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Nonprofit Radio for May 19, 2017: Healthcare Funding Options & Leadership Options

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Chris Labbate: Healthcare Funding Options

You have options today! First, Chris Labbate walks us through fully insured; self funded; level funding & minimum premium, so you understand your choices paying for your employees’ health insurance. Chris is with Marsh & McLennan Agency.

 

 

Gene Takagi: Leadership Options

Gene Takagi

Then, we talk leadership options with Gene Takagi, our legal contributor and principal of NEO, the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations law group. Co-CEOs anyone? How about holacracy?

 


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Oh, hi there. Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent on your aptly named host this is show number three hundred forty, the three hundred fiftieth non-profit radio is going to be coming up it’s on july twenty eighth, three fifty music comedy special news i hope you’ll be with me for three fifty i’m sending spies special a pre show special live listener love to the fans of crystal a bat this insurance guy has a big fan base that this guy’s, a rock star who sells insurance live listener love to chris’s special live listeners, and i’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer with my own militia if you try to soften me up with the idea that you missed today’s show health care funding options today is options day first, kriss la bat walks us through fully insured self-funding level funding and minimum premium. So you understand your choice is paying for your employees health insurance chris’s with marsh and mclennan agency and shared leadership options. We talked leadership options with jean takagi are legal contributor and principle of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group co ceos. Anyone? How about holacracy shared leadership on tony’s? Take two. My finger is still wagging, responsive by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com, and by we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers. We be e spelling dot com for all his fans. And, of course, for everyone else. Here is crystal bat with health care funding options. My privilege to welcome chris lay back to the studio as regional executive vice president at marshall mclennan agency, chris is an authority on employee benefits, including customer driven health plans and alternative funding. He shares his expertise and twenty eight years of industry experience to help you see how innovative employee benefits and hr programs can lower your costs. The company is at mm a hyphen and e dot com crystal bat. Welcome to studio. Thank you, tony. Pleasure to be here. I’m glad you are. Thank you. Read your colleague last week. Mark. So you’re going to shine like mark shine did yes, i know you’re up to it. All right? So we are we’re talking about funding funding options for employee health. Let’s, let’s reassure listeners first, this is not going to be impacted by health care reform that may come or is not going to be impacted seriously, right? Yes, that’s that’s correct? Most likely, the funding options will stay the same. Okay? Because we really can’t predict what’s coming out of congress, but we don’t expect the general ideas around funding that you and i are going to talk about to be impact. Correct, okay. Right? We don’t make the show irrelevant in two weeks after. Okay. All right, so it turns out you don’t have to fully fund. I mean, i think probably the majority are ah, now i know you do have some stats, actually, but i’m thinking small and midsize non-profits probably most of them are just osili insured, fully insured, really insured plan. Correct, but you have options. Correct. So? So in a fully insured plan, you’re just paying a fixed monthly rate that the insurance carrier sets for your organization and if its profitable to them it’s profitable them. If it’s not profitable, they’re taking on the all the risk skin and losing out. Yeah, okay. They probably don’t lose out too often, though. I’m guessing they might lose one year, but they’re probably gonna lose two years in a row over the long term state business. They have to make profit. Okay. Exactly. All right, so i think pretty. Yeah. People are pretty accustomed to that. The fully fully insured and ah it’s easy it’s level payment, i mean, and you know exactly what to expect. Her employees have a set of benefits and it’s all easily defined and of course, insurance, company’s, managing it right. So we’re just talking about the financing of the benefit plans, right? So that’s, often transparent to the employees, don’t get involved with that. So the employer is just paying the fixed costs, and they’re all there are alternatives to the fully insured, called self-funding, which can be explored for more, most organizations, five employees on up. Ok, so even for the smallest organization, correct benny on the state. But, yes, okay, okay, cool. S so this is going to be impacted by state law. Also, correct, yes, all right. Um now, if we are, if we are self-funding then we’re taking on some risk, correct, you’re taking on a portion of the claims risk so that portion you’re going to fund as the claims come in, but what’s often misunderstood about self-funding is that there are insured components built into self-funding so it may not be at the same level that you have. You’re fully insured, fixed rate, right? But you do have insurance components to protect you. Two different suits to specific types. There’s ones called specific insurance to protect you against any one person having a claim over a certain amount. Okay, you decide is the employer and you purchased that coverage of twenty five thousand fifty thousand. If a claim hits that level, the insurance kicks in, and then the second is called aggregate insurance, which is protection that your total claims that going don’t go over certain amount. Okay? All right, so i got you. I got you so you can. There are some. Yes, there are some insurance protections built into self-funding. All right, now you do have some stats about, um um about what? What? The percentages are around. Who’s self-funding. And how it’s. Been changing since nineteen, ninety nine like percentage self-funding vs versus the full, fully, fully insured thank you write. So especially since health care reform has has kicked in there’s been a movement towards self-funding on dh that basically is benefiting employer groups that have a favorable risk of benefits around the country. They’re showing. About sixty one percent of covered workers that have health insurance through their employer are covered under some form of a self-funding plan. Yeah, well, okay, so almost two thirds correct under some form of self self-funding and that’s changed from nineteen, ninety nine that was forty four percent correct. A big change. Okay, okay, um, so if we’re if we’re going to consider this self-funding option, there are some different kinds of costs that we need to be aware of, correct. Right now, we’re just like we have about two minutes before break. So why don’t you just kind of tease out the idea of these different kinds of costs we have to be aware of? And then you’re not going to more detail. Perfect after right after that. So in general there’s, two categories of cost, you have your fixed costs that you’re paying on a monthly basis and you have your variable costs will be, which will be your claims costs as they come in. Ok, fixed, invariable. All right, we’re going to dive into that a little more. We take our break a minute and a half earlier, so and then kristen are going to keep talking, finding out what your options are around, maybe self-funding all are a part of your employee health stay with us, you’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation really all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals the better way welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent with chris sabat when we’re talking about funding options for your employee health now, christine, you do not have lots of letters after your name. Last week we had i says that mention mark your colleague market lots of letters especially easy, like sees after name there’s all your where’s, all your credentials, they’re all just built into yourself. Yes. You know, i’ve been in industry since eighty nine, and i have my master’s in finance and marketing. I’m just really the experience in the industry on the benefits side. Okay, okay. Your bona fide? Yes. Okay. Okay. All right. So let’s. Now, zai promised diving a little more on these. Some of these costs that you have to think about taking on if you were goingto fundez self-funding fixed costs like like what? Like what? So the first fixed costs you would have is your cost to administer the plan. And typically you’re hiring an insurance carrier or a company. It looks like an insurance carrier called a third party administrator to perform all the tasks that that insurance carrier would under a fully insured plan. So paying claims customer service id cards for employees booklets. So from the employees perspective, if they don’t know what the funding is, it looks and feels like a fully insured plan to them. There’s no difference. Okay, so you’re outsourcing this administrative work. Exactly. No need for you to hire people to be doing this for you. Exactly. Cos that’ll do it for you. Yes, at a fraction of the cost of a fully insured plan. Okay. Okay. Um and the what? What else? Fixed costs. There’s this ways that now we now we get into some of the insurance coverage mentioned earlier, protecting us against a really unhealthy employer employee or or or or or aggregate. Go ahead. Absolutely. So so most companies that self-funding will have two types of insurance associated with their plan and their purchasing this protection. And the first is called specific insurance protection against anyone large claim going over a predetermined amount. And as the employees you, you picked that amount, whether it’s twenty five thousand, fifty thousand and as that amount goes up, the premium associating it kind of goes down exactly. Okay? And the second type of coverage is called aggregate insurance. And that’s protection that your total paid claims will not exceed a certain amount. Okay. And that’s, very inexpensive coverage. All right. And so these air part of your fixed costs that you’re going to be absorbing? Yes, if you’re if you’re exploring self-funding, you’ll get a monthly bill with your admin costs and your stoploss costs all printed out per employee, just like you get a fully insured premium bill. Okay, okay. On. And then you had the variable costs, which is basically what you’re going to be paying out for doctor visits. Right, etcetera. That right. Exactly. So the variable cost will be the claim’s paid out for your employee population covered under the plan. And in general, when you’re purchasing your stoploss insurance, the underwriter at the stoploss carrier will determine what they expect. Your claims to be given your employee population and then they’ll determine a maximum exposure. So if your claims go above this maximum amount, the insurance will kick in and cover it. Okay, that maximum exposure is usually set ten to twenty percent higher than your expected claims for your popular do-it-yourself kush. Exactly. Okay, exactly. Now, what about reserves in all this? I mean, if we’re going to be doing that, we have to have money set aside for the payment of claim. Exact. Exactly. So when you first go into self-funding plan in the first few months, you typically will not see any paid claims. Somebody goes to a doctor today. It doesn’t get reported two to three weeks from now when it gets paid. Okay, so there’s a cash flow advantage upfront going into a self funded plan, but on the back and if you ever terminate a self-funding plan, there’ll be claims coming into the third party administrator or the carrier that need to be paid based on service states prior to when you terminated, right? Right. That’s called run out or term a terminal liability. Okay, yeah, while you were self-funding toe at the end mean, you benefited in the beginning, right at the end. Claims are still going to be coming in as you exact your i guess. Or now fully insured. And you ended your your self-funding crackers. But but so that has to be a reserve fund, right? Don’t law must require something like you’ve gotta have ah dedicated account or something with the money. For the old yes, so typically a joint bank account set up with the third party administrator there paying claims out of this account when you had that crash flow advantage at the beginning of the program when your first during out self-funding we recommend that you just bank that money and that’s setting up the reserves for the event if it ever happens where you cancel the self-funding plan, okay? And how about knowing? Oh, well, i guess that goes into your expected cost. Me knowing how much to put into this reserve correcting for for a decent sized organization, i don’t know, like ten employees, i mean, could conceivably be half a million dollars or something. I mean, i’m just numbers don’t stop my head, right? You’re going to be more precise, you’re probably gonna say, well, it’s gonna depend on age, right and correct help histories, etcetera and it’s broken out by the underwriters on a monthly basis. So, you know, so when you get your stoploss coverage, they’ll give you a claims factor per employee per month. And that is how you calculate the number of employees times that claims factor gives you your exposure for the expected exclaims focus and that’s the amount that’s got to go in this dedicated reserve for typically yes, now you can’t you can’t be using this money for other purposes correct it, sze designated restricted or something for the self-funding plan? Yes, it should be air marks for the self-funding plants. He had the money available to pay their letting your employees down your absolute, obviously seriously. Okay. Okay. We don’t want people run operating that. Okay, um all right. So we’re talking a lot about self-funding what are what are some of the reasons you that non-profit might actually think about doing it? There’s some advantages? Yeah. There’s some big advantage associate with self-funding the first is there are a bunch of hidden taxes and fully insured plan. So under health care reform, there’s four four and a half percent in taxes that get attacked right onto a fully insured great. Okay, now, health care reform. Today on the day now, we’re recording couple weeks earlier, then this is going to air. So health care reform by that you mean the affordable care act? Correct? Or obamacare? Correct. Okay, not something that may be happening in congress in april of this year in may of this year is that right? That’s correct. So in the affordable care act, there’s a tax on non-profits that are any fully insured krauz any fully insured plan has attacks built into it that gets funded, the funds go right towards offsetting the cost of the affordable care act. Was it attacks on the amount of premium? You correct? Oh, interesting. Okay, right. Forty five percent you sent were correct and there’s also in some states and local taxes that get applied to fully insured plans. So when your self-funding you’re circumventing the state rules and some of these fully insured taxes at a federal level, yeah. Okay. All right. This one advantage. All right? What else are there? Other reasons it we have? Ah, younger, healthier group. You’re going to benefit because you’re paid claims will be much lower then expected or similar to expected. And then you’re paying less than you would under a fully insured plan now wouldn’t and ensure offering full insurance? Wouldn’t they be factoring in that you have a younger, healthier workforce. So health care reform change some of the factors that go in. They do account. For age coverage, tear with a single or family coverage if you’re a smoker or a nonsmoker, but generally you’re paid claims in a small group will not count towards calculating your rate. Wait a minute, we better impact that statement. Hold on, you’re paid claims in a given group will not will not what? I came here if you’re unaffiliated, if you’re in a fully insurance plan small group market? Yes, your claims do not drive your rates typically. Oh, they don’t correct because it’s the law of large numbers, they’re playing, they’re not going to base your rates on your claims. If you’re five people or ten people that’s what healthcare form actually did away with to try to stabilize the small group market just like those of us who are individuals, we go to the exchanges. It’s my premium is not at all based on my history could i mean, i think they might have asked if i’m a smoker. But that’s all yes, that’s one of the factors taken you okay? So we’re getting very small. So that’s at one end of the spectrum, tiny individual. I see what you’re saying. They’re all right there it applies to small groups as well. So i’ll give an example of you if you’re in a fully insured plan, you’re paying fixed rate every month and say your premium comes to one hundred thousand dollars a year. Okay, now, if you wanna self-funding plan, you’re paying your fixed costs, which might be twenty or thirty thousand will estimate and then there’s seventy thousand and projected claims what your claims only coming at ten thousand, you’re only paying ten thousand wonderful insure plan you pay the full hundred thousand still alright, so there’s an opportunity here for a new organization to engage in employee health, health, health and wellness, right? Yes, if you’re going to go fully every, i’m sorry if you’re goingto self-funding you can enjoy some benefits of every every, every two weeks, we have a five k run or, you know, whatever i say, right? I mean it’s perfect segway twenty foot that one of the next advantages. If you have an active wellness program where you’re engaging your employees and getting healthy, that can parlay into fewer claims and under self-funding plan, you benefit directly from that you’re not paying out claims on un employees that don’t go to the doctor. Okay? What size organization do we have to be? Or was it eliminated completely under affordable care act, where they would start looking at our claims history and our wellness programs? If we were going fully insured so it vary state by state eso it khun b fifty employees, one hundred employees and and more. All right, you have to be that size for them to start factoring in your individual act. Your program’s done. But i mean, you could have, like, smoking cessation. You could have, i don’t know. Organization provided fitbits and everybody’s got eight or ten thousand step daily minimum, right? You can have all kinds of programs to try to save yourself. Money. Those air, those air common wellness programs. There’s not innovative thinking, innovative now company and fried. It provided fifty. Now they’re doing that. Yes. Alright. I thought maybe i had some some great insights. Okay, um all right. So i just happened to be a big wellness fan so you could save some money if you doing self insurance. Self-funding self-funding i should say on and there’s a couple there’s. A couple more advantages. Get more transparency. You see, you’re paid claims were under fully insured arrangement. You typically do not especially smaller employers, so you don’t get to see the claims them all employers typically, we’ll not see their claims history because they’re not allowed or that usually carrier policy not to give out paid claims to smaller employers, especially if they’re rates aren’t dictated by plane. So that gives you the ability to better budget for future costs because you have all the information and it helps you design with plan design. So if you know people are over using the emergency room, you might up the co pan the emergency room copay and you might lower the copay on your urgent care centers or tele medicine to try to drive people with lower cost setting. Yes. Okay, so you could drive some behaviors. Okay. I could see that there’s one last one. It gives you the ability to not have to include state mandated benefits in your plan. And that’s, a big benefit for companies who have people across state lines because they can provide one seamless plan designed for all their employees. You say companies. But we non-profit organizations exactly. All right. So different. States have different mandated benefits, correct packages? Correct. Okay, i saw a bit of a little i mean, this is kind of interesting, well, privacy issue coming out of what you were just saying, if you’re self-funding you’re able to see claims history now you know who the unhealthy people are, right? Who’s got bad behaviors, etcetera mean, who wrecked a lot of so the reporting khun b done where’s d identified which just means you’re seeing general information, but it is if you have a smaller the company, you might be able to identify who those people are. S o typically you would want tohave an internal privacy policy, which which follows the hip national privacy standards with a privacy officer and a policy in place to protect that information and only have certain people buy-in certain people given access to the information within your organization. Ok, ok, that actually dovetails with what? What mark and i talked about last week levels of compartmentalization correct categorization, i believe he called. Okay, um, who typically would be looking at this data if we’re going self-funding who looks at this on a monthly basis so typically be somebody in hr maybe. Something in finance and it’s almost it’s, almost always d identified so you know, you’re not going to know who the people are, but they’re looking at it, just seeing what claims were being paid out and budget and future years, and then also the behaviours trying toe like you said, friends instance, if we see emergency rooms being overused, correct plan design, and then we could also just have meetings about listen, people, you know, you’re hurting our you’re hurting the organization by using the as your primary care or something like that, you know, you’re hurting. We’re trying to stay self-funding for for the these reasons because we think it’s better for you then than being fully insured. But you’re making it hard for us to do so right? Get a primary care physician. Yeah, you can have meetings about the right can you talk about? You can talk about that, you can have any things. And you, khun target wellness programs like you reference if you see your population has a history of high blood pressure or a lot of smokers, you can use that information to taylor educational program. Bring people in current, bring people in to talk about hypertension. Manage? Absolutely. Okay. Diabetic diabetes management? Yes. If people are having a lot of diabetes related issues. Okay. Okay. All right. So we still have some time left. What? My voice just cracked still. What? What happened? I asked you what else? What else could we talk about? Some of the some of the negatives with self-funding. So if you’re moving to a self funded arrangement, you have the variable cash outlay potential. So one month your claims can be very favorable. The next month you can have high claims. You do have those reinsurance caps built in protection. Stoploss is you’ve already examined all the jargon. I got tongue now, stoploss but you can still have some variants and some come organisations prefer the fixed costs associated with a fully insured plan. You know what you’re paying your budget for it and that’s your costs for the year where self-funding can vary over the course of twelve months. Okay, um, how does it work? This is a very basic question. But if you if you are self-funding, how does it work in terms of a network of hospitals and doctors? Have you that’s? Good cause. You choose what providers are available to your employees. So when when you hire the third party administrator or insurance carrier to administer the plan there, providing that service for you so you can hire a big insurance company and use their network, you’re renting their network to access those discounts. That’s part of the administrative fees it gets broken out into network rental fee utilization management, he gets into a very a lot, a lot of details broken out, focus. Okay, well, because you can use somebody’s network and not be insured by the exactly you’re taking the risk, you’re just using them to administer the plan. Roger. Okay, i say interesting. Okay, um, what else? We still got a few minutes left, so that zoho your disadvantages of having any of that was that was one big one. The other one is if you ever want to get out of self-funding you have that terminal liability. So if you say i’m canceling my self-funding plan today, you’ll have a couple months of claims to pay out. Still for claims that were incurred prior to your cancellation date. And at the same time, if you’re signing up for a fully insured plan, you’re paying the fully insured rates so it’s like a double payment for a few months to get out of this self-funding plan. I got to get to cool things. I got terminal liability and stoploss yes was going around saying, you sound like a genius, alright stoploss german labbate that’s a term reliability problem on dh that i could touch on to two other quick thing before you do, though dahna the terminal liability i mean, could that could that go on for years? I mean, suppose someone made a claim while you were still self-funding and then they continue to have related issues to that claim like so i don’t know what a surgery that went bad or something, and then years later, they’re still having, like following surgeries to that infection from when you were self-funding what good question so it’s driven by the nhk earl date of the claim? So if i go to a doctor today and i’m self-funding today, it gets paid dahna self-funding plan for that same condition if i go to the doctor next month and next month i’m under a fully insured plan gets paid by the flame. Shirt plan. Oh, so the general liabilities just the run out. They call it from the from the self-funding period when people went to the doctor during that plan here. All right, so it’s not considered like a pre existing condition. Correct? Where the now insurance company, because you’re fully insured kicks is going is going to kick it back to you from what? Your self-funding days doesn’t work like that. Correct? It does not. Does not. Okay. Okay. All right. That’s, some reliability thisyou xero everywhere you’re in our daily lives. Term liability stoploss okay, what else you got? I could do real quickly to other hybrid type products between fully insured and self-funding. So you have some combination once called level funding, and this gives you the fixed costs of a fully insured plan where you paint a rate every month for employees. But at the end of the year, if your claims are favorable, there’s the potential to get a refund of a portion of the terrible claims. Oh, so you benefit if if claims air. Good. Act. Okay. And if claims are are not good. You’ve paid your rate for the year and you walk away. Okay, well, that’s, because you have what you want had some stoploss coverage it’s all built into, like, a fully insured rate. So you have that fixed rate, and then if your claims are favorable there’s something called a settlement done at the end of the year, you know, if you would get money back, but there’s no potential. The additional dellaccio more correct. Okay. And then you have you said in which another hybrid? Yeah. There’s there’s one more call the minimum premium arrangement. And this is sort of like a fully insured rate, but you’re carving out the claims part of it and your funding the claims as they actually come in. So similar to level funded. But you don’t have the wait till the end of the year to get the benefit of favorable claim get, like month the month? Correct. Exactly. Well, okay, so there’s. A lot of issues to think about, and i guess way just have, like, a minute and a half left or so, but i guess this all comes down to risk tolerance. Exactly. Do you do? Do you want to just write off the wrist completely and give it to an insurance company? Or would you like to get some of the benefits of doing it yourself and maybe even having healthier employees? But you’re taking on some of that risk. Correct your risk tolerance and your ability to handle some cash flow changes from one month the month with self-funding and it really comes down to analyzing what would my costs be under a fully sure plan. Total costs. What may cost being herself funded plan at the maximum claims that’s where the stoploss carrier says you would not pay more than that. Yes, you’re a total costs on. Then what would your cost be under the expected where they expect your claims to be? Given your employee population and looking at those numbers will give you a good feel for where he should be. Okay. All right. Crystal bat. Andi. I demoted him because he’s, a crystal bat is a regional executive vice president at marshall mclennan agency. Okay. I wanna thank you very much, chris. Thank you. Tony called my pleasure. Coming up. We have jean takagi and shared leadership options. More options for you first. Pursuant, they’ve got a new webinar. Big surprise. It’s free designing experiences. That inspired donorsearch every brand elicits a feeling, you know this like think disney, starbucks, united airlines and each of your donors has an impression of your organization based on their experience and interactions with you with your brand. On thursday, may twenty fifth, you can join lutheran, our ministries, brad never ary and pursuance senior vice president hillary noon and learn how to create immersive experiences that inspire greater engagement from your donors and potential donors. Brad is going to share how lutheran our explored the journey of a key audience identified opportunities to improve on their experience with his brand, and they put in practice places that are goingto make measurable impact trying to make change. Of course, this will be archived if you can’t make the live session, but if you can, you register at pursuant dot com quick resource is and then webinars we’ll be spelling who needs to engage millennials? Maybe you’re bored has raised that as ah as a possibility or a need. Do you feel it’s important for your sustainability? Perhaps what you waiting for? We be spelling dotcom get started for pete’s sake. Hosta fund-raising spelling bee. This is not your seventh. Grade spelling bee. You know this. Check out the video at we b e spelling dot com and then talk to the ceo alex career. Set something up or just get more information. We be e spelling dot com. Now, time for tony’s. Take two. That damn finger is wagging again. Are you properly registered in each state where you solicit donations? You need to be listen to my admonishing tone. It’s not going to stop. Where are you sending e mails? Sending direct mail hosting events, maybe buying ad space. Do you have a donate? Now button that admonishing tony’s not going away. Each of these things is a solicitation, and it triggers the registration requirements. Charity registration. You need to get it done. I can help you. You could do-it-yourself. You need to be in compliance in each state where you are soliciting donations. My video is that tony martignetti dot com that is the admonishing tony’s. Take two live lesser love. I’ve got a ton here in the united states of america and not too much abroad. Really. So let’s, uh, let’s. Start here in the us of a with tampa, florida. Very loyal, lifeless and live. Out to you special tampa. You’ve been with us for a long, long time. Woodridge in new jersey, swan’s borrow north carolina, new york, new york and brooklyn. New york really got two out of three borrows this week last week. Course we had all five. But brooklyn. I’m glad you’re with us. Manhattan. Thank you so much, but gives he with that westchester that’s. Not bad. North of the city. Poughkeepsie live. Listen, i’d love to you also, white plains neighbors in westchester live. Listen level so to newjersey caldwell, new jersey, hackensack, new jersey. Still no altum pandu jersey, where my mom and dad are sitting right now. Uh, moving ah! Moving way down south san marcos, texas live. Listen, love out to you, san marcos on then coming back to the northeast, stratford, connecticut were all over except on the west coast. I know what west coast person who’s listening but he’s on the line so it doesn’t count. Not this week. And let’s do germany got to live listeners in germany? We cannot see your they’re so concerned about privacy in europe we cannot see your cities in germany nonetheless live. Listen, love guten tag the podcast pleasantries. They got to go, you know that you’re tired of me saying it, but i’m not going to stop the podcast. Pleasantries have to go out to the over twelve thousand, listening in that method pleasantries to you. Thank you for being with us on your schedule on demand, and the affiliate affections were looking to grow that affiliate list. Our outreach director, belly, betty mcardle belly. No, she’s. Not ever. Billy. Betty mcardle is working on that. But for the effect for the affiliate stations that exist right now. Of course i am. And fm stations affections to you. So glad that you’re station includes us on your schedule. Thank you. Jean takagi is with us waiting patiently. He’s the one i was alluding to, um and he is the managing attorney of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco. He edits the wildly popular non-profit low block dot com and he’s the american bar association’s twenty sixteen outstanding non-profit lawyer he’s at g tack on twitter and i believe he’s calling from an airport. Welcome back, jean takagi. Hi, tony. How are you? I’m very good. Very well, are you, in fact, in an airport? Is that what happened? I’m now at an airport hotel. A little bit better. Okay, where are you? What city you’re in? I’m in los angeles, los angeles. So that’s not far from you for san francisco. Okay. Okay. S a little background noise. I kind of like that. Mixes things up a little bit. Um, if anybody gets difficult while you’re on the phone, you know if you have to drop the phone, you know, and fight somebody off, just explain what you’re doing first before you just dropped the phone. Okay, i’ll make sure i hold them off, ok? All right, well, do what you have to do but inform me first that’s the first your safety is secondary to informing me that’s what? I’m that’s basically, what i’m saying, it makes understood, ok, thank you very much for that. So we’re talking about some shared leadership options. Um what? What brought this to your attention? You know, shared leadership has kind of been a little bit of a hot button issue recently amongst non-profits that are thinking of more equitable practices and in attracting younger people. Millennials, you might refer to the you know, to that group and say that they may not be is ingrained with the hierarchical structure that those of our generation tony, maybe comfortable within used to, and they’re really wanting tio have more of a say early on in their careers, so, you know, shared leadership issues, all sorts of forms are really starting tio to take hold in some practice on dh starting t gain in more popularity so are you seeing this? I guess mostly then in organisations where the leadership is thirtysomething or so well, you’re seeing it from from a lot of younger people, for sure. So living in the san francisco bay area in with silicon valley nearby, and this is not just a non-profit management or organizational structure, this is started in the for-profit world in this sort of spread into some non-profits but yeah, it’s a lot of younger tech companies, like suppose that that sort of kicked it, kicked it off some of experimented with it and left it like medium, but one of my organization that i’m on the board of a compass point non-profit services also experimented with holacracy and while it isn’t continuing in a whole keeping the whole model, we’re keeping aspect of it because you feel it’s really valuable. Okay, now i’m not going to put you in jargon jail because i know we are going to talk about holacracy but you just try to slide by me, and i want you to know that i’m quicker than you. So i i noted it, but you’re you’re you’re pardoned thiss time because where i know we’re going to talk about holacracy alright, so so sort of following from what you’re suggesting i can see the advantages there’s empowerment, there’s, there’s, there’s shared, there’s shared buy-in and empowerment of others. Yeah, and i think that works for leadership development with the team more people having more voices, teo impact what’s happening with the organization, what they’re doing, they become more interested in it that probably helps in recruitment and retention. It helps internal communication and collaboration, and it i think, necessitates cross training because you’re talking and trying to understand what your little part of the organization, how it may impact every other part of your if you’re one of the decision makers, are you’re making decisions as a group? You got to know the other three other parts of the the organization how your decisions are going to impact them. Yeah, i can see that this is not something you embark on overnight, right? Especially in the need for cross training and understanding. What’s going on across the crust of our organization for the thing people are going to be sharing in leadership now. Yeah, absolutely. The other, you know, benefit that has some people. Have been writing about it lately than it actually helps facilitate and succession planning. So we have more people who maybe pull, you know, in the pool of candidates to take over for for a ceo or an executive director. That maybe leaving the organization? Yes. Okay, that’s a good one, right succession plan. We’ve talked about that. Uh, ok, alright. See cem value. Um, but i see some potential downsides to this is going to be a lot more cumbersome for decision making. Yeah. I mean, you can imagine when you have too many chefs in the kitchen. I guess it is the metaphor analogy that people make on dh. So yeah, definitely neo-sage delayed decision making and that khun delay implementation of ideas. So you’re kind of the slow ship that takes forever to turn around. It can result in inefficiencies, and then you may lose opportunities, not acting’s. Quick enough cause confusion at the start. A cz you’re trying to figure out, you know, who’s accountable. How how do we, you know, make a decision? What if we’re split for? For what? If we start tio a form cliques within our organization and then we start to battle or engage in disputes with other factions of the organization. So their their potential bound falls that you have to actually really account for careful. Yeah, potential for open conflict. I mean, one of the things we’re going to talk about his co ceos and, ah, i mean, if the two people don’t agree. I don’t know. Yeah, get factions and jesus, you could start running like our white house. I don’t know. Okay, we’re gonna get to co ceos. All right, um, let’s. See? Well, we may as well go there. Um, what air you saying? Have you seen this? Have you have you seen this one in practice, where there were two ceos? Maybe any of your clients execute this? I mean, i’m just i’m just wondering if you’ve seen it firsthand co ceos, yeah, way have so definitely on. And i think this is actually becoming more of a trend, and i’ve seen it more in the nonprofit sector have limited exposure to for-profit sense since since i left that that world but i think you know, times are getting much more complicated. Management has also become much, much more complicated with, you know, technology changes non-profits are exploring earned income and advocacy and collaborations and employees laws are changing and then non-profit corporate and tax laws are ever changing, and right now there there’s some big, big changes that are planned, of course, on dh. So with all of that complexity, can one person really be the leader through the organization understand all of those those factors and be ableto lead the organization through all of it and that’s kind of why there’s been a little bit of a draw forming co ceos and succession planning is the other thing is, i think there’s supposed to be a huge turnover of executive lake leadership is the baby boomers are starting to age out of their employment, and they’re starting to retire on dh succession is, uh, is a problem if we don’t have adequately trained and experienced people in those roles, and coke co ceo platform’s can really help ease that problem. Ok, but with with all those issues that you mentioned for leaders to deal with, i’m not even sure that to people with their combined skills could manage, you know, can understand all that in the level of depth that that’s necessary. I don’t know, i’m not even sure two people could do it, so yeah, ee don’t know that i’ve ever seen three tio, no, but i’m just wondering if if i’m not sure to really adds that in my sense of it, too doesn’t really add that much more value. You could say it doubles, but i’m not even sure that’s enough, so if if i’m right, then why not just stick with one who has a strong team of people directly reporting to him or her it’s an interesting argument, tony, and indefinitely the single ceo structure is the one that were more comfortable with and probably the one that’s going to teach comin in for a long time still. But first, for some organizations, experimenting with two ceo structures can work out. And i think where we’ve seen this practically is where the two leaders share kind of a long term relationship, so they’ve already comfortable with how they work on dh, how they would make decisions together hyre the areas of responsibility, maybe divided so that one person has final decision making over these fears of the operation and the other one over other spheres, and sometimes, you know, in a very simplistic way, some people just refer to it is the internal management and the external management. Yeah, okay, some of that makes me makes me think of mika brzezinski and joe scarborough. I don’t know, okay, all right, let’s go out for a break and when we come back, jean, i’m going to keep talking about the shared leadership options. Stay with us. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon, craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that worked and they only levine from new york universities heimans center on philanthropy, tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard, you can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guess directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. I’m peter shankman, author of zombie loyalists, and you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent um, jean, i’m thinking this is goingto take some time to to implement and, uh, before you start to reap benefits from it, if you if you do it’s not you, you’re not going to see this immediately. The advantages? Yeah, you know, i think it’s going to take an investment on depending upon what level of shared leadership you’re talking about co ceos is probably the a fairly simple level, relatively speaking of shared leadership, but yeah, it’s going to require an investment, it may take a failure, teo, actually get it going the way you want it. So there’s definitely a lot of learning. It relies on it, you know, having a shared vision and common values amongst the shared leaders on if you don’t have that established, you really shouldn’t do this. You have to be careful of the amount of money, time and other resource is that you’re going to have to invest because that’s all got to be budgeted in if you don’t incubated and invested and nurture it, it means it’s probably not going to work. We’re also gonna need a lot. Of patients among our staff. Yeah, yeah, i think that’s absolutely, absolutely right. You run the risk of having that go to mom, go to pop kind of run things, right? Good cop, bad cop. Yes, right. Somebody’s, thie other ones said this, but i said no. So i’m coming to you, right? Right? You got to beat that stuff down. All right? Interesting let’s go to one that i want to make sure we spend enough time on this. To me, it sounds like anarchy, but you’ve said your organization you’re on the board of is doing some of this. The pro you call it program autonomy is what is that? So the general idea and they’re different forms of this, but this this is on the other end of the spectrum of complexity. So this is a complex form of shared leadership where each program or each division oven organization is fairly autonomous, so doesn’t all rely upon going to the ceo on the ceo makes the final decision. Each group within the organization which might be divided into programs, will make their own decisions now don’t know, probably be working with the budget that’s been approved by the board on then segregated out into the different programs. So they know what the operating rules are within within their group. But figuring out how to distribute the leadership and that’s the one of the buzzwords, sum, sum. Avoiding drug in jail again, it’s. Really just distributing the leadership amongst the different programs or the different groups within the organization and there’s. One particular type of model that i mentioned earlier, which i should have waited until we got to this segment. That’s called holacracy on dh. That is a particular form of distributed leadership, where the different groups that that are taking on these local decision making authority rolls are called circles. No, james, no, jane. Yeah. Can you still hear me? Yes, i hear you. Okay, last thing we heard you say was holacracy is made up of circles, but you need to explain. Yeah, so you know, generally the way holacracy works is so it’s a form of program autonomy, although again, the circles or self managed groups don’t necessarily have to be divided into a program that could be divided into function. So there might be one for fund-raising for service delivery, for grants, for events, for public communications. So however, you decide you want to divide up the circles, it’s going to be an iterative process where you’re always modifying it. So every month you’re going to consider whether you should have the same circles or different circles, and each individual is actually going to take a role with multiple circles, and in some cases they’ll be the leader of a circle that’s going to help decision making and help facilitate that circle or that group of individuals within that circle to make a decision. And in other circles they may not be see that that leader on dh, so they’ll just be part of the group that makes the decision making, and they might be on three or four, five circles depending upon what their skills are. All right, this is anarchy to me, but you’re saying it works a compass point, it weaves we’ve tried it for maybe a year and a half, and we’ve decided to modify it so we’re keeping aspects of it. But we’re not keeping the whole thing, so you’re anarchists of anarchy. You can’t even follow the anarchic model of program autonomy. Okay, well non-profits pride themselves on their ability to experiment and hopefully do yes, alright, yeah. So who is but who’s orchestrating the overall? I mean, there’s got to be, doesn’t there? Well, i’m i’m answering my question, but better ask it as a question, doesn’t there need to be one or maybe two people if the co ceos overseeing the coordination of all these pola craddick circles yeah, there, you know, so it’s it’s, largely governed by two principles, one is you’ve got the law on the latto has the board of directors on top of the organizational hierarchy and does require a ceo in most states, or or a president that that’s going to be ultimately in. Charge however, they’re going to be a set of rules and systems, and this has to be very transparent and holacracy so you’re not leaving everybody to go. I don’t know who to go, teo, you know, maybe i’ll ask this person so in holacracy there’s a large set of rules that everybody knows and everybody has to abide by, including the ceo and that’s where how the different relationships between the circles are all codified and how the decision making goes from one circle to another. But ultimately again, it would be a non non-profit corporations you have a board of directors and ceo have to oversee the whole thing and can decide how to modify accordingly. Okay, maybe something for listeners toe look at program autonomy, let’s say i wanted to jump to the most complex one because i want to make sure enough time sometimes our talk at the end, our topics at the end get cut off a little bit. I don’t want that to happen with program autonomy and the holacracy pola craddick circles still feels very crystal lee to me, i don’t know dahna all right, let’s, go to we just have about two. Minutes left explain how the ceo and the board might be the leadership share well for small organizations that particularly all volunteer organizations it’s usually all hands on deck, right? The board is completely active in running the programs of the organization as well as just doing their regular board duty. So, you know, you got the ceo because somebody has to be ceo of a corporation that might be called president or chair of the board, but somebody has got to be identified in that way, and what their decision making authority is going to be will depend upon what the board wants to give to that position, but board make decisions board takes actions on lee at meetings or by written consent, so whenever individuals are actually running programs, they’re not running them as board members. They’re running them of volunteers with certain delegated authority. And what the board has to really be careful of is that they’re making sure that they’re delegating authority for somebody to run an event or somebody to run a specific program there delegating with due care, meaning that they’re not quitting somebody who would be totally unqualified and in experience latto lead. Something of importance to the organization because if it is, gets into trouble, you know, the board could be held for violating the produce very duty’s not exercising reasonable care in making that delegation, and they can’t just say, well, that was another board members, i couldn’t tell them what to do. That’s not the case. Yeah, yeah. Ok, i see. I see i see a greater responsibility and risk for for the board under this one, but it makes sense. I mean, they’re taking a more active role in the leadership of the organization. That’s, right? So that’s, that’s very much shared leadership where all board members see themselves as equal, but when they’re exercising roles that are different from meeting at boards and taking actions like approving contracts are approving, you know, the by-laws there acting as volunteers, so they have to realize that they’re wearing a different hat and the authority has to be properly delegated. We’re gonna leave it there. Jim takagi from ah hotel in los angeles managing attorney of neo and you’ll find him at g tak neos, the non-profit and exempt organizations law group. Thanks so much, gene. Thanks. Have a great day. I pleasure. Thank you. Next week, diane lettered returns with your grants team in and out. If you missed any part of today’s show, i’d be seat. You find it on tony martignetti dot com, responsive by pursuing online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled, and by we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers, we b e spelling, dot com, our creative producers, claire meyerhoff. Sam liebowitz is the line producer. Betty mcardle is our am and fm outreach director. The show’s social media is by susan chavez, and this cool music is by scots. Time you with me next week for non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent go out and be great. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark insights orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a, m or p m so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe add an email address their card, it was like it was phone. This email thing is fired-up that’s, why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were and and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s, not what you make in life. It zoho, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expected to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

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Nonprofit Radio for September 16, 2016: Happy Healthy Nonprofit & Your Job Descriptions

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Beth Kanter & Aliza Sherman: Happy Healthy Nonprofit

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Beth Kanter returns with co-author Aliza Sherman and their new book is “The Happy, Healthy Nonprofit.” They urge you to make employee wellbeing as important as organizational performance. We talk through how. (Recorded at the 2016 Nonprofit Technology Conference)

 

 

Heather Carpenter: Your Job Descriptions

Heather Carpenter is co-author of the book “The Talent Development Platform” and she’s got advice for your often-rushed-through, lifted-off-the-web job descriptions. (Hint: Stop doing that!) (Originally aired September 25, 2015)

 

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent on your aptly named host oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer with quadra tano pia, if i saw that you missed today’s show happy, healthy non-profit beth cancer returns with co author eliza sherman, and their new book is the happy, healthy non-profit they urge you to make employees well being as important as organizational performance that was recorded at the twenty sixteen non-profit technology conference and your job descriptions have the carpenter is co author of the book the talent development platform and she’s got advice for your often rushed through lifted off the web job descriptions hint don’t do it. Originally aired on september fifteenth of last year on tony’s take two my new plan e-giving video responsive by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com, and by we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers. We be spelling dot com here’s the happy, healthy non-profit and this book that they’re about to talk about is number nine in the amazon non-profit books category. Let’s get this thing, but just by the darn thing skyrocketed. Let’s. Get it up to number eight. Let’s. Get it? No, we get it upto one by this book the happy, healthy non-profit hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc non-profit technology conference this is also part of ntc conversations. We are in san jose, california, at the convention center and with me now are beth cantor and eliza sherman. They’re session topic is happy, healthy non-profit using tech for healthier work and life we’re going to get to that very shortly. First have to highlight our swag item for the interview and that is this papal very fine crafted would a pencil those of you just on ntcdinosaur say shins and the audio stream i’m sorry you can’t see the fine craftsmanship and the way this is burned in the papal logo burned into the woods like i used to have a little wood burning kit when i was a cub scout and we usedto carve nasty words and our names but more nasty words independent to wood pieces, and then burned them before our parents saw them and then also there’s this nice papal book notebook very handy for keeping track of your wellness and health goals and your and your achievement toward them. This goes into our swag pile for the day, second day here at ntc and ah, what a not so subtle transition i made teo happy health and wellness. The two of you are working on a book. Beth, eliza and what’s. The book is called happy healthy non-profit is that right? Yes. Strategies for impact without burnout, judges for impact. Without burnett, when can we expect this book it will publish in october. Okay, your co authoring eyes there. Another author. We should know the two of you. Okay, now, beth, you’re last year and t c you were here talking about walking as part of work. Not as not as part of your health and wellness regimen, but working, walking at work. You have a you have a wellness kick? Yes, you know well, that was the genesis for this book. Because it’s not just about individual wellness. It’s also about well being in the workplace. Thie organizational health. Yes. So i see we’re talking to an organizational level now. Yes. And not just health, not just health. Because, you know, health is important that’s, physical energy, but well being, the well being of the organization, well being of the staff, which translates translates into the well being of the organization and its stakeholders. Okay, eliza, now i neglected teo properly introduce either of you. I’m sorry. Beth is a master trainer, speaker, author and blogger at beth blawg, and eliza is tech wellness advocate tequila’s on dh, author of eleven books. This will be your twelve, right. This is the eleventh, so ten, but she’s, just such a great writer and collaborator, i just i just thought it was twelve. You have an interesting this deeply are all your books about health and wellness? Actually, all of my books are about business or the internet. In fact, i started the first woman on internet company back in the nineties, and so i wrote a couple of books, cyber girl books about the internet for women, and this came out of my interest in tech wellness, which is obviously an important part of our lives because of everything we’ve been doing with all of our gadgets. And i got in touch with bath and she’s into the walking and she’s into all of the sleep habits, and we combined it all and that’s what the book is going to be. Okay, wait, hold on. Beth tech wellness. What is tech wellness? What do you mean by that? Well, if you think about the fact that the technology we use has gotten smaller and portable and nobody has taught us how to use it well, so now we’re all getting strained next. Strange eyes, strained brains. So hold it like this. Yeah, like that. Like it like that. Try to do that. Pose that’s a good pose. It’s hard. Maintain it is. Okay, what we’re gonna say back. Oh, i forgot. I know what i want to know why. I also want to say that lisa and i have actually known each other for twenty years. You have no rights. Okay? Out of the blue oversignt no, no, because, you know, i sort of had a front row seat at the creation of this field, the non-profit tech field. And so when i was looking around doing web stuff for non-profits back in the early nineties, i ran into at least met her at one of ah, web girls meet ups. Okay. Okay. So let’s go. All right, so we want we want tohave happy, healthy non-profit by having happy, healthy people eyes that. Okay, so you have some strategies, i presume for well, especially from you gaining more from technology with fewer intrusions. So we is that the way we start there, with sure minimizing intrusions in our tech beings? Sure. Okay. From what kind of lens? Of of the individual. Okay versus the organization. Okay, so, for starters, i stop sleeping with my iphone. Okay. You had your iphone goes to your head. Yes, i know. I used it is an alarm clock, but i had no impulse control. Teo actually not look at all my social media feeds before bed, and that disrupts your sleep. It disrupts your circadian rhythms and if you don’t get good sleep, you’re not good to anybody. You’re worthless, you’re worthless that air sleep by keeping your iphone out of the bedroom and bask in your office alarm clock. Sabelo well, i did a sony said, no, no, i don’t want radioshack final radio shack. What about one with that? Wakes me up with pulsating light fancy. And then i set up a charging station at the house. So as soon as i walk in the door, my entire family has to put their devices at the door, plug it in, and then if they want to use it, they have to walk through the whole house and think about the fact that they’re going to use the device. Ok, that is similar to me to what we learned in the italian, my italian background eat less by not putting the big platter of food on the plate. Exactly. You keep the platter in the kitchen and plate there and then and you have to get up and go and, you know, attempted by the beautiful sausage in the pasta that wolber so close, it’s. Just a fork. It’s a fork length away. Okay, okay. Makes a lot of sense now. I was just reading something about the iphone. Then the new iphone that’s going to be technologically equal to the six but smaller inside were like, five. They’re changing something about the blue, the blue tones, the blue light and the way you dropped your sleep. There’s a blue shades or something that that makes it hard. It’s a strain on your eye or that you know, but it’s it’s not so much. Just it’s. That but it’s also, if you read your work emails right before you go to sleep, you’re gonna have stress dreams about it. I mean, you know, you should have a better night time rich team that allows you to go to sleep calmly and wake up refreshed about a better morning routine. That too i do. I’m trying. I try not to look at my email now, my phone is not well. It is today now, because when i travel yeah. When you travel, you travel you. Use a little little nightstand radio club. Now, i use my phone, but i keep it. Try to keep it a faraway so have to get up out of bed. Okay? And i’ve conditioned myself to say don’t don’t do it right now. The morning routine that’s a tough one. No, i have one. Guess what it is. Well, it’s not checking your email? No, i don’t know. I walked five thousand steps, so you get out of bed. Well, i shower and, you know, show kids to school, you know? And then i walked my five thousand steps or your coffee drinker. I make coffee, i meditate while the coffee’s brewing okay, three short meditations. Yeah. Three minutes, three minutes. Cycle right. Five thousand steps on dh then start my day. Okay, let’s, turn to release it. Now, before you did something like the cookers hyre well that’s supposed to be related to the circadian rhythms. Exactly. The blue light affects your brain and its tricks your brain into thinking it’s daytime. And that is something that so subtle and none of us are realizing it’s happening. Now what i was going to say about the iphone is they’re taking that out over there, changing the shade in the new, smaller iphone that’s still going to be technically so all that does is change the light that doesn’t change. What beth was saying is that you’re compulsively checking all your messages and getting sucked into the tensions and stress of work keep the phone away from the bed, you don’t get it right, and i don’t need it in the morning. You don’t it’ll be there, you know, there are things in the world will be trying to make space in your life for reflection and contemplation and some were somewhere in this always on, always on, always thinking, always doing world yeah, okay. All right. What else? Elisa, you give us one self care so self care is important. So we were talking about technology. But there are so many other things that have to do with taking care of yourself. So tack, wellness is one of them getting good sleep. We’ve talked about movement. The fact that we sit so many hours of every day at work almost all of us are trapped behind our desk. So beth has been really good at training me at doing this i considered the computer for hours on end and never budge. She forces me to get up, we walk the halls, we walk around the block, you live in the same house. Are you sharing a home together way? No, no, what do you know when when we’re doing princessa presentations together and we’re traveling together working on the book, working weekends, right? Yeah, so we’ve been working a lot of the book and we get sucked in as well to the book, but then she is incredibly disciplined to get up and get her steps going, so i’ve gone from two thousand steps to hitting ten thousand every damn with her when i’m not with her, i’m not as disciplined, but you have reminders you can use your technology to remind you to be mindful of using it or to remind you to stop what you’re doing and get up and move around, or two meditate toe, listen to some guided meditations that are free on your iphone or on your android phone, and take that times or use your technology to advantage you’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights, published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. Now, is this a simple is you referring to just setting an alarm to remind you to get up? It could be, but there are apse. There are acts that will remind you. All right. So they just have a few apple fit ball fit. Bolt? Yes, old fitted bold because actually is a plug in on your browser that will ding every fifteen minutes and show you exercises. Actually, pictures of exercises step by step that you khun dio i can still be productive if i stop my work every fifteen minutes. Yes, yes, yes, you can. It’s it’s a different kind of interruption because you’re what you’re doing is training your attention. Have you ever heard of a book called eighteen minutes a day? You’re pregnant. You can tell me about the last time. I think. You know, you have a really good memory. Yeah, i think so. Let’s, look back. We can check the video, but i think yes, you told me about it. Okay, but go ahead, summarize because everybody doesn’t have my memory. Give us well. And this is more if you’re cliff notes. Right? Right. So let technology makes us distracted. And what you’re doing is training your awareness, so if your beep yourself every hour and say to yourself and my own task, am i doing that most important task? You’re actually trained yourself to think that way, right? Right? Staying on task versus you know, i yeah, somehow i ended up, you know, in an endless loop of youtube videos, couto they’re very nice people, but, you know, it could be a little distracting. Yes, they have a big president like, i have to have two floor here, but it could be a little distracted, right? How did that happen? But if i have a little bit of a reminder, i’m not present, i’m somehow i wandered down this path. I don’t know how let me get back to where i need to know. It’s changing bad habits it’s becoming aware of your bad habits and changing them is being really conscious, mindful of how you’re using the technology and making those changes consciously making those changes because if nobody is, they’re nudging you if i mean we could be accountability buddies to each other, i might say to beth beth, you’re on your phone at bedtime, but if if nobody is there, at least your technology can remind you and make yourself more conscious and aware. Because once you’re aware you can do something about it and they wear. This is important too, because the technology provides monitoring. Like i can look down, i can say, well, i’ve only had twenty seven hundred steps so far. I better get moving. Okay, for sure that a simple benefit, but yes, the search search. Ok, it does everything okay? We name any other apse for wellness. Well, there’s a desk desk, yogi is one for your computer that will help you pull that bolt and yogi. Okay, there, spire spike. Oh, that’s a wearable it’s unbearable zubair aspire u s p i r yes, fire it’s a device. You either talk in here or in your pants and your brawl or your pants, and it measures your breath and it’s based on your breath patterns. It tells you whether you’re calm tents are you or you’re focused and it sending data to your phone. So i mean, it will tell you if you’re tense and so it’s a reminder to a nudge toe. Take a deep breath. You’re tense. Upset? Yeah, alright moment. There’s so if you’re in the meeting with your boss and things in your annual evaluation is not going well, you can say, well, my bride’s beeping i gotta stop fired-up spire was telling me, buy bras buzzing, you know? Well, i can’t have any more i can’t have any more flat attend. Well, what what it is is helping you with, you know, emotional intelligence of self awareness and knowing what your reactions are so you can then manage them and be intentional about it. Okay? That’s the awareness. Yeah. Intentional intentionality. Okay, what else we got? Oh, moment there’s the moment at which tells you how more okay, moments where tio, check your it tells you how many times you’ve been looking at your iphone. I have that really embarrassing. You haven’t mastered that. So how many times through the day today, i astronomical. Are you over? A hundred? Probably is. I mean, well, yeah, you use it for so many days, sequential things. I look at the time of day sometimes, you know, that’s over and over. But then but then there is mail on your facebook wear. How embarrassing, you know? Well, i was i was consciously trying to in this might somewhere because i’m a social media person to consciously think what i’m on social media and my butt being intentional and they getting stuff done are just wind this lee scrolling through the feet and saying what everyone else is doing. So how much time in my wasting on facebook and how much time i actually getting stuff done with her? Same thing? I mean, they’re also short looking another hundred fifty and it’s a way to procrastinate. Do you want to share your your number? What is gold with moment a moment you wantto make moment number, moment number i i actually just used it to t get a handle on it said he was embarrassed. It was embarrassing at first. What was i looked at like there was one like two hours of facebook today, two hours of yeah, but no cumulatively alt-right yeah, yeah, thank you, but also tell you how many times you looked at your phone. Do you remember how many times you were checking? Oh, you know, she’s not going to tell you that i’m going to tell you that i should tell you i can’t remember tell you her cholesterol numbers before i know it was like three hundred eighty years for eighty or something. Yeah, great. Well, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Three. Ninety nine, ninety four hundred. Okay. It’s one. Fifty now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. That was from last year. Also. That’s. What? Got you on the walking? Yeah, four hundred. That was yes. Okay, our other ideas. Way wellness. Okay, let’s, go up to the aps. And when we started to talk about relationships in the workplace, okay, so we talk, you know, that does affect your emotional well being. So we talked a lot about techniques that you can use. Teo, you know, man it. How to say no. For example. Boundary setting down decent but foundry said on reset and enforcing forcing i think lots of people set boundaries and then they don’t get enforced. I had our excellent pia is yes, that’s true. Given those i thought we were getting into the session i was looking at was, like, fifteen minutes. Ok? Yes, that it happens. You have these things in your mind. But you never. You never tell them to anybody, so nobody else knows and your boundaries get trampled and you don’t say no, you say? Yeah, how the first thing you say is yes, i’ll do that. Yes, i think you’re thinking. Are you okay? Yeah. Now. Okay, let’s, give some of the tips. So how do we enforce our boundaries? You say now we got to buy the but you’re going to say by the book, but you use it. You say nufer out on non-profit it was right. No way this little exercise around practicing feeling what no feels like in your throat. So i’ll say, eliza, we jump off a cliff. No, come on, alisa. You’re really good at jumping off cliffs. No, but why? I’m too busy right now. I have a full plate, but thank you for asking, okay? It was was this one act play festival, which is what is that? Well, we’re just just practicing saying no, and then and overcoming objections and if people practicing practicing and and also coming up with really legitimate reasons, because people want to hear a reason they don’t like to take no, they don’t want to take no for an answer. So come up with your reasons are and value those ok, i’ve heard a strategy? I don’t know necessarily related to boundaries. But you people want to hear. Yes. So you thie answer is yes, but even though everybody knows but is the universal no gator yeah, here. Yes, yes, yes, i will do that. But i won’t do it until tomorrow. Or yes, there’s that technique as well. Okay, is that is that bonem cards that make way didn’t make the book? I mean, our book is really just learning to say no and benefiting from saying on being okay with saying no so here’s another technique and sort of down the my mindfulness path, if you will drawling, meditative, drawling something called zen tangles. So rather than zoning out on your phone zen out with drawling so it’s actual it’s the meditation technique technique demonstrate this one your swag we have are going she’s so good at they’re people. So you now you’re gonna have to describe it for listeners because everybody does not have the benefit of the video. I need a pen. Of course. Give me the paper would burn. Oh, is that so gorgeous? What a gorgeous pan. The wood burning. I’m just gonna have to go. Go to their booth and hear what they’re doing. Zen zen circles with no it’s god’s entangles. Okay, okay. It’s, meditative drawing. Okay. And you’re usually doing on the small piece of artwork so you can complete it in less than a half hour. So we draw. You gotta do the cliff notes version four dots on the page. You connect them four dots. You drew a rectangle, i draw a rectangle. I then i draw a scribble or tangle. And then the next part is to fill it in with repetitive patterns in silence. Okay, stop now! Show that to the camera. So a rectangle than her squiggle and that we’re filling it in with repetitive vertical lines. She’s chosen right to write and keep on changing it. Okay, my head feels and or can i could? You could do circles or whatever, but the idea is, it helps your focus. You’re telling it’s intuitive there’s no right or wrong answers. And what it’s doing? Is it’s really lighting up a different side of her brain? Then you are in front of the screen. Is this research based we have researched? Approved? Yes. Yeah. It’s, therapeutic art. This is their feet in guarding the cars and houses, drawing the courthouses. Yes, about that. Oh, it could be that. Tell us about that. I don’t know. I like to make little court. I mean, i’m no artist naturally. But i thought you literally through no, i draw cars and houses. And i thought you threw carson. Elsa? What? What is this called? Xan. Tangle. Entangle? Yes. When i said is this better than drawing? Okay? Cars and houses. You know that i draw when i’m there. I mean that’s, my there’s mine, there’s there’s my own u do that over and over again. Well, i’ll fill it in sometimes. You know, sometimes a shingle house like that. How you do it might be bricks, you know, i might make it a stucco. Ah, it could be a plaster. Which would be no, you no, those are the main ones. And then i feeling the roof, of course, usually tar shingles. I don’t like the stucco roofs, and i don’t really like slate roofs either. So i do the the national sabat are there things? Do you do? This is there is my house. Relax, say, to relax or while you’re bored? Are you not to relax? I’m not paying attention if you’re doodling, which is a very different part of your brain, you’re losing its not enjoying this. You’re not, you know, dahna screen doing this? No, i’m not so it’s a different part of great. I might be on the ground on easy phone call, you know, a casual phone call like with friends and not business. I think i pretty well. So you’ve been in a bookstore recently. Have you seen, like adult men in the bookstore recently recently? Yeah, i was in barnes and noble. Okay, so, have you seen all the adult coloring books i have? Not. So this is the hot new trend? Yeah. Wait. But that means that we’ve grown up coloring books, not dahna way. Don’t bother. Although there is a swear e coloring book, we won’t say those among terrestrial radio. Now, don’t get in trouble with my am and fm affiliate stations. No, of course not. Like you would have two years ago. You know, of course not. All right, right. So these are adult themed right coloring book. Not a mean of a non sexual nature. They’re they’re they’re meditative. Drawings? They’re flowers. They’re butterflies, whatever. Highly detailed, though that’s. What? That was it’s different than a child. One very highly. Let’s. Go back to my course is a research backing up? Yes. Therapeutic art thieves entangles there are yes. Entangles. Okay, meditative art, art therapy. You can look at a dog clolery cubine google it. Everybody knows art therapy. Like yeah, yeah, yeah, same thing, same thing entangles all right. And adult coloring books, adult coloring book and there’s some right here in this sum. And this exhibit blackbaud blackbaud has them with pencils. In fact. Other says, i’m not blackbaud handup who had the pencils and the colored and it wasn’t black there’s three but there’s a thumb up your lady was upleaf saturday’s swag pile had coloring pencils. Very nice. Find pencils. You know that the adult coloring book trend has caused a color pencil shortage. All right? Yeah. There aren’t enough colored pencils produced in the world. Yes. Not anymore. Not anymore. They’re not. They’re doing putting extra shifts in the factory, and they want the big sets of one hundred fifty different colors. Right? You’re you’re young and you’re full spectrum? Yes, exactly. Red orange. Yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, the rainbow, you know, but you gotta have the full spectrum. All right, let’s, let’s, get back to our wellness. We were in the office that can put us in the office. All these. What do you have? Office. We talked about boundaries, nandi on the office, standing and sitting what’s. The combination there’s, an ergonomic combination of twenty minutes standing eight minute sitting in two minutes stretching and moving around it’s, twenty minutes sitting a minute, standing two minutes stretching a minute. Standing. Yes, it. Yes, as long as you’re breaking up the siting. Okay. Okay. Well, sandy or treadmill desks for movement while you’re healed. Now, i’ve seen motorized desk that are both. Yeah, i’m standing and and sitting there, vera desk. There will be a narrow desk. Very desk because they have lovers and they can raise them. E i saw that at south by okay. Okay. I want one. All right. You could have you could have. I have the old one with the lover. Yeah. That’s those air, those air, certain stops. The details. Yeah. You want the motor where’s unlimited stopping, right? And you don’t potential and, you know i actually have to buy a fancy desk. I’ve seen non-profit people use cartons and music stands okay. You know, let’s get people a decent death. Yeah. Or even on amazon? Yeah. I’m not saying you’re advocating that, but no, but let’s not have people standing standing on creates and no elevating their desk with milk milk boxes. You know, let’s, let’s get you people, but some krauz organizational policy offering that as an option if you want to standing and encouraging it or even a community one have a standing desk there that people take turns and they encourage each other. Okay, it’s, your turn. It’s returned eight minutes, eight minutes and that’s. Another thing you know, going into the office. That design and layout of the office can encourage or be nudges too certain healthy happy behaviors. For example, walking trails inside the office. They have that robert wood johnson foundation walking trails in the office. Right. They lay out here if you do this track around the office. It’s this many steps. Take a break. That’s not you know, i’m not joking. Alright, i believe you, you know sign it. Don’t take the elevator. Take the stairs. Two up, one down. You know, there’s a one up, two down, but even even doing something as simple as like, if your workplace offer soda in the refrigerator or put it down, i don’t have it. Don’t have it at eye level. Put the water in eye level dahna very simple stuff the baskets of fruit within reach through no chocolate doughnuts, right? Right, i’m ok. I’m feeling bad about something that just occurred to me that we said earlier again for people who don’t have the video, we were talking about how to use your howto hold your phone and i said like this, not like that. Well, that’s no value to people who are just listening to ntc conversations or non-profit radio, they don’t have the video, not on my youtube channel. Riel, oriel tony martignetti so they don’t have the benefit of video. I could do that. You cannot no, i like give shout out some, you know, best knows i’m kidding, lisa, i hope you know. No, you’re good, you’re good to chat about what was my point. Oh howto hold, explain how you’re alone, right? So so instead of your neck is down and your shoulders are hunched and it’s close to sixty pounds of pressure on your non-technical on the cervical spine. Yes. So it’s close to your body that’s not good. Hold it out a little bit forward. And if you don’t want to look like a geek, you khun sort of put your guests want to make a little more human looking you put you, you cup your elbow into your other hand and you’re sort of holding it up like that. You’re walking like this, you know you’re not supposed to be doing while walking. No, no. That’s distracted one thing you know, they’re not gonna do that when you set me up. No, but you know, that’s. All right. That’s, another issue. There’s been a thirty five percent increase in accidents do to distract and why i’m not surprised you walk the streets of new york city now because you’re on the west coast now. But anyway, i walk the streets of the east coast of new york city, and you have to you have to get out of people’s way, right? Because they’re not watching in tokyo. They have a texting lane in the sidewalk. No, they do. Where you can walk without a walker? Yeah, that’s. I wouldn’t do that because you get bumped into suppose you, but is there one for each direction yet? Is that a yeah? Yeah, is it too late? There was an article in the guardian recently to a really bizarre i think we should just about a fire handup ratify our environ. Exactly what exactly does that enables? Yeah, so so enabling modification to know, but modify your environment in different ways that create a relax using space that give you these cues that trigger your brain to say, oh, going into work, it’s not so stressful because i’ve got some really good lighting i’ve got maybe aromatherapy or some nice plants, i’ve got an environment that i’ve created at my workplace that makes me actually calmer, more relaxed, excellent didn’t even have to ask for your ideas. Were you right or or workplace? Where? There’s communal space where i can connect with other people and inspires collaboration? Yeah and that’s playful play way at work, but we need to have in our little in our shared space that makes it playful toys, adult court on always white ports and all. Clolery yes. Puzzles, markers, a communal table. Stress balls, balls. Yes, robots. One of one of the people you talked about has robot robot. Yes. Okay, cool. Yesterday we had did you see the group? I’m trying to see them. Corner shop. They’re here they have squeeze balls that are fruits today’s yesterday swags pile which got stolen overnight. But we had to squeeze eggplant. Yes, i have squeezed tomato. Some guests i could tell, you know, whether they were under stress or not, or whether you put there squeeze toy down, but they have fruits and vegetables out of squeeze toys. All right, buy-in we got to leave it there. I think we’ve from barton people. Yes, we have a deal. Ok. We only just talked about very little of what’s in the book. Well, of course you go by the book. The book is going to be called. I don’t know the subtitle of it. I’ll let a little lead to say at this time but the title is going to be happy. Healthy non-profit strategies for impact without burnout published by wiley wiley and coming out october of this year. Twenty sixty? Yes. Look for the book. Maybe we’ll have you on when it may. Well, have you want again? Keep that mind. Beth cancer. I may not remember so right. You know me better write. You can always find it happy, healthy non-profit dot org’s. Okay. Okay. Beth cantor out. Master trainer, speaker, author and blogger. You know she’s at best blogged. And lisa sherman, a wellness attack wellness advocate and, uh, multi book author as as beth is. Well, this is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc non-profit technology conference. Thank you. Wish, ewing, we’re showing you wishing you health and wellness in your office place. Thanks so much for being with us. You can preorder that book right now on amazon. It is available. Let’s. Shoot those numbers up your job descriptions coming up first. Pursuant, they’ve got a free webinar. Best kept secrets for upgrading donors. Well, secrets are going to be so best kept after the ribbon our wednesday september twenty first, one o’clock eastern, you’ll learn the latest don’t a research keys to advancing donor elation, ships and surprising strategies to upgrade your hidden gems. Tony dot m a slash pursuant webinar needed capital p and a capital w and that’s, where you go for registration, we be spelling spelling bees for non-profit rid fund-raising if you want to bring millennials into your good work, this is perfect, not grandma’s spelling bee you can check out their video, which has examples of the live music, the dancing, the comedy fund-raising and spelling these air terrific millennial events, usually in a bar or restaurant, and they’re very fun video is that we be spelling dot com now tony steak too. My latest video is don’t be in the woods on planned e-giving there’s a lot that small and midsize non-profits can do with planned e-giving i explained how to get started it’s at tony martignetti dot com and that is tony’s take two here is have a carpenter with your job descriptions. I’m very pleased that heather carpenter is with me. She is a phd was a non-profit manager for ten years. She’s, now assistant professor in the school of public non-profit and health administration at grand valley state university. She teaches grad and undergrad courses in non-profit management, financial management fund on profit technology, leadership and human resources management. The book that brings our two non-profit radio is co authored with terra qualls. And it is the talent development platform putting people first in social change organizations published by josy bass this year on twitter she’s at heather carpentier, which is at heather carpenter. But take off that last are have the carpenter. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, tony that’s. A pleasure. You’re calling from grand valley university. Where’s that michigan. Right war in grand rapids, michigan, which is on the west side of the state. Okay, okay. That was the summer there in grand rapids. It was really nice. We have a great summer. I’ll bet a little harsher winters, but yeah, no, but you do have harsh winters. Yes. Okay, heather, our job descriptions he’s often get very, very short shrift, don’t they? Yes. Yes. Well, having worked in non-profits for many years and done h r and operations, i know how busy we get. And often, when people leave organizations, we scramble and pulled together what we have on dh and send out a job description that is often outdated and hasn’t been updated in a few years. Or sometimes, i think even pulled off the web. Yes, yes. You’ve seen that? Yes. Ok, not that you’ve done that when you were leading your non-profit. I understand, but i think it’s i think that’s also a pretty common practice. Why do we need to focus more on job descriptions? Well, job descriptions are really an important part of helping an employee to understand their roles and responsibilities within the organization. It also helps to track employee and volunteer performance and success. And this is ah living document, right way. Need to keep these current as job responsibilities change. Yes, we recommend that non-profits update their job descriptions, actually on an annual basis. Okay, okay. Sabat do you do you think that poor job descriptions lead tio? I don’t know hyre turnover or lower morale? What consequences do you think result from not having accurate descriptions? Yes, i i agree with your assertion. We’ve found that a couple of things can happen with outdated Job descriptions 1 that it’s for a new hyre they might not really fully understand the role let’s say hypothetically, speak about how when organizations lose employees and they have someone coming in and they used a job description. That’s out data from the labs it’s not clearly showing the response the accurate responsibility so the person might get burned out pretty quickly, finding out they have a lot of additional latto responsibilities, or maybe they don’t even have the adequate qualifications for for the rial responsibilities. So the job or, if someone’s been in a position for a few years, there’s what we call the pile on effect, where often more and more responsibilities added, but that’s not actually reflected in the job description or in compensation so so employees can get and volunteers can’t burn out that way, and then sometimes people become overqualified for the job or might be overqualified when they come in. The job description is accurate. Does this apply also to organizations that are mostly volunteers? Should should be job descriptions for volunteers? Oh, yes, absolutely, we believe that that will our book applies to not just paid staff volunteers as well, and we actually have sample job descriptions for board board positions and key volunteers as well as come common staff within various non-profit organizations like your executive director, development director on bury the book is loaded with lots of resource is sample job descriptions but goes way beyond that just job responsibilities. And forms, you know, and we’re just taking one piece of the book and talking about job description, but there’s a lot more to it. And the thing is just loaded with but templates and resource is yes, thank you. I really wanted it to be as practical as possible, having worked in the nonprofit sector for many years ourselves, it’s more of a workbook where organizations can pick and choose the chapters that they need the resource is from. But it is a whole platform. If an organization decides to go through the process for from everything from understanding the organizational learning and professional development culture to actually assessing stats, professional development and creating professional development goals, an objective tied to the strategic als of the organization. All right, so where do we start this job? Description process. I mean, i know who it starts with its doctor, the supervisor. How does that what is the what the person need to do to get started? Well, the supervisor should really look at the position itself and often there’s different philosophies on job descriptions. And our our philosophy is that the organization, the supervisor, should build the job around the position and not the person because people change andi really, to really get an understanding of what is needed to advance the organization forward. So we have something called a proficiency mapping cool and are in our book where supervisors can really identify the called common confidences that the knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics needed to perform the job and then rape those competencies on different proficiency levels. We use a proficiency level scale created by the national institute of health, and they’ve been doing this type of job description, worked for many, many years and really getting understanding of what level that the position and the responsibilities you need to be at when we talked earlier a few minutes ago about outdated job descriptions common, another problem with outdated job description says they’re not often at the level that the position needs to be on a smaller non-profits with great to have people who could do lots of different responsibilities, but sometimes we have very high expectations that someone in entry level type job might be more responsibilities, say, manager or leading the organization through some sort of process when that’s not necessarily the right level for that. Job you have these 5 proficiency levels, fundamental novice, intermediate advanced and an expert, yeah, way provide definitions and also example words and responsibilities at each level. I like to tell you, i jump pretty quickly from fundamental expert on i think if i’d done something once, that makes me an expert, so i don’t know if that fits within your construct, but like, one time i’m not the expert the first time, but after i’ve done it one time, i consider myself an expert and that’s cause that’s cost me a lot of money and, like home repairs and things, but i can’t get around it. That’s that’s but that’s probably not probably fit within your your definitions well, generally the expert and advance our our our director level positions on responsibilities. So at the executive director, we would hope a most size organizations that the person, the person holding that position would have advanced on expert level. But we understand that at the lower level positions the coordinators, the entry level positions that they’re more at the novice and the intermedia level. And yes, i mean, we’ve found that it’s helpful, starting with the supervisor to create these confidences and proficiency levels on dh, then down the line. Wei have employees assess themselves and not do a real comparison over the competencies profession? Okay, yes, we’re gonna get that. So so after the supervisors part, then then what’s next in creating these optimal job descriptions, the next step is really getting documenting the employees responsibilities, and they don’t see what the supervisor has done. But if you do have someone in that particular position just making sure that all the responsibilities are are documented because the supervisor might not have a son of everything that employees doing. But obviously, if it’s a new position, or if the job description ever been done before, then they would have the supervisor just do the proficiency mapping. Ok, ok, but but the the next step now is the is the is the employee e-giving their input into what their responsibilities are around the competencies and the proficiency levels. Yeah, the next up is just the employees identifying their their responsibility. Okay, a faster proficiency levels. Quite yet just for the job description itself. It’s really making sure that all the responsibilities are identified and the supervisor is really the one that making sure that all the proficiency levels are identified. All right, ok, ok. And we mentioned these competencies. Can you give us some examples of competencies? Sure. Before you do that, i want to tell you about the process that we took to to identify ten core competencies for non-profit managers like holly and i actually did some some national surveys and looked at literature around training needs of non-profit managers and assassin what their confidence cesaire needed. So this is really backed and research that we identify the ten course set of common confidence ease that non-profit managers possessed. They’re very general there everything from advocacy to communications, marketing, financial management to fun development hyre we also have human resource is way also in the book go through the process of has helping organizations create their own sub confidence ease, because since the time core competencies are very general, we know that each organization is different in their culture and each position and as well as department, it’s organization, house, apartment, that they have their own core competencies that are important to that organization. So we’ve also provided of examples of different size organizations and the subcontinent use that. They have so well for example, intercultural confidence he is a very important sub competency for many organizations, two working, working well under pressure are working with certain population, so we’ve we’ve worked with various organizations and their different types of missions require different competency. So we worked with homeless organization last semester, and they, you know, they require their staff to have confidence he’s in understanding people who have housing have challenges, okay, let’s see, we have just about a minute before, before we take a break and then we’ll continue. I should do this. We haven’t mentioned the board should be job descriptions for board positions. Definitely we have. We have a sample job descriptions for board chair board treasurer, board secretary on various board general boardmember on there’s a there’s. A lot of resource is not just in our book, but out there on the web is well for creating and managing board job descriptions. That’s an important piece we’ve we’ve done this process with all volunteer run organizations where it’s just the board teo organizations that have paid staff, maybe they’re smaller, they have all the board do their Job descriptions and then the 1 to two staff members that they have so it’s important that it’s not just a staff process that boardmember look at their job descriptions and revise them. Okay, let’s, go out for a break and when we come back, heather, of course we’ll stay with us and we’ll keep talking about your job descriptions, and then we’ll move to mapping, mapping you thies competencies and proficiency levels to the job description. Stay with us like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that or neo-sage levine from new york universities heimans center on philanthropy tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e. N e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy. Fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals. Just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard. You can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week, and always includes link so that you can contact guests directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Lively conversation. Top trends and sound advice. That’s. Tony martignetti non-profit radio. And i’m lawrence paige, no knee author off the non-profit fund-raising solution. I know. I say it every time. Maybe maybe you listeners get here. Tired of hearing me say this, but i wish lawrence would pronounce his last name. Panjwani he’ll be so much more beautiful than paige. No. Ni lawrence. I’ve said this a large his face. So no it’s it’s. Not like i’m going behind his back. And pandiani will be so beautiful. Lorenzo? Lorenzo panjwani okay, okay. Heather let’s. Move now. Tio mapping what is this? What is it? What is that? The mapping process that comes next? Well, this is the mapping process is really about revising the job description and making sure that it matches up with the responsibilities really, that are needed. We advise organizations to separate job responsibilities by the competency categories. So we often see job descriptions that have a whole long list of job responsibilities. But were our processes to separate them by category? Cory so that it’s clear on the difference competencies that are needed with that particular job. We also have the manager identified perfect since he loves based on the job responsibility, action words. And so this is where hyre this is the revision process, the different levels and making sure that the wording really matches up with the proficiency level so we might have a position that is hyre up than it needs to be or lower and can be a giant. Now you mentioned job responsibility, action words. What defined those for us? Well, the action words are provided in the proficiency mapping scale. So as we talked about before there’s five purpose into levels from fundamental awareness, novice, intermediate to advance and back first. And each of these have a different level, and we have action words that are associated with each level. So as i mentioned about the higher level positions, we have the dance level there there’s facilitating, leading liaising, managing and the expert level. We’re synthesizing. We’re training were troubleshooting. And so these hyre level action words are associated with hyre level job responsibilities. Okay, yeah. And that’s me. Well, i like to focus on the expert. You know, like i said, i would skip over novice, intermediate and advanced. I go right from fundamental to expert one one one one time. So i’ve gotten used to use those expert use those expert examples. That’s where? Just in my mind, that’s where i belong let’s. See? Okay, so in this job in the in this revision process now it’s, the employees and the supervisor working together, uh, well, family it’s the supervisor making sure that the job description is aligned because as much as we’d like to be an employee involved in the process, the next step in the talent development platform which i don’t have time to talk about here is the individual professional development assessment and that’s where an employee actually haserot their confidence season proficiency level. So it’s really helpful that they don’t see realign job description before that, that there going off of what they i think that they’re expertise is and their proficiency level is. And then that way, you could do an accurate comparison. So what the job requires. Okay, well, you might be surprised we might have time to get to assessment a little bit. We might be surprised. Um, now for the mapping, there are there’s having six steps. Andi don’t really have. You know, we don’t have time to go through all six of them, but help help us understand an overview of the process. A little more detailed. And then we have so far yeah, so, as i mentioned in the first step of separating the job responsibilities by competency category, you’ll see then if there’s gaps and if you’ll have competency categories that you’re not covering it’s amazing how many organizations that we’ve worked with through this process, where they are missing competencies for specific positions, like operations manager, or or the executive director where often maybe, you know hr is a part of the operations manager job, but it’s not really accurately included are reflected in the job description or the job responsibilities or information. Technology is often a part of someone’s job, but not necessarily included, so it really helped helps organization to identify gaps with responsibility and say, well, we don’t have anything in this competency category. So let’s, let’s talk about what we need to include, i see, okay, it strikes me that this whole process to is going to i guess you said it, but just is going to make sure that you’re not bringing in let’s say, entry level people and having expectations that are unreasonable for them in terms of responsibilities and competencies. Exactly way also talk about degree levels as well in compensation we worked with quite a few smaller non-profits that, like tio, take all the responsibilities that we, we provide his examples, and and use them to hyre their new entry level staff at the masters level were like, whoa, you know, let’s think about it’s entry level, do they really need a mask spurs or do they even need a bachelor’s for that regard? So this really helped to think through the position responsibilities that you need for the organization and ok, if i really need all those responsibilities and maybe it’s two positions, not one or i’m i think i’m being unrealistic with how many responsibilities that i’m requiring in this in this position. So having those sometimes difficult conversations about what’s realistic for the organization since restarting tio, we’re talking about the possibility of entry level employees what’s your feeling on starting people at at low salaries? Well, i’m a little biased because i advocate for living wages because i teach graduate students in a lot of them are often on the job market, either during their degree program are afterwards and it’s really disappointing to see them have to take very low wage starting jobs also research, so that it costs between seventy five to one hundred for fifty percent of its employees annual salary when they leave. And so what i’ve seen with my students and former employees is that bill, if they’re not getting adequate living wage compensation, then the leave within a few months and that actually costs the organization a lot of money organizations, i don’t think we often realize how much time and effort it takes toe post the new position to interview the people to do the training and that’s that’s money, and what will when in fact, we could pay a living wage and a good starting salary for entry level employees and have them stay longer even if they stay a year to that’s that’s better than the cost of done, leaving within a few months because they find a better opportunity that paste on better excellent, we gotta leave it there. Unbelievable! You were right. We didn’t have a chance to talk about assessment. You’re right, but you got it by the book it’s talent development platform she’s heather l carpenter, phd and you’ll find her on twitter at heather carpentier carpenter and take off that last are thank you very much. Other next week, data disruption and small data rocks. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, find it on tony martignetti dot com, responsive by pursuant online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled, and we’d be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers. We be e spelling dot com. Our creative producer is claire miree off sam lee boots is the line producer. Gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director. The show’s social media is by susan chavez. On our music is by scott stein. Be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. 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Nonprofit Radio for April 22, 2016: Virtual Orgs: Managing Remote Employees

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Heather Martin, Karen Graham & Amy Sample Ward: Virtual Orgs: Managing Remote Employees

What does it take to successfully manage offsite employees? You start with the right mindset, people & jobs. You also need tools, rules & etiquette. Heather Martin & Karen Graham are in the trenches on this and they share their wisdom. Heather is COO at Interfaith Family & Karen is executive director of Idealware. We talked at the 2016 Nonprofit Technology Conference.

Then, Amy Sample Ward is with me live to share her tips and lessons learned as CEO of Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), an organization with several remote employees.

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Heather Martin & Karen Graham at 16NTC
Amy Sample Ward
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Oppcoll hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent on your aptly named host we have a listener of the weak dan kimble in fresno, california. He’s, product specialist at apple owes software at ntcdinosaur just was non-profit technology conference just last month, dan couldn’t say enough good things about the show. So, dan, i thank you so much for loving non-profit radio congratulations on being our listener of the weak dan kimble okay, last friday, i made a mistake last friday was not tax day last week was a pre recorded show, and i hadn’t realized two weeks in advance that you had until the eighteenth for your taxes. I you know, i have accountants and bookkeepers and and attorneys and financial planners dealing with these these mondo ass ity mundane when two triviality things i have a show to produce. Please, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer. You’re a thrill incontinence if you leak the idea that you missed today’s show virtual organizations managing remote employees what does it take to successfully manage offsite employees? You start with the right mind set people and jobs. You also need tools. Rules and etiquette heather martin and karen graham are in the trenches on this, and they share their wisdom. Heather is ceo at interfaith family and karen is executive director of idealware we talked at the twenty sixteen and to see non-profit technology conference, then amy sample ward is with me live to share her tips and lessons learned as ceo of non-profit technology network and ten they have several remote employees on tony’s take two between you’re good data worth fifty thousand dollars, we’re sponsored by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com, also by crowdster online and mobile fund-raising software for non-profits now with apple pay for mobile donations crowdster dot com from ntcdinosaur are heather martin and karen graham on virtual organizations managing those remote employees welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of twenty sixteen non-profit technology conference hashtag is sixteen ntc we’re in the convention center in san jose, california with me now are heather martin and karen graham. Heather is sitting closest to me and she is the chief operating officer. Your faith family. Karen graham is executive director at idealware. Ladies. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks, it’s. A pleasure to have you both. I’ll be here. Oh, thank you. Your topic for the session is virtual organizations managing remote employees in the leadership track. All right, back-up we need to be a little more open, i guess, to virtual employment opportunities. Is that right? Yes. Yes. We’re finding that there’s more talent out there that you might not be able to tap into if it’s only in your local community on dh just there. So you can open yourself up to the whole world. You can potentially the whole country if you’re willing to do that on dh. However, it’s not an easy thing to do necessarily. And so we’re hoping to give some tips and techniques for people who are managing virtual employees or who are virtual employees themselves. Karen so you think it’s a combination? We’re not doing it as much as we could and those who are not doing it. Maybe you’re not doing it as well as they could, right? I think some organizations are held back by fears of, like some of the ms about remote employees. You know, i won’t be ableto know what this person is doing. They’re going to be folding laundry and eating cupcakes all day, things like that and that. Okay, it’s not always untrue, but almost always. But, you know, most most people are pretty conscientious and very productive at home, and in fact, i think i’m probably more productive when i work from home or away from a group of people than i am when when i’m in the middle of all those interruptions. Okay, heather, you you virtual also, i am not virtual, but i manage virtual employees in eight different cities. Oh, excellent. So we have a manager of a different city employees and someone who works virtually you’re virtually my entire team is virtual okay? Arika, uh is the whole company? Yes. Idealware all right. And that’s a recent change for us. So whereas other has a great deal of experience with this it’s really nufer me. And so for the last year, i’ve been learning what it’s like to convert from almost everybody in a brick and mortar office toe having everyone worked from home offices. So i’m really curious what brought about that change? It started with one person who was remote and then as new staff were hired, we just looked for the best talent wherever we could find it and didn’t worry as much about having everybody in one central location. And so just gradually, we’ve evolved into having people in three different time zones and things spread across the country. Ok, whether it sounds like we need to first get over our own objections to know it’s got to be a local employees, i don’t want to take this on somebody wrote. One of the things that we’re finding is the old culture within some organizations is if i don’t see it happening it’s not happening. Ah, nde. We were that’s embedded in a lot of cultural, a lot of older organizations, and once we get over that and we put in some processes to handle that, people get more and more comfortable. One of the things we’re finding and karen alluded to this also is if you hire the right people, then that idea that i don’t see it it’s not happening and trusting your employees is really key in managing virtual organizations. Where do we, since you’re the manager of a different location, people in a different city? Where do we start with this? Should we start with the hiring process? Cerini so i think what’s, very important, is identifying before you’ve been hyre someone what the skillsets that this person needs, what are their goals going, toby, what is their job going to be? There are definitely some roles that cannot be done, virtually so that it’s, not for everyone, it’s, not for every organization, it’s, not for every position, okay, so identifying where it belongs, okay, can anything you want to add that stage? Not yet, okay. The let’s, let’s. Start with some tips. Okay, wait. We’ve identified what types of people we need, what kinds of skills we need up. Well, actually, i’m taking a step back. What are some things that were sometimes of jobs? Heather, that definitely should not be virtual. You think i think that if you’re a type of person that needs teo, if your role needs to be interacting with people on a regular basis to get something done within an office. So an office manager, um, things that need to have interactions with other people on a regular basis and i don’t know if you come up. I’m talking, karen, if you came across any of this as you all went virtual, but i’m finding that it’s been very difficult to have a virtual employees if their job is to sit down with you and communicate with you on a regular basis and get stuff done enough physical environment. Okay, okay. Gary, i would agree with that and that’s a challenge that technology khun partially solve. But it can be really challenging. Okay. All right, let’s, move it to technology. Will get the tips and, you know we’re playing time together. What are some tools that you find just essential for this? Certain? Here we are at a technology conference, so it makes sense too, really focus on that one of the tools that we use most often at idealware to keep in touch and to sort of simulate the water. Cool the water cooler. Conversations that tend to get lost with a virtual team is chat. And and so we use google maps for our email and calendars and document management and everything. And so it felt natural for us to just use google’s chat tools as well. And we have a channel set up called the virtual break room and there’s usually a little bit of activity on there every single day and people will just post like, oh, it just started snowing outside or my cat is sick. O r, you know, just kind of that casual conversation. That’s not really work related. And yet it’s, so crucial to building a cohesive team and feeling like you really are part of each other’s full lives. How cool is that? Because you have to try to simulate what? What? Being in the office is like you mentioned the water. Cooler tryingto virtually simulate that so that it feels like on office space, another that makes it mine. Yeah, going backwards, you know you’re you kind of have to go backwards in order to make this effective communication is key. What all of the tips, all of the technology, everything you use, it goes back to the ability to create cohesive communication between people who are not physically in the same space. So the same way karen has her virtual water cooler. We use skype for business on a regular basis, and if you want to talk to someone, you’re usually on skype, you click on it, you have a video and you have a quick conversation something that may not necessarily be as effective if you try to do it through email and it probably faster on email has been detrimental somewhere, sometimes to our employees, because they’re just getting hundreds and hundreds of these. And if you want a quick answer, there’s all these other tools like these chat tools that make it a little easier. Okay, okay. Karen, please aren’t our process. That idealware for kind of identifying what technologies we needed to help us as a virtual team really started by looking at what gaps were there that were left by by not being in the same place together. So one of the things that you misses, a lot of nonverbal cues, tio what people are thinking, how they’re reacting to something, and so we use video a lot as well and that’s always our default, what video platform way use google hangouts primarily, but we also have some other, like peskay and other tools that we use for external meetings as well. And so with heather, you know, we actually just met for the first time about five minutes ago, you were in person, yes, but were bent on we’ve been on video chats together several times before, and i feel like we kind of know each other. I knew what she looked like, michael workers know when i get a haircut when i get a new outfit, even though it might be four or five months between seeing each other in person, you’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. Duitz are using video every day. Yes, i probably spend, on average two to three hours a day on video chat there’s that comment through a lot, a lot of video in depending on the positions and who’s working with who? Yes, we actually have a staff meeting through webex, where all twenty eight employees get on to video chat, depending on who’s available and who is not in their pajamas. Sometimes people bow out because they don’t want to be put on video, but it’s really helpful to see people and to connect with them at a visual level, even if they’re not physically in the same space where where humans we want way respond to community and and i think visual visual cues as well, it helps a lot to be to be seeing people. People have a tendency. One of my first experiences with this virtual nus was i was working at ibm, and i was project managing. I was doing strategy consulting as project managing the implementation of lotus notes, and we needed the tech team to do work in in order to get the implementation done. The tech team was in armonk, new york, i was living in virginia and we were implementing this to staff nationwide, and what you do is each project manager had to get in touch with the tech team, get them to do stuff, something broke. You had to go back to them, and what we found was i happened to goto, our monk, for our training, and i went into the room where the tech team was sitting and introduced myself. After that, everything seemed slightly easier. And it was just because when i picked up the phone and i ask them to do something, i knew who i was talking to, and they knew who i wass and just having that physical connection made things so much smoother, okay, you said a lot more eloquently than i did. Thank you. Thank you for helping me recover let’s, identify other tools, it’s gotta be google docks, google calendar or something else, what do using collaborative document systems are very helpful for virtual teams, and actually so at idealware, maybe, not surprisingly, since we’re ah, research and knowledge organization, we have mostly introverts on our staff, and i’ve actually found that when we do brainstorming, sometimes it could be more productive. When we do it virtually by typing notes and ideas into a shared google doc than when we actually do it in person, it helps those introverts kind of get there, get there, say, without feeling like they have to jump into the fray of a really lively conversation and gives them space to think a little bit when they need teo and then participate when they’re ready. Cool. So that’s an interesting benefit of working in this manner you see anything like that? I do. I also think that not only the technology tools are important, but laying the groundwork with expectations is key to making sure that everyone’s on the same page so we back in the hiring no, no, no, not unknown in the hiring, but how? How you’re actually running it. So with karen, if you’re if you’re having a conversation, they do it through video conference for us. We’ve set out some and i know you also have communication charters to make sure that when people are connecting with each other, they know how to connect with each other. Charter, what is this? So, for us way, d’oh, d’oh! Basically, what we do is when we hire someone new when they first come on, they get oriented. One of the things we asked them to dio is to talk to us about how they like to be communicated with and sometimes they can’t answer that question up front. But for us, it’s really important to understand if you don’t like email or there’s people, especially we hear this from various employees, they hate the phone, they don’t want to pick up the phone, they don’t talk to someone, the phone rings and they actually like shake. I don’t want to, but if you were to text them or chat with them online, they’d be more than happy to respond to you. And so understanding how people interact on to communicate with their communication makes it so much easier because you don’t have those visual cues. You can’t see if you’re walking into someone’s office and they’re super busy or super stressed or someone’s sitting there on dh, so we like to set it out ahead of time, so let people know what works for them. And similarly, we have eleven golden rules for working as a virtual team and they charter or the golden rules. Whatever we’re gonna call them, okay? They mostly addressed communication. Our number one rule is assume positive intent, which can be hard when you don’t know that somebody didn’t sleep last night because they were up with their baby or, you know, you missed some of that stuff that you might find out at the water cooler, so assume positive intent is is the number one rule. But then we’ve also talked about, for example, with video chat, it can feel very intrusive to just have that turned on all of a sudden, like someone is calling you and without warning, so we have a practice of doing kind of a virtual knock on the door through chat, and if i want to talk to dan, i’ll send him a chat and say, how are you free right now? Is this a good time? And then then we start the video conference, so there’s just a lot of it’s, a lot of etiquette and respecting each other’s time. Um, another thing we do is with email if there’s an urgent reply needed, then we’ll put that right in the subject line because we get such a huge volume of email. That that helps us to scan and know how to be responsive, teo each other when it’s really needed way have to avoid abusing the urgent your gym tag, too, right? Right. Okay, share another golden rule of the eleven golden rules. I wish i had the memorized, but i don’t want to know what well, okay, we start with positive that’s a great one, right? Another one we talked about was email length. And at what point, when you’re writing a four screen email, does that mean it’s time to pick up the phone or or do a hangout? So that’s that’s another one? We have some guidelines about that. All right, let’s. See so cem cem, other tips about doing this successfully emails a big one for us also, my rule is if i have, if i’m on the third email on the same topic, i’m picking up the phone the minute that you have to go back and forth at least three times it’s too much and it’s so interesting. I was at a session this morning and i just heard the best. The best line about email email should be five lines it should tell me who you are, what you want me to do when you want me to do it by why i need to do it for you. And there was one more that i don’t remember, but if it’s longer than that, you’re going to lose people’s attention it’s gonna go into a file and people may never get to it. If you really need something urgently, whether you flag it or pick up the phone like this is the phone is there or create a chat and do it immediately like don’t put it out there into the ethernet and then hope that someone’s going to respond to it in the way that you would expect them to take time to get comfortable with us? Absolutely. If a person is not accustomed to being a virtual employees very much so. And i also think that setting the expectations up front and letting people know that this is not an easy thing is very helpful because some people feel really lost out there, and what we try and do is when a new employee comes on or someone starts to work virtually who wasn’t working virtually before, let them know that that this might be difficult, there’s going to be a learning curve, and we’re here to work with you on it. You’re not just out there by yourself, and you have to do it without anyone any support, karen, have there been people who decided not to work for idealware because it was one hundred percent virtual, has that ever been a ish? You know, we haven’t encountered that. We did have i’m thinking of one staff member in particular, who is very social and enjoys that aspect of working in an office. And so when he became a home based employees that it was an adjustment for him, perhaps more than some of the rest of us who aren’t quite as social and interactive and, uh, it just it took a little bit of of patients and adjustment on his part, i think, for all of us, it also was very important for us to have our own local networks and people that we could interact with, and so many of us will occasionally work from a coffee shop, or i have a group of local friends and colleagues who also work from home for for various ventures, and so one thing we did was because none of us get to have a holiday party with our co workers. We had one with each other, and i i hosted it at my house, and we had maybe six or seven people there who all work independently from home. And so that was a really fun thing to do to kind of a substitute for the social aspects of working with your own team at an office every day. Is there an annual or semiannual gathering of all the tell us? Fifteen employees of idealware uh, dr bonem right? Fifteen? No, we have five. Oh five oh, yes were fairly small teams and you get together physically at least once a year or so way don’t have a set routine, but yes, at least once a year, we’ll all get together. And in the past year, we have gotten together a little bit more often, too, because, well, various reasons i don’t need to come into here. But, you know, there are times when there’s a big change in the organization there’s a big project that you’re working on that just require you to be together more often. Mother, how about you you have to bring these people from eight cities together. We dio way do, and it was a really interesting learning for us when we first started to expand into these other cities. At first, we didn’t bring that anyone in to meet the internal staff in our boston headquarters. Now, anytime a new employees starts at whatever level, if their virtual they come and do a couple of days training in boston with us just to meet everybody, see what the national office looks like and annually. We have a staff retreat in boston where we bring everybody in for two days to get together and brainstorm and talk and just get to know each other. Okay? That’s interesting like the onboarding process has to be face to face. I think that you can’t you can’t get away from what you get the value you get of meeting someone in person, and if you can and if it’s available financially resource wise, timewise, even if you can get together once a year or even at the beginning so people can meet each other in person, it’s invaluable karen would be one hundred percent virtual doesn’t do employees would they get to meet someone face-to-face physically, we have not made a hyre since we became one hundred per cent virtual, so i’m not. I’m not sure what our plans will be for that, but a related issue that non-profit should think through if they’re considering going to a virtual team is is off boarding our when employees exit, how do you handle that? And we were dealing with that right now. We have an employee who is going to be leaving idealware and so we’re thinking about well, ok, how do we collect the stuff that is in storage at her house? The equipment that is ideal wears equipment that that she has in her possession right now? How do we have a farewell party for somebody on really make that a meaningful event when we can’t physically be together? Those those air, all they require creativity and thoughtfulness, and i’m sure we won’t do them perfectly, but that’s something we’re learning. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. The off boarding right. All right, hyre we still have a couple more minutes together. Uh, you well, party. Your session was gonna be ten key steps. Way covered. Any of the ten key? Steps i think you’ve covered most of them in a variety of different ways, but the other thing that we do just one other tip while we’re at it is i’ve spoken to other organizations who have virtual friday drink beers, get togethers, and friday afternoon everyone gets on video, gets their glass of tea, glass of wine, glass of beer, whatever it is and makes it a very low key social environment on video, which takes getting used to when you’re not when it’s not something you do on a regular basis, but it does give you that personal connection again, that you don’t normally get on a day to day basis. And so there’s things like that that you khun dio that seem a little farfetched sometimes that are really helpful. Hi, great, we’ve i’ve had lunch with one of my co workers where we just get on video together and we’re eating and and just chit chatting about things, and it felt very awkward at first but ended up being a really enjoyable experience for both of us. So i recommend just taking some risks getting out of your comfort zone a little bit. I’ve done a wine, wine, chat with who’s there were maybe half a dozen of us the furthest was in in vancouver. I think so. But, you know, you know, half a dozen people what kind of wine do you have? We’re toasting mean, it could be fun. I mean, it is fun, it could be done. It doesn’t have to involve alcohol way happening. Choose wine, you could do a cough, you can do a coffee date and have everyone you know, on video drinking, whatever their seventeen dollars, coffee is heather would use for video, so we use webex when we do our staff, our staff meetings, we’ve used skype for business. We’ve tried google hangouts also, it depends on who’s running the session and what technology they want to use. We haven’t found the perfect one yet we’re still looking. I think that some of the challenges with video are the number of screens you could get on at one time and who you can see equality has improved significantly over the last five years, even but at first, when we were doing this, the line would drop or you couldn’t hear someone or it was pixelated, you know, i’m feeling like i’m talking old school a little bit, but the technology has improved enough that it makes it seem a little bit more realistic and in person and you can get the visuals, which was something that was a challenge. You couldn’t get the facial expressions without the high definition and the faster response time. All right, so i’m gonna wrap this up and bring it full circle, that kind of belief in the technology i can help listeners overcome their reluctance. We talked about initially and in mindset because that’s really what you got to start, and i would also say the technology isn’t the savior to this it khun definitely help it, but you need all of the other pieces to i feel like you shouldn’t use the technology technology to drive this, but there are some great technologies out there that can help with pieces of this. I couldn’t have said it better. All right. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Heather martin is chief operating officer at interfaith family and karen graham, executive director idealware ladies. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks. Great advice. This is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc san. Jose, california, thank you so much for being with us. Amy sample ward is coming up first pursuant and crowdster pursuant has a free webinar dahna relations of the disney way if walt disney was your ceo, how would you treat your donors? How would you inspire staff? What would you do differently? 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I sure am every sample word our social media contributor and ceo of intend, the non-profit technology network there it and ten dot or ge she’s at amy r s ward her latest book is social change any time everywhere kayman sample ward. Welcome back. Same it’s. Fun to get to follow-up anew. Interview from the ntc. Yeah, no kidding. And congratulations on a very successful non-profit technology conference. Thank you. I can’t believe it was already a month ago. Hard to believe i agree. That’s that’s. True. Now you sound a little echo here. You and your ah, you in your office. And and ten, i am in my office. If it sounds a little echoey, i can it’s not bad. No, don’t have. It just sounds. It sounds different. It sounds different. Cubine, have you, uh, have you hung all your your artwork? You have your carpeting down in the new office. Maybe that’s a way. Do have carpeting, and i have a big print right in front of me. Well, it’s under it will get better as we unpack even more. Okay, just sounds like a different environment. That’s all you’re, uh you’re all settled now in the new office in portland. Yeah, we’re all settled. Word. We’re up and running. Yeah. It’s fun to be in a new space. Cool. Congratulations. All right. Thank you. So i know you. Were listening. Teo, heather and karen and and ten, of course, is a virtual organization. How, how many, uh, in office versus virtual employees does then ten have good question we have i think this is something that i thought was interesting that i wanted to bring up from listeningto, karen and heather’s interview with you from the conference was i actually think there are mohr organizations who have teams or individuals that maybe virtual while they still have a physical office than there are organizations who are one hundred percent virtual all right, and they have no physical presence, so i think a lot of organizations, when they’re thinking about this, how do we adapt to virtual staff? And what of the policies with the advocate ex center? I think a lot of that comes from, they still have a gn office, but now they’re trying to incorporate folks and make people who aren’t in the physical office feel included versus just everybody is having the same kind of remote situation, right? That’s. Interesting because heather and karen idealware, where karen is ceo is a hundred percent virtual and heather at interfaith family is not so right. And you are you are hybrid too, yet you have i know you have people in the portland office, and then you have remote employees? Yep, exactly. Someone ten people. You have ten people here in portland, and then we have five people that are remote, okay? And they’re in different time zones to write not all pacific. Exactly. And i think that’s one of the big considerations with a physical office versus remote staff is that it can become easier or the default time for everything to be in the time zone where the office is, even though you have staff that are another time zone. So i think it’s a challenge, but very important. Try and be mindful of time zones when you try and say, oh, my gosh, you know, we’re having a conversation. We should totally loop someone in to realise thirty six p m their time, they’re not online. They’re not waiting for you to invite them to this meeting. Yeah. Interesting. All right, so how do you how do you manage that, then? On dh something early in the morning? If your east coast staffers are talking, you know your office isn’t open yet. Same thing. Exactly, i mean, when i previously was based in new york as a remote employee of intent, whereas now i’m in the office, there was another employee that was on the east coast, and we found the morning to be super productive because the two of us could just, you know, get through all kinds of things on, and we we often worked together on projects it in that way. It was very convenient that we were the two awake early and could get some stuff done and then present it to other staff when they woke up and got online. But now and ten has just one person in east coast time, one person in mountain time and then remote or, i guess, to eastern and then to pacific outside of the office. So it spread enough that i think it helps us force that conversation. You know, we have to say, okay, we have people in enough time zones. What time is it? Really? Right now on dh once, once it gets after two or three o’clock in the portland office, it gets pretty quiet because we know we can’t engage other staff across time zones. Yeah, all right? Do you have mindfulness? Basically means you have to be mindful of this not planned meetings for three o’clock pacific. Exactly. And you know so many of our meetings, and i don’t think this is unique to intend, but so many of our meetings are already kind of reserved on the calendar, right? You you already know when your staff meeting that’s going to be because it’s a recurring meeting and so just making sure that you use those recurring calendar items as a way that start building in that pattern of this is these are the times during the day you could meet with folks. I think that really helped, because then outside of that is when people, maybe, you know, just kind of go head down and work on their own. Whatever is on their to do list. And you set a pattern by the meetings that you schedule in advance. Okay. Yeah, i see. All right. What about the personalities the heather and karen mentioned one of them mentioned. You know, then a lot of introverts, karin said i do. Do you find that in a few different people’s personalities when we’re talking about virtual hi. I actually don’t find it to be different than if you were all in the office together. I mean, i think that if everybody was all in one office, you’re naturally just by probability, right of humans. You’re naturally gonna have some folks that maybe regardless of their personality or just not folks who maybe process in real time in a meeting and are gonna have something to say there people who want that information and they want to go back and think about it before they have an answer, whether they’re an introvert or not. That’s just how they process information. And so in a in a meetings, they were all in one room. Whoever is running that meaning it’s probably i would hope, you know, reaching out to folks who are quiet in the meeting insane. Do you? You know, pulling something out? Do you have something you want to share? Their questions that’ll help you think about this, you know? What are we not considering and that that process, that kind of managing a meeting happens whether everybody’s all in the same room or you’re all of that google hangout? Or you’re talking to two people? In a instant message conversation, you know, i think being thoughtful and intentional about how you interact and kind of manage meetings and manage conversations, it’s the same lessons it’s the same processes, andi, i think, you know, karen’s point about sometimes using those online tools that folks feel like they can participate when maybe they wouldn’t have spoken up in a meeting that could totally be true. I think for me and that antenna it’s really about just regardless of how this meeting is happening, is everybody contributing or does everybody have the answers they need so that we can end the meeting and you know where to go back? Do you find it difficult? Tio include members, employees when if the meeting is by phone, you know and like three or four people are sitting in the conference room or something. And then however, many people are remote and it’s just and thereby phone, not video. Sometimes you have to be very mindful that there are two other people on the phone and it’s hard for them times for them to speak up because they don’t know when the pauses air coming. I mean, you find any awkwardness? Around that, yeah, that’s a good point, i think. Well, two things they’re two strategies one if it’s i think anton has a similar experience, as karen and heather both shared in the interview that if it’s an internal meeting, if it’s really just with other staff, we wouldn’t use the phone, we would use video conference people can kind of raise their hand, or they can post a chat that says, hey, i want to bring something up once we’re done with this point, you know it, and we can manage that easier when it’s on video and then the other strategy that that i think is really helpful, just like best practice generally for mediums, is that if we’re having the meeting, we have a shared document where we’re taking notes, so sometimes that means we could kind of go down a rabbit hole, right? And three of the five people in the meeting are going off on this thing with the other two people maybe don’t want to lose a thought they could just put it into the notes, doc, and we come back to it once we’re done with that rabbit hole, right? We’re we’re still capturing things in a couple different channels, plus as the best practice. Now you have notes from that meeting, right? Yeah, school. All right, all right. Um, what about the part about bringing new employees in who aren’t accustomed to working remotely? Yeah, i think it can be very overwhelming for a new staff person. We try and include processes, best practices, etiquette, social norms in our orientation, but not we don’t do it as a great you’re an employee for the next two hours. We’re going to tell you how we do everything in this, like, remote team versus office environment instead, you know, maybe there’s a section of the orientation where you’re talking with your manager, whoever you’re going to be working with and they’re talking about, okay, these are the meetings were goingto have regularly here’s how you and i are going to check in here’s how i encourage you to check in with others and then in that conversation, you know, talking about some social norms around how to engage folks that are remote verses in the office and where to post content for others to see it and, you know, so we kind of embed the lessons around how we want to operate together into the full process of orientation it’s not a stand alone great here’s how to use instant message er, right hand here’s, here’s, howto chat with folks or hey, remember that these folks were in these time zone, so send them a quick ping before you try and call them, right? Because you don’t know, you can’t see them, so maybe they’re gonna call already or something. You know, i like the suggestion of some virtual knock on the door before you open a video chat with somebody well, and, you know, we honestly we do that in the office, i can see you, but that doesn’t mean that i know if you’re actually muted running a webinar just because it looks like you’re sitting in your desk, so because we are all online or on the phone or running webinars, whatever it might be, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the office or not that’s become kind of standard practice. I am somebody before you walk over to them anyway. Eyes that right? Okay, see, it’s so been so long since i had to work with other people in an office. You had to work with you one of punishment that wass well, okay, i don’t think i’d be a very good employee anymore. We’ll put it that way. Yes, i can see that. Thank you. I don’t think i would hyre myself. I would. I would. I would kill it in the interviews. I mean, why kill it? I mean, i would i would i would kill a possibility. Yes, i would ruin my chances in the interview stage. I would not be a good employee, but so i didn’t know that. So so so in offices, people you i am someone before you, uh, you go and knock on their door anymore before you just walk down and see them. Well, i think part of it is that most staff don’t have a door because we’re working in an open, more collaborative space. And so folks may go behind the door to run a webinar, for example, and then you definitely know they’re offline or not available for you to go talk to, but sometimes you might just be on a phone call and have your line muted for a minute, right? Because someone else is speaking of course, because you’re not speaking out loud doesn’t mean you’re ready for somebody to walk right up to your desk and say something because one ear can still hear the phone call, so okay, i yeah, it’s been since ah nineteen when’s the last time i worked for somebody else was nineteen, no, two thousand three, two thousand three was my last employer for you. Did you know, i think defect tio the idea of being in office where people have really accepted that norm of let’s, just quickly hop on a video call right and have this conversation kind of face-to-face even though your remote, it also means that the folks who really are in the office have to anticipate that at any given moment of the day, they could be in the background of someone’s video, you could be walking past somebody who’s on, you know, has their camera on or maybe the way they’re seated, you know, you’re kind of close enough to them that if they hop on a video and don’t move their screen, you’re kind of in the background doing your email on dh i think that’s just part at least at an ten. It isn’t seen as a negative it’s seen as like, oh, well, i was talking to you, i saw that so and so was was, you know, talking to this person, i didn’t realize they were in the office. Could you tell them this for me? You know? And it makes it feel that much more connected. I can see what’s going on right now that we’re in a new space. As you noted, when when i first talked on the phone, we’re in this new office, we’ll remote staff haven’t seen the new office, and so on monday, everybody in the office wanted to have a conversation about okay, we’re in here now, like, what else do we need? Do we need more chairs or tables? Is there any? Are there any problems we need to address in? There? Were you know, there were problems with, you know, sometimes if we turn the air on it’s too loud for webinar rooms, it’s just too noisy in the room and, you know, just surfacing these issues that you don’t know until you get into the space. Well, all of the remote staff requested to be part of that conversation because they want to know what we’re struggling with. They want to know that if they hop on a quick, you know, video call with us and somebody’s complaining, or or something, they could say, hey, is it because the air is on and it’s really loud, like i understand what you’re going through? I have some insight into that. They want to be a part of it. Cool, all right, that’s, a human, human connection. All right, we gotta take, we got to go away for break. We come back, you and i’ll keep talking about remote employee management. Stay with us. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that or an a a me levine from new york universities heimans center on philanthropy tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard, you can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests are there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guess directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. If you have big dreams in a small budget tune into tony martignetti non-profit radio, i d’oh. I’m adam braun, founder of pencils of promise. Welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I mean, what about the face-to-face like, do you have face-to-face orientations for new employees? Or do you have annual gatherings where everybody’s together? How do you manage the face-to-face part? Definitely. I think the face-to-face piece is huge. I mean, we we consider some amount of the video calls to be, quote unquote face-to-face you know, we don’t want things to be completely removed into just documents, so we have ah, move a few different layers so that every day at nine thirty pacific, regardless of where you are in the world, if you are working that day, you are expected to be on aa meeting, where every single staff person is able to check in and say, hey, tony, i’ve been waiting on this thing from you so that i can follow-up or this is my big priority today, so if you see me in my head bowed there on, don’t bother me. I got a big deadline, you know, whatever, it might be this on your list, but away for every single staff person to be visible to everybody else, whether they’re in the office. Or not. And then every monday, we have a full staff meeting. That’s actually programmatic. So you know whether it’s a proposal first from somebody or a certain team wants to give an update whatever that might be, you know, formal agenda every monday, but twice a year, all staff come to portland for a full week of planning meetings and happy hours and lots of eating. And and then outside of those two meetings, you know, we have our conference. We have our own events that also bring all the staff together. Okay, off course. The portland food scene is it was worth gathering around exactly so cool sametz priority than planning meeting second. Yeah, we have the trucks, the trucks, air. The trucks are key. You can have. Yeah, there are only two blocks from the office now, but that would mean a lot of trucks, but i’m being a new yorker. I’m calling them trucks. They’re called cart their carts, right? Not trucks? Yes, their carts. Right. And what you call a collection of carts? What is that called? A cart pod. A court pod, right? Right. Just like whales. Write a card pot. But, you know, you call it a pod? Or would you say i’m going to the cart pod? Or you just say, i’m going to the pod, you say i’m going to the cart, the cart’s? Oh, you don’t say pot. Ah, ok, ok. Yeah, it’s. Very important. But anyway, so you do this twice a year, twice a year. All in ten step. Okay, very good to know. Alright. So that’s different than the heather and karen managed things, but cool. Okay. Okay. And then, of course, yeah. You’re conferences drop the whole staff together. Two leading change on tc, right? Yeah. Okay, exactly. And i think, you know, as much as there were all there to run the conference. We’re also there a couple days early. Everybody gets to catch up and see each other in person. But i also think there’s a lot to be said for doing something together, you know, by the end of the week, even though we didn’t spend the weekend casual planning meetings and eating food from the food cards, you know, we get to the end of the week and feel like everybody has certainly bonded has certainly had all kinds of conversations because we just we just ran the whole conference together, right? It really creates an opportunity for there to be a lot of connections. What else came out of that conversation that you want to talk about? We still have a couple minutes left. Yeah, well, i thought one thing that we could chat about were some justice, you know, kind of kind of boring things around policies think at inten we’ve found to be really important so something that organizations may not think about, but karen alluded to this at the very end when talking about, you know, staff person, that leaving the organization and they have all this equipment, the organization really should be providing that equipment, just like you would to someone that’s in the office. So even though you’ve been hired as a remote employee, that doesn’t mean you don’t need a laptop in a second monitor and a phone and all of those pieces. So thinking about policies that treat a remote staff person just like you would a staff person, as in the office, and i think that also goes further to say in the office, right? And ten pays for all of all of the office for the electricity and the internet and everything else. So, do you have policies that they for staff who were working from from their home as they’re expected space, that you will reimburse them for some of their internet or some of their phone cost? Etcetera? Okay, very, uh, very thoughtful policies you have. Okay, do what i think something else that karen heather brought up was, you know, remote staff feeling like, oh, today i’m going to go work from a coffee shop or today, you know, i just need to get out of my house has been sitting in my living room for four days straight, right? I think it also goes a really long way to make sure that feeling of freedom is shared between folks in the office and folks who are remote so that you don’t create this feeling that, like remote staff have it better or folks in the office have it better, everyone should feel like, hey, i really need to write this article and i want to focus. I’m going to go to a coffee shop and sit by myself for two hours. It doesn’t matter if you work from home or you work from the office. If you’ve created that culture, everyone should get to be a part of that. No. Okay. Egalitarian. Right. Okay. Yes. Um what else? What else came out of that that you want to talk about? Well, one thing that i thought was interesting that was brought up right at the end that end ten has a different version of is that idea of ah, kind of virtual happy hour. And i think part of it for us, the reason why it isn’t necessarily happy hours because again time zones, you don’t want to tell somebody that is three hours ahead. Hey, you should wait until eight. Get back on your computer, have a glass of wine. Would you like to be part of the team right now? That doesn’t feel very fair. So instead, what we have is a weekly lunch. So in the office here we turn on a google hangout and, you know, open up the line, essentially and that any of the remote folks can also call in if they’re free. It’s not required it’s. Not like people in the office have to stop right at noon and start eating. Lunch on video. You know it’s just anybody that wants to have lunch together and chat the line is open, you can hang out and you know, it’s gonna happen every single thursday. So if this thursday you can’t do it, no big deal. But next thursday, you can call in on dh. It just creates that kind of open conversation space where you can chat about sometimes work sometimes good ideas for work, but also just random things. What are you doing for the weekend, etcetera? Excellent. Excellent. Thank you. Alright, we have to leave it there. Any sample ward? Our social media contributor. Ceo of antenna and ten dot or ge she’s at amy rs ward. Amy, thanks so much for sharing. Intends remote, you know, management stories. Thank you. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you. Next week, gene takagi are legal contributor returns with election year advocacy. What’s allowed. And what gets you in trouble? Plus, we have another excellent interview from ntcdinosaur. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, i implore you, find it on tony martignetti dot com. Where in the world i’m very uncertain the way forward with this. I need to know the path i have to find the path ahead. We’re sponsored by pursuant online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled pursuant dot com, and by crowdster online and mobile fund-raising software for non-profits now, with apple pay for mobile donations. Crowdster dot com. Our creative producer is claire meyerhoff. Sam liebowitz is the line producer. Gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director shows. Social media is by susan chavez, and this great music is by scott stein. Be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. Buy-in buy-in what’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe. Add an email address card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is right and that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dno, two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expected to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sacristan. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

Nonprofit Radio for September 25, 2015: Smart Interviewing Makes Great Hiring & Your Job Descriptions

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Sherryl Nufer: Smart Interviewing Makes Great Hiring

Sherryl Nufer, a founding partner in Pareto Consulting, explains why Behavioral Interviewing is superior to traditional methods and how any size nonprofit can get better hires through more sophisticated interviewing, whether you hire once a year or many times a month. This is from April 13, 2012.

 

 

Heather Carpenter: Your Job Descriptions

Heather Carpenter is co-author of the book “The Talent Development Platform” and she’s got advice for your often-rushed-through, lifted-off-the-web job descriptions. (Hint: Stop doing that!)

 

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent i’m your aptly named host. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be forced to endure the pain of a cute ryan al gia if i just got a whiff of the possibility that you missed today’s show. Smart interviewing makes great hiring cheryl nufer, a founding partner in peredo consulting, explains why behavioral interviewing is superior to traditional methods and how any size non-profit khun get better hires through more sophisticated interviewing? Whether you’re hiring once a year or many times a month, this is from april thirteenth, two thousand twelve, and your job descriptions once you’ve made the hyre it’s time for job description. Heather carpenters, co author of the book the talent development program, and she’s got advice for your often rushed through lifted off the web job descriptions gotta fix that on tony’s take two social media videos responsive by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com here is cheryl nufer if smart interviewing makes great hiring, i guess now is cheryl nufer cheryl is a founding partner of peredo. Consulting, providing small to medium sized organizations with business tools that are often available only the large for-profit corporations sounds like she’s sort of stole the tagline for this show. She’s, a strategy and organization development consultant with more than thirty years of experience, and i’m pleased that her expertise brings her on cheryl nufer welcome. Thank you so much, tony it’s really a pleasure to be here. It’s a pleasure to have you thanks, snusz what’s wrong with traditional interviewing? Cheryl well, we have a top ten list of what goes wrong in interviews, but really, they’re too big and the first one is that it’s? Hard to believe, but a lot of interviewers don’t really know what they’re looking for in a candidate, and so they just figured that the more people they interview, the better their odds it’s kind of like vegas, and they don’t know when they see it. The second big problem is that they ask risky questions when i say questions. Yeah, what is that? Yeah, i don’t know. Just wait. Typically think about what we call illegal questions. Is that a problem? But risky questions, questions that back-up candidate can prep for that. They can anticipate that they can prepare a candid answer for which may or may not be the truth. So the data on which to base your hiring decision is a lot. So those sounds like questions like what’s your strengths and your strengths and weaknesses, like those types of questions are risky that’s exactly right? Because people can anticipate them. Yeah, common ones we here are what you just said there, but it’s also questions like, what would you do in a situation? For example, if you were faced with an angry donor for this job is going to require a lot of long hours. Will that be a problem for you? Or my favorite is tell me about yourself. Why should i write? And these are risky because they’re predictable is unmentioned. Secondly, they solicit the candidates opinions and, you know, i don’t want to sound harsh, but the candidate doesn’t know a lot about what’s required for success in the job interviewer does interviewers opinion it’s most important and then laugh so you can say that? Not sound harsh if i say it, it sounds harsh coming from you. It just sounds very matter of fact unprofessional. And final thing is that they also asked the candidate to hypothesize, so if you ask me, what would you do in a particular situation? They can tell you just about anything now? Is that what they would do if they were faced with that situation? Your organization, they may or may not so again, all of these risky it’s interesting that you call very typical questions risky, but i understand. I understand why. Yeah, well, it’s all about making it’s all about collecting data to make a decision to predict how someone is going to perform in your organization and risky your your database here, your hyre decision. Alright that’s so that’s the interviewing that we’re all most familiar with, we either do it or we’ve been through it. Or both. Why don’t you just started acquaint us with behavioral interviewing? Okay, well, behavioral interviewing is not just about the interview. It’s really a business process, just like your financial processes review hr processes and it has a set of steps. And so it starts off with identifying and defining the skills for success. And then you create a line of questioning that’s based on those skills you put that in an interview guide, follow the guide. After you interview you right, candidate based on the data you collected, and then all of the interviewers get together and share their example of make a hyre or no hyre decision. So, first of all, it’s, a repeatable process. In terms of knowing what you’re looking for, i think that’s a really big difference what we talk about is looking for a balance skills well and what we’re looking for doesn’t that come from the job description? Well, not necessarily, but good question, because a lot of organizations job description are nothing more than a list of responsibilities that they will fulfill once they’re hired, but what i’m talking about is a list of skills that are required to be successful in executing those responsibilities. And so we look at those in terms of technical skills, which are really job specific and things maybe like marketing the iranians fund-raising sales and then another set of skills that we call professional skills. You might also call the sauce skills and these cross jobs and these air things like planning and team work and initiatives and judgment, integrity, those kinds of things wei have a saying that a lot of organizations hyre on technical skills when they have to fire someone. Cheryl, we have to take a break when we come back. We’ll continue this and start exploring why behavioral interviewing is better than what we’re all accustomed to please hope. Everybody stays with us, we’re talking smart interviewing makes great hiring what’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing so you gotta make it fun and applicable to these young people x somebody’s a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to dio they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones me dar is the founder of idealised took two or three years. For foundation staff to sort of dane toe, add an email address their card, it was like it was phone. This email thing is fired-up that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dno two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts, tony, talk to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell, you put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other. Ninety five percent. Dahna welcome back with my guests, cheryl nufer of peredo consulting, you’ll find peredo consulting at parade o p r e t o hyphen h y p h e n but don’t spell hyphen just put a hyphen in consulting peredo hyphen consulting dot com. Cheryl, why is this method behavioral interviewing superior to what we’re all accustomed to? Well, that has to do a lot with the questions that you ask, i said before the other questions, key behavioral questions are based on principle that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, so if we can figure out in an interview how a person behaves in the recent past in situations that are similar to what they face in our job, then we have a pretty good idea how well behaved if we hire them. So this is the opposite of stock investing, investment advisors who will say past results or no indication of future returns, right? Okay, but past behaviour is predictor of future behavior. Yeah, because we are creatures of habit. So there is a great formula for creating a behavioral question that your listeners could start using right away. So what you do is you start with the phrase something like give me an example of the time in the past, or maybe describe the past situation, and then what you do is you go back to those skills i was talking about a minute ago, the rooms that are important for success and you plug in burbage that describes the skills so let’s say we were talking about initiative, then we’d say something like, give me an example of the time in the past when you went above and beyond job requirements or a time in the past when you anticipated a potential problem and you made contingency plans. So what you do is always in behavioral interview issues asked what people did in the past versus what they would do in the future, which is a hypothetical. So this sounds harder to fake, but i have to tell the whole story. Now you have to tell a whole story, and it is very difficult to fake because they’re hard to anticipate. And a good interviewer should be asking specific follow-up questions. I mean it’s, easy to just ask the behavioral questions, but it’s an interview are you start listening for what you want. You want a real situation? You want to understand what they said or did in that situation, and you want to know what happened, what kind of results this is scaring the heck out of me if i’m in it, i’m nervous that’s a good thing i have my own business, so i’ve never run into this well. So what if i don’t have a story about initiative? Alright, i’m under pressure. I can’t i can’t think of one well, that’s a common thing, and our goal is the interviewer is to bring out the best in the candidate. So what? We can dio that’s good that’s, that’s reassuring it’s too, because when you’re comfortable, you’re going to share more information with me so i would prompt you with questions such as what about in this specific job? Or i may rephrase the question where someone doesn’t have work experience, i’m my nasco and to think about project that they did in college or maybe a summer job so anything that i can do or i can say, you know, we can come back to that question and give you a few minutes to think about it if you’d like. There are a lot of ways to handle that it’s not uncommon for someone to freeze up. Yeah, okay, i pulled listeners before the show. One of the questions i asked is, do you feel you’re hiring? Process is efficient and you’re hiring the right candidate, and about seventy one percent said yes and about twenty nine percent i said no, so we want to help the other third, but that two thirds may not be may not be as efficient and hiring savvy as as they think. That’s, right, that’s recorders almost sorry even if they have a good track record of getting good can bring one good talent. Beauty of a behavioral approach is that up? You don’t necessarily have to interview a lot of candidates and pick the best of the lot if you know what you’re looking for and you have a good screening process and you interview the candidates and their experiences match the criteria success. Technically, you could hire the first candidate you interview, which reduces your cycle time, and it also keeps you from potentially losing a good candidate because you’re hiring cycle is too long. Have you seen organizations do that either? For-profit or non-profit don’t they don’t they typically say, well, she was very good, but maybe we’ll find somebody better, absolutely, and that they are not confident in their process. There’s something in there got that says, you know, i’m just not confident in the data, my process for evaluating it and that’s where a good process really builds confidence to make that decision when you see that good step, okay? Andi yeah, these air interesting ondas you said very these type of questions very hard to anticipate that they’re going to come. How does the interviewer prepare? You talked down a little bit, going a little more detail on and then shortly we’ll get to how many interviewers there should be, but but but how do we prepare as an interviewer? So as an interviewer, well, basically you identify the skills that are required for success in the job. Based on those skills, you develop a line of behavioral questions using the formula that i shared with you. Typically you will type those up in an interview guide or just list if you have multiple interviewer shall divide that list up among all of your interviewers, so that there are no gaps in your questioning and there’s no redundancy safe, so everyone has their game plan they interview based on that. So that’s the primary way that you would prepare a search would review the resume common things, write what you want you want it certainly want to be prepared. So if it is a a siri’s of interviews interviewers, they don’t ask the same questions then no, they don’t that’s really a waste of time, and you have so little time in an interview. You want to make sure to use it wisely. Now they ain’t me ask multiple questions about a specific skill, but they typically don’t ask the same question because if they asked the same question, the candidate will probably give the same example and that’s kind of silly. You still tell the same story twice, exactly, and you would expect that so it’s not the interview each ball that’s the interviewers fault for not being prepared. On the other hand, what if all the interviewees stories, anecdotes come from just one of their jobs or something? Or just too? And they’ve got, you know, thirty years of experience or something like that? Well, that would absolutely be a red flag either there bread through depth of experience is not what it means here on their resonate, or perhaps there’s something that they just don’t want to share with you so that’s something that you may, if you find when you bring your interviewers together, that the same stories were told to everybody, then you could either make a no hyre decision or you could make a decision to have a follow-up phone interview where you would try to clean examples from some of their other work experience. Okay, so you’d like to follow up interview to be by phone, but the first one to be in person is that right? What i’m talking about here is typically you would do a phone screen organisations and then bring the candidate in for face-to-face what i was saying is, if you feel you can’t make ah hyre no hyre decision, you know, you always have the option to follow-up again by phone and asked more questions, okay, okay, um and so since we’re talking sort of around this, what is your advice around having just one interviewer or having a siri’s of interviewers, or even having a panel. Okay, well, we would always recommend more than one interviewer, if at all possible, and you can is that just to eliminate bias of one person, it could eliminate buy-in it? I can get you more data because if you have two interviews that you have more data on which to base a decision, there are two ways of doing what we call a serial interview, which is cheryl interviews candidate hands candidate off tony who interviews to hands it off to joe, and then when you separately and then after all the interviews, you come back together and share your example and make a decision. There’s also the panel interview where you have multiple people interviewing the candidate at one time and you can do multiple panels panels are great ways to involve more people from your organization and getting exposure to candidate. You just don’t want the panels to get too big. You know what is to become a panel? Interviews khun b scary. I’ve heard stories from people who were interviewed by five people or so that’s pretty intimidating it’s very intimidating i’ve been interviewed by many has six at one time. I know a lot about interviewing and that that was a nerve ng me, what we recommend is either two or three. When it gets above three, it can not only be intimidating, but it’s difficult for the interviewers to kind of it should be choreographed. So you should have someone out of the panel who is kind of the host and is kind of orchestrating this interview. There’s not anarchy, everyone’s firing questions at the candidate and it really doesn’t set the candidate up. Cheryl nufer is a founding partner of peredo consulting. You’ll find them on the web, but peredo pr e teo hyphen consulting dot com we’re talking about smart interviewing, making great hiring, cheryl. Is there an advantage of serial interviewing over the panel or or the other way around? Well, there is an advantage in the advantage is that when you’re in a panel, if you conduct one panel interviews, all three of you are hearing the same stories, the same situation in a serial interview it’s more likely that you will hear different stories, or sometimes the same story told different ways, and so you know, that sounds bad, but it can be bad if in fact there are vast differences in the story, like your fourth step in the supposed be the results. So if the results were different in the same story across to different interviews that’s about sign that’s a red flag may be the results keep getting better and better. Three interview that’s a great way to start catching a candidate who may be fabricating for people actually do that. Is that true? Absolutely, they do. I’ve heard rumors to that effect, but i always hoped it wasn’t so another question i asked listeners before the show is our hires in your office typically interviewed by more than one person and seventy one percent said yes, fourteen percent said no, so most people are doing the multiple interviewing and then fourteen percent said depends on the job. Um all right, is there a job where the solo interview makes sense or no, you really just don’t like that at all or there’s a situation, i guess i mean when just one interviewer makes sense. Here’s what i would say in some more straightforward job, maybe some entry level jobs it could perhaps the appropriate that i say it’s no more appropriate in bigger organizations bigger cos you have a really small organisation. You have to hire the right people. You i have no where to hide them. You have no one to cover for them hyre abad a bad fit so i think it’s always good in a small organization, if possible, to have a second set of eyes and get that second set doesn’t have to be somebody that the person is going to report to, right? It could be a colleague. I mean, taken officer just four or five people. They’re going to be hiring of fifth or sixth, like a cz you’re saying that’s a big percentage of the staff, it doesn’t have to be somebody that that person would report to write absolutely not. And in a small organization of horrified people, i mean everyone’s wearing multiple hats, they really have to depend on each other. So everyone has a big stake in making sure the best person has brought onboard, so it could be a appear. It could be someone that maybe is performed well in a similar job in the past. You’re absolutely right. It could be just as long as they’re good interviewers they would be appropriate? How do we gauge technical expertise? We’ve been talking about behavior? Well, you can use behavioral questions to get that technical competencies, but technical skills are a little bit easier. For example, if you were hiring someone for fund-raising you can actually have them bring in and explain fund-raising approaches that they’ve used in the past. I mean, i would ask a lot of follow up questions to make sure that what they brought us, something they actually did. There are tests that you can use for certain technical skills. You can also do simulations, so for example, if you were hiring someone for a sales position, are fund-raising position you could actually have them come in and do a presentation to a team of you, and so you were potential donors and see how they would handle it. So there are a lot of ways to get technical. Wei have just about a minute left, cheryl, what potential problems should people look out for us if they’re goingto implement behavioral interviewing? I think the biggest problem is asking a behavioral question and assuming you’re going to get a behavioral answer, so you have to be able to sort out hypothetical responses through a good line of follow-up questioning about the situation there. Action in the results. Okay. Situation, obstacle action and results. Cheryl nufer is a founding partner of peredo consulting, which provides small to medium sized organizations with business tools that are often available only the large for-profit corporations. Cheryl, thank you very much for being a guest has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. And i hope that this information will help your eye. I think it will help listeners. Thank you very much. A pleasure to have you. Thankyou, tony. Stick to and your job descriptions coming up first. Pursuant, they have this tool. Billboard it’s integrated management for your multi-channel engagement strategies. All right, s o jargon jail. I plead guilty for that. You, khun. I could throw myself in there. Let’s. Break it down. You communicate in lots of different ways. Email landing pages, micro sites, donation forms mobile, all the social networks best to manage them all separately. No, don’t separate. Integrate! I thought that myself that’s, that’s not pursue it. Language. I thought of that billboard is integrated management and the all important analytics that go along with all these. Tools so you know which channels move more people and which don’t from mayor you learn you improve, continue that it oration, that innovative process of learning and improving based on the analytics, and you’ll raise more money. Check out billboard it’s at pursuant dot com. My video this week is the next set of non-profit technology conference videos. They’re all about social media there’s a panel of three on visual social media, another panel on email deliver ability so that those e mails that you sent through billboard actually arrive at people’s inboxes video strategy and embrace embracing emerging technology and social media. They’ve been on non-profit radio if you’ve missed them or you want the videos because you like to watch the videos, then the links are under my video at tony martignetti dot com, and that is tony’s take two for friday, twenty fifth of september thirty eighth show of the year. I’m very pleased that heather carpenter is with me. She is a phd was a non-profit manager for ten years. She’s, now assistant professor in the school of public non-profit and health administration at grand valley state university. She teaches grad and undergrad courses in non-profit management, financial management, fund-raising technology, leadership and human resources management. The book that brings our two non-profit radio is co authored with terra qualls, and it is the talent development platform putting people first in social change organizations published by josy bass this year on twitter she’s at heather carpentier, which is at heather carpenter. But take off that last are heather carpenter. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, tony it’s. A pleasure. You’re calling from grand valley university. Where’s that michigan. Right war in grand rapids, michigan, which is on the west side of the stage. Okay. Okay. That was the summer there in grand rapids. It was really nice. We have a great summer. A little harsher winters, but yeah. No, but you do have harsh winters. Yes. Okay, heather, our job descriptions he’s often get very, very short shrift, don’t they? Yes. Yes. Well, having worked in non-profits for many years and done h r and operations, i know how busy we get. And often, when people leave organizations, we scramble and pulled together what we have on dh and send out a job description that is often outdated and hasn’t been updated in a few years, or sometimes, i think, even pulled off the web. Yes, yes, you’ve seen that, yes, ok, not that you’ve done that when you were leading your non-profit i understand, but i think it’s, i think that’s, also a pretty common practice. Why do we need to focus more on job descriptions? Well, job descriptions are really an important part of helping an employee to understand there roles and responsibilities within the organization. It also helps to track employee and volunteer performance and success, and this is, ah, a living document, right way need to keep these current as job responsibilities change. Yes, we recommend that non-profits update their job descriptions, actually, on an annual basis. Okay, okay. Do you do you think that poor job descriptions lead tio? I don’t know hyre turnover or lower morale? What consequences do you think result from not having accurate descriptions? Yes, i i agree with your assertion, we’ve found that couple of things can happen with outdated job descriptions, one that’s for a new hyre they might not really fully understand the role let’s say hypothetically speak about how when organizations lose employees and they have someone coming in, and they used a job description that’s out data from the labs it’s not clearly showing the response the accurate responsibility so the person might get burned out pretty quickly, finding out they have a lot of additional latto responsibilities, or maybe they don’t even have the adequate qualifications for for the rial responsibilities. So the job or, if someone’s been in a position for a few years, there’s what we call the pile on effect where often more and more responsibilities added, but that’s not actually reflected in the job description or in compensation, so so employees can get volunteers burn out that way, and then sometimes people become overqualified for the job or might be over, claude will decide. When they come in, the job description is accurate. Does this apply also to organizations that are mostly volunteers? Should should be job descriptions for volunteers? Oh, yes, absolutely, we believe that that will our book applies to not just paid staff volunteers as well, and we actually have sample job descriptions are bored board positions and key volunteers, as well as from common staff within various non-profit organizations like your executive director, development director on bury the book is loaded with lots of resource is sample job descriptions but goes way beyond that just dahna job responsibilities and forms, you know, and we’re just taking one piece of the book and talking about job description, but there’s a lot more to it, and the thing is just loaded with but templates and resource is yes, thank you. I really wanted it to be as practical as possible, having worked in the nonprofit sector for many years, ourselves it’s more of a workbook where organizations can pick and choose the chapters that they need the resource is from, but it is a whole platform if an organization decides to go through the process for from everything from understanding the organizational. Learning and professional development culture to actually assessing stats, professional development and creating a professional development goals and abducted tied to the strategic als of the organization. Yes. All right, all right. So where do we start this job? Description process. I mean, i know who it starts with its doctor, the supervisor. How does that what is the what the person need to do to get started? Well, the supervisor should really look at the position itself and often there’s different philosophies on job descriptions. And our our philosophy is that the organization, the supervisor, should build the job around the position and not the person because people change andi really, to really get an understanding of what is needed to advance the organisation for words. So we have something called a proficiency mapping cool and are in our book where supervisors can really identify the called common confidences that the knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics needed to perform the job and then rape those competencies on different proficiency levels. We use the profession into level scale created by the national institute of health, and they’ve been doing this type of job description, worked for many, many years. And really getting understanding of what level that the position and the responsibilities to need to be at when we talked earlier a few minutes ago about outdated job descriptions common, another problem with outdated job description says they’re not often at the level that the position needs to be on a smaller non-profits with great to have people who could do lots of different responsibilities, but sometimes we have very high expectations that someone in entry level type job might be more responsibilities, say, manager or leading the organization through some sort of process when that’s not necessarily the right level for that job, you have these five proficiency levels fundamental, novice, intermediate advanced and an expert yeah, and we provide definitions and also example words and responsibilities at each level. I like to tell you i jump pretty quickly from fundamental toe expert on i think, if i’d done something once, that makes me an expert, so i don’t know if that fits within your construct, but like one time i’m not the expert the first time, but after i’ve done it one time i consider myself an expert. Andi that’s cost that’s cost me a lot of money in like home repairs and things, but i can’t get around it that’s, that’s but that’s, probably not talking, doesn’t fit within your your definitions well, generally the expert and advance our our our director level positions on responsibilities. So at the executive director, we would hope a most size organizations that the person the person holding that position would have advanced on expert level. But we understand that at the lower level positions the coordinators, entry level positions that they’re more at the the novice and the intermedia level. And yes, i mean, we’ve found that it’s helpful, starting with the supervisor to create these confidences and proficiency levels on dh, then down the line, wei have employees assess themselves and not do a real comparison over the competencies profession? Okay, yes, we’re going to get that so so after the supervisors part, then then what’s next in creating these optimal job descriptions, the next step is really getting documenting the employees responsibilities, and they don’t see what the supervisor has done. But if you do have someone in that particular position just making sure that all the responsibilities are are documented because the supervisor might not have a buy-in of everything that’s employees doing. But obviously, if it’s a new position or if the job description has never been done before, then they would have the supervisor job. Do the proficiency mopping. Ok, ok, but but the next step now is the is the is the employee e-giving their input into what their responsibilities are around the competencies and the proficiency levels. Yeah, the next up, it’s. Just the employees identifying their their responsibility. Okay, a faster proficiency levels. Quite yet just for the job description itself. It’s really making sure that all the responsibilities are identified and the supervisor is really the one that making sure that all the proficiency levels are identified. All right. Ok. Ok. And we mentioned these competencies. Can you give us some examples of competencies? Sure. Before you do that, i want to tell you about the process that we took to to identify ten core confidences for non-profit managers like holly. And i actually did some some national surveys and looked at literature around training needs of non-profit managers and a what their confidence cesaire needed. So this is really backed and research that we identify the ten course set. Of common confidence ease that non-profit managers possessed. They’re very general there everything from advocacy to communications, marketing, the financial management to fund of elopement way also have human resource is way also in the book go through the process of have helping organizations create their own sub confidence ease, because since the time core competencies are very general, we know that each organization is different in their culture and each position and as well as department, it’s organization, house, apartment, that they have their own core competencies that are important to that organization. So we’ve also provided some examples of different size organizations and the sub confidence juices issues that they have so well, for example, intercultural confidence. He is a very important sub competency for many organizations. Uh, two working, working well under pressure are working with certain population. Uh, so we we worked with various organizations and their different types of missions required different confidences. So we worked with homeless organization last semester, and they, you know, they require their staff tohave competencies and understanding about people who have housing, have challenges. Okay, let’s. See, we have just about a minute before before we take a break. And then we’ll continue. I should do this. We haven’t mentioned the board should be job descriptions for board positions. Definitely we have. We have a sample job description for board chair board treasurer for secretary on various board general boardmember on there’s a there’s. A lot of resource is not just in our book, but out there on the web as well for creating and managing board job description. That’s an important piece we’ve we’ve done this process with all volunteer run organizations where it’s just the board teo organizations that have paid staff, maybe they’re smaller, they have all the board do their job descriptions and then the one to two staff members that they have so it’s important that it’s not just a staff process that boardmember look at their job descriptions and revised them. Okay, let’s, go out for a break, and when we come back, heather, of course we’ll stay with us and we’ll keep talking about your job descriptions, and then we’ll move to mapping, mapping you, thies competencies and proficiency levels to the job description. Stay with us what’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests. Check this out. From seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark insights orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealist. I took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe add an email address their card. It was like it was phone this email thing. Is fired-up that’s? Why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were and and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift. Mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life, it sze you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell, you put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent lively conversation top trends and sound advice that’s tony martignetti non-profit radio and i’m lawrence paige, no knee author off the non-profit fund-raising solution. I know i say it every time. Maybe maybe you listeners get here. Tired of hearing me say this, but i wish lawrence would pronounce his last name. Panjwani. He’ll be so much more beautiful than paige. No. Ni lawrence. I’ve said this a large his face. So no it’s, not like i’m going behind his back. And pandiani will be so beautiful. Lorenzo lorenzo panjwani okay, okay. Heather let’s move now. Tio mapping what is this? What is it? What is that? The mapping process that comes next? Well, this is the mapping process is really about revising the job description and making sure that it matches up with the responsibilities really, that are needed. We advise organizations to separate job responsibilities by the confidence categories, so we often see job descriptions that have the whole long list of job responsibilities, but were our processes to separate them by category? Cory so that it’s clear on the difference competencies that are needed with that particular job. We also have the manager identified proficiency levels based on the job responsibility, action, words. And so this is where? This is the revision process, the different levels and making sure that the wording really matches up with the proficiency level. So we might have a position that is hyre up that it needs to be or lower and can be a giant. Now you mentioned job responsibility, action words. What defined those for us? Well, the action words are provided in the proficiency mapping scale. So as we talked about before there’s five perfect into levels from fundamental awareness novice, intermediate to advance and experts and each of these i have a different level and we have action words that are associated with each level. So as i mentioned about the higher level positions we have the dance level there’s there’s, some facilitating, leading liaising managing and the expert level. We’re synthesizing. We’re training were troubleshooting. And so these hyre level action words are associated with hyre level job responsibilities. Okay, yeah. And that’s me. Well, i like to focus on the expert. You know, like i said, i would skip over novice, intermediate and advanced. I go right from fundamental to expert one one one one time. So i’ve gotten used to use those expert use those expert examples that’s where hyre just in my mind that’s where i belong let’s see? Okay, so in this job in the in this revision process now it’s, the employees and the supervisor working together, uh, well, family it’s the supervisor making sure that the job description is aligned because as much as we’d like to be an employee involved in the process, the next step in the talent of altum platform, which i don’t have time to talk about here is the individual professional development assessment and that’s where an employee actually haserot their confidence season proficiency level so it’s really helpful that they don’t see realign job description before that, that there going off of what they i think that they’re expertise is and their proficiency level is. And then that way you could do an accurate, um comparison. So what the job requires? Okay, well, you might be surprised we might have time to get to assessment a little bit. Way might be surprised. Um, now so the mapping there are there was, i think six steps on don’t really have you know, we don’t have time to go through all six of them, but help help us. Understand an overview of the process a little more detailed, and then we have so far. Yeah, so, as i mentioned in the first step of separating the job responsibilities by competency category, you’ll see then if there’s gaps and if you’ll have competency categories that you’re not covering it’s amazing how many organizations that we’ve worked with through this process, where they are missing confidence, ease for specific positions, like operations manager or or the executive director where often maybe, you know hr is a part of the operations manager job, but it’s not really accurately included are reflected in the job description or the job responsibilities or information technology is often a part of someone’s job, but not necessarily included, so it really helped helps organization to identify gaps with responsibility and say, well, we don’t have anything in this competency category. So let’s, let’s talk about what we need to include, i see, okay, it strikes me that this whole process to is going to i guess you said it, but just is going to make sure that you’re not bringing in let’s say, entry level people and having expectations that are unreasonable for them in terms. Of responsibilities and competencies exactly. We we also talk about degree levels as well and compensation. We worked with quite a few smaller non-profits that, like tio, take all the responsibilities that we provide his examples, and and use them to hyre their new entry level staff at the masters level were like, whoa, you know, let’s think about it’s entry level, do they really need a masters? Or do they even need a bath? Kottler for that regard, so this really helped to think through the position responsibilities that you need for the organization and ok, if i really need all those responsibilities and maybe it’s two positions, not one or i’m i think i’m being unrealistic with how many responsibilities that i’m requiring in this in this position. So having those those sometimes difficult conversations about what’s realistic for the organization since restoring tio, we’re talking about the possibility of entry level employees what’s your feeling on starting people at at low salaries? Well, i’m a little biased because i advocate for living wages because i teach graduate students in a lot of them are often on the job market, either during their degree program are afterwards and it’s really disappointing to see them have to take very low wage starting jobs also research so that it costs between seventy five, to one hundred for fifty percent of employees annual salary when they leave. And so what i’ve seen with my students and former employees is that bill, if they’re not getting adequate living wage compensation, then the leave within a few months and that actually costs the organization a lot of money organizations, i don’t think we often realize how much time and effort it takes latto post the new position to interview the people to do the training and that’s that’s money, and what will when in fact, we could pay a living wage and a good starting salary for entry level employees and have them stay longer even if they stay a year to that’s that’s better than the cost of done, leaving within a few months because they find a better opportunity that pays better. Excellent! We’ve got to leave it there. Unbelievable! You were right. We didn’t have a chance to talk about assessment. You are right, but you got it by the book it’s talent development platform she’s heather l carpenter, phd and you’ll find her on twitter at heather carpentier carpenter and take off that last are thank you very much. Other thank you. I’ve been a real pleasure next week. I just don’t know, because i’m recording this a couple of weeks ahead. It won’t suck, i promise you that if you missed any part of today’s show, find it on tony martignetti dot com where in the world else would you go? I told you i was coming back pursuant full service fund-raising you’ll raise laundry carts more money. I’m not talking about those one person metal things that you pushed down the street to go to the local laundromat or your stuff him in the in the back seat of your minivan, i’m talking those big plastic monsters on the loading docks at hotels and jim’s with sheets, and the towels are spilling over the sides, but instead of sheets and towels filled with money pursuing dot com, our creative producer is clear meyerhoff sam liebowitz is the line producer shows social media is by susan chavez susan chavez dot com on our music is by scott stein bourelly next week for non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent go out and be great. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder pregnant mark insights orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealist. I took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe. Add an email address their card it was like it was phone. This email thing is fired-up that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were and and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift. Mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell, you put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.