The Tool Nonprofits Overlook in Fighting Turnover

Leveraging regular feedback loops allows organizations to stop turnover before it starts.   

Ask most nonprofit leaders what keeps them up at night and it’s not (just) stretched budgets and work that feels like it will never be done.

In reality, the challenge facing many service organizations is employees: finding them and keeping them year after year. In fact, a survey from the National Council for Nonprofits showed that nearly 3 of 4 nonprofits reported job vacancies in the past two years, and over 50% reported burnout as the most commonly voiced problem among staff.

These challenges are real, and it’s easy to feel as if a manager’s hands are tied – after all, there is only so much salary to go around, so many people to do the work, and so much time in a day to provide emotional and physical job support. But rolling over and giving in to the turnover only fuels the flame of the culture challenges facing many nonprofit organizations.

In fact, when you lose an employee, it costs a minimum of a third of their salary (and sometimes up to 2,000% (to get a number specific to your industry, we like the Bonusly calculator.) The thing is, in addition to all the money lost in recruiting new staff members, training them up to be excellent at the work, and other replacement costs, the real cost isn’t about finances at all...but what happens to culture and morale when turnover is high.

As remaining staff stretch to fill gaps, they often start to experience decreased feelings of worth and increased feelings of burnout. Company reputation suffers and so can customer relations, as people wonder if they should trust you with their business.

The good news? (Yes, we have some!)

HR and organizational executives can use feedback opportunities to anticipate problems, rather than just react to them. Feedback tools like pulse surveys, stay interviews and real time feedback can give leaders the insight to act early. This means less time scrambling to fill staff gaps, more time focused on your world-changing work.

Today, we’ll focus on the feedback ecosystem, reviewing the different options and best practices for each. And on next week’s blog, we’ll explore how to review and respond to data, including pitfalls to avoid.

Pulse Surveys

A pulse survey is a short set of questions sent to employees on a regular basis. Because the questions remain the same each time, pulse surveys gather continuous feedback and measure feelings (the vibes, if you will) of an organization.

Pulse surveys can be used to measure anything that matters to the company, from employee engagement to wellbeing and workload to leadership effectiveness to values alignment.

When sending pulse surveys, it’s best to do so monthly or quarterly, keeping the question count lower if sending more often. (Think 5 – 10 questions for a monthly pulse and 10 – 15 max for a quarterly.) Using a scale of 1 – 5, strongly disagree to strongly agree, can help you organize the data and share it more effectively. Surveys should also be anonymous to get the most authentic information.

Worried about form fatigue with such a frequent survey cadence? Don’t be! Qualtrics data found that 75% of employees want to give feedback to their organization more than once per year. Plus, when change occurs following employee input, it creates positive reinforcement for surveys.

Stay Interviews

You’re familiar with the exit interview – it’s a helpful way to gather data on why people chose to leave your organization. But why wait? By the time you’re conducting an exit interview, it’s too late; you’ve lost them. That’s why stay interviews are such a powerful tool. These  one‑on‑ones conducted with current staff are a proactive measure to determine what keeps staff employed with you…and what might compel them to leave.

Stay interviews are usually conducted once a year (twice max), ideally in-person, and not for more than 30 minutes. If your organization is small, it’s a good idea to interview all employees during the process, but larger organizations should focus on several employees from each level or demographic of the organization, as well as the high-performers they want to keep.

Stay interviews complement pulse surveys by helping to interpret survey data – where did those “strongly disagrees / agrees” come from? They also provide deeper qualitative info and support you with retaining your best people. When done well, they show people how much your organization is invested in their wellbeing and retention.

Real time feedback

The least formal of the feedback systems (but maybe the most important!) is real time feedback, or the process by which employees and managers share in-the-moment thoughts and feelings with one another. Immediate feedback is a powerful way to collect and respond to data because it’s, well, immediate!

For staff to feel comfortable giving feedback to their managers, managers must ask for the feedback, ideally weekly or bi-weekly during a one-to-one check-in. As with other types of feedback, it’s critical that even critical input be received with grace and responded to by the manager. Staff must not feel punished for sharing their thoughts when asked!

Making employee/manager real time feedback part of the ecosystem of your organization is the best way to ensure it happens. This starts with top-down modeling of this skill and direct instruction (think a great workshop from your friends at Luminal?!) in how to give and receive feedback.

Join us next week!

We’ll share more about the “so what” – you’ve got all this data, now what do you do with it? We’ll help you break down trends, find the actionable insights, and turn feedback into action so that employees keep sharing it in the future.