Case study: Nonprofit
Enhancing a national nonprofit’s talent management approach
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A large nonprofit organization called on Eagle Hill Consulting to help it attract, develop, and retain the top talent needed to deliver its mission. To realize this aim, our team helped the organization enhance its HR systems and programs, including how they map responsibilities across the organization, promote career development and performance management, establish compensation standards, and recruit and hire talent.
Goal
Update HR systems and programs throughout the employee lifecycle to help the nonprofit organization be more objective, transparent, equitable, and consistent.
Unconventional consulting—and breakthrough results
jobs now have core responsibilities defined
technical competencies created
increase in manager confidence leading performance management change
The challenge
Our team started by working with the nonprofit’s HR team to identify the needs in each area, including job descriptions, recruiting and hiring, career development, performance management, and rewards. We supported the nonprofit organization in determining a path forward for each program, keeping the core tenants of objectivity, transparency, equitability, and consistency in mind. As the programs launched, our team needed to be mindful and adapt to the unique needs of senior leaders, people managers, and employees throughout the organization; we supported efforts in each area of talent management:
Job descriptions:
Drafting and refining the job responsibilities for 550+ jobs across the organization.
Recruiting and hiring:
Implementing a new process to streamline the recruiting and hiring process.
Career development:
Establishing technical competencies aligned to each job and revisiting existing leadership and foundational competencies to make them relevant for the organization today and in the future. In response to desires for greater career development, our team created a four-phased career development model to allow employees to drive their development.
Performance management:
Incorporating ratings related to demonstration of the new foundational competencies and achievement of goals.
Compensation:
Developing and implementing new compensation standards and salary grades through training, including instructor-led manager training, an employee video, written content for the organization’s intranet page, and user guides to roll out the updated compensation standards.
The roadmap to success
To keep people at the center of change and ensure all of these programs were adopted successfully, our team employed robust change management techniques—engaging leadership and stakeholders, communicating about the changes early and often, and providing high-touch and high-impact training. We provided the opportunity for employees and managers to share feedback about what was working, and areas for improvement by:
Conducting interviews with business unit leaders across the organization to gain candid insights on how competencies were being used and validate the new competency definitions.
Leading working sessions with employees and managers to edit data gathered for consistency and incorporate their feedback on shared responsibilities across units to produce an accurate job description for each job.
Facilitating workshops with business unit leaders to outline how competencies could be integrated across the employee lifecycle in recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and performance management processes.
Providing tailored training materials to meet the needs of each audience. All trainings began with the big picture – how the new programs and processes would help the organization meet its mission, and then outlined how changes associated with the new competencies would be incorporated in the enhanced performance management approach.
Delivering sustainable impact by creating processes, tools, and templates for the HR team to help the organization be more efficient and use the newly defined job data more effectively.
As a result of the work, the nonprofit organization and employees benefited from impacts including:
- Greater automation in the performance management and compensation processes
- More objective performance management with measurable and individually rated goals
- Consistent set of compensation standards applied across the enterprise
- More objective and equitable salary grades aligned to the work performed
- Clear lateral and matrixed career paths for employees
- Greater ability and confidence in using new systems, adopting new processes, and following new standards
