce simultaneously creates the conditions to implement organizational changes. Indeed it is through this lens that we may avoid some of the perils associated with a lack of employee engagement and ideally prevent the ‘perfect storm’.
Six ways to engage employees
Staff–led retreats: activities away from the office led by employees help build teamwork, empower individuals and strengthen communication, participation and collaboration.
Crowdfund a project: collective action can unite and inspire employees to work together towards a common fundraising goal while receving recognition and reward for their efforts.
Encourage sabatticals: corporate volunteering initiatives, like Uniterra’s Leave for Change program, may provide opportunities for employees to connect with the mission of an organization at the grassroots level.
Employee development fund: providing staff with their own professional development budget allows them to take part in courses, training or activities connected to their career goals, furthering engagement and resonsibility.
Staff journals: creative initiatives like this may help employees capture the informal, day-to-day reward of their work. An inspirational moment or conversation can be easily lost in the big picture, but staff journals can be an excellent way to collect and measure feedback or major accomplishments.
Employee recognition systems: innovative programs like LoveMachine let team members reward each other for doing amazing work and help organizations measure individual employee contribution.
David Venn is an Ottawa-based public relations specialist focused on helping nonprofit organizations create positive and sustainable social change. He currently works as a Communications Advisor with the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. Follow David on Twitter @davidjvenn or on his nonprofit PR blog.
