If there is one thing that drives the success of a nonprofit organization, it's the people that believe in its purpose and contribute to its growth. As part of a growing nonprofit, your goals should be to continuously feed this passion by fostering an organizational culture that thrives on healthy levels of employee engagement.
But how can this be achieved? Below, we'll discuss ten tips for better employee engagement in your nonprofit.
Delegate Clear Responsibilities and Empower Your Employees
Employees of nonprofits are typically driven, passionate people who want to see the organization, mission, and sector succeed. However, if you want to get the best out of your employees, it's important that you delegate clear responsibilities with certain levels of accountability.
Giving your employees a clear understanding of their day-to-day, along with the broader strategic direction of the organization, empowers them to make decisions independently without the need for the regular direction of organizational leadership. This fosters healthy levels of autonomy and happy employees. As their supervisor, you win and they win.
Keep Communication Lines Open
There are few things in any organization as important as effective communication, and your nonprofit is no different. However, proper communication means something different to everyone, and finding out how your employees best communicate is essential when creating mutually beneficial dialogues.
How do you know what works best for each employee? As important as it is to set a culture of communication and clearly define the tools and patterns of communication, it’s also important to ask your employees what works for them. Work with your team to design a way of working that provides the best results for everyone involved.
Whether you conduct regular in-person meetings, web conference calls, or have regular over-the-phone check-ins, your employees should feel like they have a regular conduit to you. This will allow them to be aware of their shifting priorities while also feeling they have a sustainable format to connect with you as needed.
Identify and Reinforce the Organization's Vision
At one point or another, you may find that some of your employees hit a productivity wall where they feel less engaged than they used to be in their current roles. When this occurs, it's important to spend the time to reinforce the organization's vision and the individual role they play when supporting it.
Your employees equally want to enjoy where they work and the work they do. One way to ensure this happens is by regularly reminding them of how important they are to you, your organization, and your constituents. This feeling of belonging and purpose will help them get past productivity hurdles that may otherwise get in their way.
Create Manageable Workloads
Do your employees have enough to do? That may be a tricky question to answer without fully understanding your employees' capabilities or the day-to-day operational constraints they may be working with. It's essential to carefully consider your employees' abilities in relation to the amount of work they're tasked with.
Creating manageable workloads for your employees ensures that they are fulfilled day-to-day with the work they're accomplishing without feeling overwhelmed. This helps avoid employee burnout which inevitably can lead to poor morale and lack of productivity and efficiency.
Provide Regular Feedback
Regardless of how great your employees may perform, spending time giving regular feedback on their performance is a sure way to get long-term engagement from all members of your nonprofit team. When you give feedback to one of your employees, the context of the feedback needs to be as impactful as how it is delivered.
When giving feedback, you should be careful not to make it negative as much as constructive. The purpose of your feedback should never be to punish but rather to correct. Of course, not all feedback needs to be built around corrective action. Positive feedback can be even more impactful, and you should always look for opportunities to give it when you can.
Support Work-Life Balance
In order to ensure your employees stay engaged with the organization for a more extended period of time, it's vital to foster a healthy work-life balance. This can sometimes be challenging as nonprofit employees are often passionate about the projects they take on, and it can be tempting to put more time into the organization on a day-to-day basis than is sustainable.
Be sure to encourage your employees to maintain balance when working more hours than they should. This may mean mandating that they take time off at regular intervals, reduce hours when necessary, and find ways to step away from the daily grind when it starts to impact their ability to focus.
Flexibility in working hours and work location can provide value to the employee without negatively affecting work performance or productivity. If COVID taught us anything, it’s that work from home is here to stay. Crafting a policy that supports flex time and place will help you recruit and retain employees that are committed to your organization and passionate about the mission.
Keep Goals Measurable and Achievable
It’s important that you are clear with employees about the expectations of their role while ensuring they have a measurable path to success.
Every organization needs clear objectives, but this is especially the case when running a nonprofit. Whether those objectives are financially driven or are part of executing the nonprofit's mission, employees should be informed of their role in helping to achieve those targets.
Keep your goals measurable and achievable in order to get the most engagement out of your employees. By putting in place smaller milestones that they can achieve, you'll help build their confidence and build a much healthier culture of personal and professional growth.
Celebrate Employee Success
It can be easy to get wrapped up in the daily grind and forget about the hard work your employees do on a regular basis. Don't let the daily pressures of running your nonprofit lead you to forget about celebrating each of your employees' individual or group success from time to time.
While working for a nonprofit organization can be rewarding, every employee likes to know that they are appreciated for the effort put out every day. Take the time to celebrate with your employees whenever you can and continue to feed the excitement of watching your nonprofit succeed.
Provide Support Where Needed
Remember that while you may hire a staff member to complete a specific set of tasks, their success is often a direct reflection of the support you give them on a day-to-day basis. The more support you give, the more effective the output of the employee. Be sure to make yourself available whenever you can to support your employees regularly and give them the tools and knowledge they need to succeed.
Invest in ongoing training -- whether through your state organization membership, funding attendance of a key nonprofit conference, providing access to tools like LinkedIn Learning or Pluralsight Skill, or purchasing courses on Udacity or from various domain experts, like our START strategic planning course.
Allow For Honest Feedback
Just as important, if not more important, as giving feedback to your employees is the willingness to be given feedback as the need arises. The ability to remain humble and accept input from your employees is a defining quality of a great nonprofit leader.
Never shy away from the ability to receive thoughts, ideas, or concerns from your staff members, and be sure to give them a safe environment to do so. Curated feedback never benefits anyone. Open yourself up to being vulnerable, and you'll be amazed at the level of respect you're given for it.
Final Thoughts
It's vital that you never forget the importance of regularly engaging with your employees. By following these ten tips for better employee engagement, you'll ensure your employees remain excited about your nonprofit's goals and continue to play an active role in achieving them.
In the comments section below, share with us other tips you have for engaging your employees or has been particularly impactful to you.