Continuing on the theme of employee turnover that I wrote about last week, I wanted to harken back again to an early post I made about Johns Hopkins study saying that the non-profit sector wasn’t having as big an issue with turnover and recruitment as had been widely reported.
I checked and they haven’t seem to have done a follow up report specifically on this issue since then.
At the time I took a pretty skeptical view of some of the responses collected. I don’t doubt that those were the responses, they received, it was just that the responses themselves seemed a little dishonest.
In particular, I questioned the responses reported in figure 6 on page 5 where those surveyed claimed the largest benefits to employee turn over were to the budget and creativity.
In my post I wrote,
The positives about the budget are obvious. Not having to pay someone helps save money. I am uneasy about the staff creativity result because I think the go to position for so many non-profits when they face staff shortages of any sort is to smile and determine to work harder and smarter.
I suspect creativity claim is actually a ploy to cope with the increased workload and is a facade for the damage to morale and feeling of burnout. Having been in similar situations, I imagine that the creativity manifests itself in penny pinching steps akin to my grandmother washing aluminum foil and hanging it on the line to dry so it can be reused.
Everyone stands around and congratulates each other on how clever they are to be so thrifty. Then go back to their offices and skip lunch so they can get all their work done, their hunger pangs temporary dulled by the recently shared optimism over how creative the staff has become.
Cynical as you may think this is, the same chart seems to provide some support to this idea given the largest negative impacts are to staff productivity, burnout and morale, in that order.