As the biggest employer in North America’s Jewish nonprofit sector, the JCC motion employs greater than 55,000 professionals — 12,000 full-time, 23,000 part-time and 20,000 seasonal employees — in its greater than 170 JCCs (Jewish Group Facilities and Jewish group camps).
Given the motion’s outsized labor drive — significantly as JCCs of North America’s leaders juggle a deep dedication to their professionals, workers’ new expectations about working hours and places and a tightening labor market — office tradition more and more is a critically essential matter, not solely in JCCs, however in organizations all through the skilled world, the place tradition usually is uncared for and undervalued.
For greater than a decade, JCC Affiliation of North America has surveyed JCC professionals as a part of its JCC Excellence: Benchmarking surveys. The info collected, along with exploring interactions with JCC members, was designed to discover the standard of execs’ personal experiences within the office and determine the important thing drivers of employees satisfaction. To assist JCCs throughout North America develop a really robust, enticing tradition, JCC Affiliation leaders set about to deepen its current relationship with Main Edge.
The unique partnership between the 2 organizations started in 2019, when JCC Affiliation began to work with Main Edge to gauge JCC workers’ experiences utilizing the latter’s Worker Expertise Survey (EES). Since 2016, the EES has been despatched to greater than 52,000 workers working at almost 500 organizations within the nonprofit Jewish sector. Utilizing the survey outcomes, leaders and managers can determine organizational strengths and areas wherein office tradition will be improved. Organizations whose workers take the survey over a number of years are inclined to see their outcomes enhance 12 months over 12 months as leaders’ interventions demonstrably enhance workers’ working lives.
Now, constructing on the overlapping survey questions requested on parallel EES and JCC Excellence: Benchmarking surveys, Main Edge and JCC Affiliation have created a single, complete survey that helps the work of each organizations. The 2023 EES is presently within the subject at 334 organizations with greater than 31,000 workers — together with 83 JCCs with greater than 13,000 workers. The EES eliminates the necessity for JCC employees to finish two surveys and can present information about JCC professionals’ expertise, and effectiveness. JCC Affiliation encourages JCCs to take part as a result of the aggregated information — when contextualized throughout the Jewish communal sector — gives a sensible measure of how the JCC motion works for its workers, leading to an 80% improve within the variety of collaborating JCCs from 2022 to 2023. And the extra the motion works for its professionals, the extra they, in flip, can serve their very own members and Jewish communities throughout the continent.
From its latest partnership with Main Edge, JCC Affiliation has garnered stable information about JCCs’ workers, the elements that almost all affect their happiness and sense of belonging at work, and their need to stay employed at their JCC. The newest 2022 EES revealed quite a few findings from the 46 JCCs that participated. For instance, 60% of JCC motion workers will not be Jewish, whereas past the motion, roughly 40% of workers are of different (or no) faiths. This determine is greater than incidental. As Deirdre Munley, a longtime worker within the Jewish sector, who shouldn’t be Jewish, notes on this eJewishPhilanthropy op-ed, “[T]right here is wealthy spiritual range throughout the workforce that powers Jewish communal organizations … [and] maybe opposite to expectations, non-Jewish workers could also be a number of the sector’s most engaged and devoted long-term workers, an essential distinction in instances of great worker turnover throughout the workforce at giant.” On the similar time, Main Edge information additionally has proven that non-Jewish workers within the Jewish nonprofit sector, expertise fewer emotions of belonging in comparison with Jewish workers, which has implications for office fairness, inclusion, engagement, and retention. In line with Munley, “Unsurprisingly, a lot of what will be useful in inclusion practices typically holds true right here as effectively.”
The JCC Excellence: Benchmarking surveys even have allowed collaborating JCCs to evaluate and observe modifications over time in drivers of excessive employees satisfaction and retention, together with skilled growth alternatives, common communications, the notion that senior administration cares about employees well-being and the flexibility of govt administrators and boards to set a imaginative and prescient for his or her JCC’s future, which additionally correlates with reported JCC rewards for progressive pondering and calculated risk-taking.
With most Jewish nonprofit organizations’ workers working in individual for at the very least a part of the week, whereas the challenges of constructing an ideal tradition over Zoom or in hybrid settings additionally nonetheless persist for a lot of organizations and workers, each Main Edge and JCC Affiliation are seeing a renewed emphasis on creating constructive worker experiences. That’s a very good factor. Instruments like Main Edge’s EES are related for any group that seeks to create a robust, constructive office tradition. By understanding the elements that almost all have an effect on workers’ experiences, leaders can drive change that successfully creates and sustains the specified tradition of their organizations. With out the sincere and confidential enter from workers who take the EES and the evaluation of the outcomes that Main Edge gives to collaborating organizations, leaders within the nonprofit Jewish sector would possibly as effectively be steering their boats in the dead of night with no compass.
Andy Paller is a vp of JCC Affiliation and director of JCC Excellence: Benchmarking. Alena Akselrod is senior director of information technique at Main Edge.
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