BOT Report, Feb 2023
NIA Report
Mike Titzer, NIA President
February 2023
As we ring in the New Year, this board report will focus on what we have appreciated about the tremendous changes happening at NOLS over the past year, as well provide some ideas about how NOLS can continue to best support their employees under the director level.
Appreciations:
1) Pay and Benefits
NOLS has taken tremendous steps to advance the pay of full-time and seasonal employees, as well as faculty and staff. These pay increases have moved people above poverty-level pay, and have made it possible for them to continue working at NOLS. Many of our employees are well educated and have other employment options when it comes to working at NOLS. As one particular employee put it: “I love NOLS, and when I first started, was excited to work for an organization whose mission I was passionate about, but realized that I just couldn’t make the numbers make financial sense. With the current pay increase, I’ve stopped looking for other jobs and plan on sticking around!”
The offering of health insurance for faculty and instructors has been a much-needed addition as well, as NOLS strives to ensure that each employee, whether part-time or full-time, has access to quality health care.
2) Digital Upgrades
Where digital upgrades have occurred, they have saved the resulting departments lots of time, frustration, and menial taskwork. For example, in the Wilderness Medicine department, tasks that used to take NOLS employees hours of menial computer labor now take only minutes, as students are enrolled and billed more quickly and efficiently. We’re looking forward to how these digital tools can be expanded to help NOLS employees in other departments soon!
3) Employee Resources Groups (ERGs)
We’re always excited to see new ways of interacting with employees, and we like the concepts of the ERGs as they are rolled out to the school. We hope that these can be forums not only for employees to communicate with one another, but to help NOLS learn what different groups need from NOLS in order to best excel as employees.
Room for Growth:
1) Formalized Conflict Resolution Process
We’ve gotten multiple reports from employees who have told us that supervisors at the CLG level have made comments that are microaggressions. When a supervisor 2 levels up from you makes a microaggression against you or your affinity group, what do you do? These employees were extremely put off by the CLG members’ comments, yet struggled with the power imbalances of addressing the issue and having a conversation about it with their supervisors. We need a formalized HR complaint / conflict resolution model for standard HR complaint resolutions.
In the field, we have a third member sit in on a VOEMP between two other expedition members, making sure that everyone is heard and respected during the resulting conversation. We can learn something from our field courses, and adopt a formalized HR Complaint Form that could be filled out by any employee on IkoWapi, then taken up for action by the People Team to help resolve the conflict. If the two employees cannot find a way to talk about their issue among themselves, the People Team can send a mediator to help resolve the conflict at the lowest level. These official complaints to the People Team would not be anonymous, but would be a way to help people facilitate difficult conversations between each other. This new conflict resolution system would be different than SpeakUp, which continues to be a great, anonymous way for NOLS employees to report any workplace issue for investigation by a third party.
As NOLS continues to grow as a diverse workforce, we need formalized ways that help supervisors listen and hear feedback from employees about conflicts, microaggressions, etc. We also need a way to log these complaints over time and hold supervisors accountable if there is a pattern of complaints against them. By formalizing, tracking, and following up on employees’ concerns, we can make each employee feel heard, valued, and cared for, leading to a more fulfilling community where people are excited to work.
Next Steps:
1) Connection with Employees: We plan to hold quarterly meetups with NOLS employees who are on the ground, doing the work everyday for NOLS. Whether an employee is an NIA member or not, if they are below the CLG level, they are welcome to attend our meetings to talk about NOLS, their roles, their excitements, and their struggles. Through this outreach program, we hope to continue highlighting the most important needs that our employees face, helping to serve as a conduit between NOLS and its employees.
2) Partnering with NOLS: We plan on meeting with NOLS ET/CLG members regularly to communicate our members’ excitement for policies, struggles with work, and ideas to make the organization a better place for everyone. We realize that we best serve as a conduit between groups of people with different inherit power imbalances. We hope that our organization can serve as a connector between employees working at NOLS and supervisors at the highest level of NOLS, helping to continue to improve the organization whose mission and people we all love and support.