12/14/2022

Don’t Salaries Matter?

Of work, weasels and employee engagement in the nonprofit sector

Every year, when Leading Edge releases our annual Employee Experience Survey, we tend to emphasize findings from the survey that most strongly contribute to employee engagement. "Employee engagement" is about feeling proud of the organization, feeling motivated to do great work, wanting to stay with the organization, and being likely to recommend the organization to others. Employee engagement isn’t the only thing that matters for organizational effectiveness, but we focus on it because research has shown how directly correlated it is to productivity, profitability, employee turnover, workplace accidents, absenteeism, product quality, and more. And our data points to certain organizational factors that strongly correlate with employee engagement, what we call “engagement drivers.”

This year, like last year, those drivers were:

1. Feeling like the organization demonstrates care and concern for employees
2. Having confidence in the organization’s leadership
3. Believing employee well-being is a priority at the organization
4. Feeling that there is open and honest two-way communication at the organization
5. Feeling like you belong at the organization

These elements of the workplace experience—more than any others we study—drive how engaged employees are in the Jewish nonprofit sector. We don't believe that our field is unique in this; these things are important for workers in every sector.

Please select this link to read the complete article from SSIR.