BOT Report, Feb 2024
NOLS Employee Association Board Report – Feb 2024
NOLS Employee Association Board Members:
Mike Titzer - NEA President, Field Faculty, HQ Employee
Sarah Acuff - Wilderness Medicine Faculty, HQ Employee
Elena Chin - Field Faculty
Ron Rash - Field Faculty, In-Town Staff
Mission: The mission of the NOLS Employee Association is to communicate and advocate employee views and to work within the NOLS community to promote the school's mission and values.
Who We Represent: We represent the interests of current NOLS employees in four categories: Location Staff, HQ Employees, Wilderness Medicine Faculty, and Field Instructors. We represent the interests of employees below the “Community Leadership Group” level. We give voice to employees who are working every day to bag rations, repair gear, enroll students, process payments, and teach around the world in classrooms and the field.
Number of Members: 213
Community Gratitudes
· The NEA Board Members would like to thank the members of the NEA for their dedication to supporting and improving the working relationship between NOLS employees and NOLS administration. NOLS is undergoing momentous changes and we are striving to be a positive influence and connection for all employees to the school.
· Full-time NOLS employees had a much-needed, restful, two-week paid break over the holiday season. We want to express gratitude to NOLS for making this happen. This paid break was a nice end-of-year surprise that not only raised morale, but allowed full-time employees to rest and recharge before launching into 2024.
Updates
2024 Goals
Listening and Advocating – Continue listening to all types of NOLS employees that we represent (WM Instructors, HQ Employees, Field Instructors, Seasonal Staff). Through group meetings and one-on-one interactions, we want to listen to a diversity of staff voices so we can better represent a holistic picture of NOLS employees’ current professional satisfaction and hopes for the future.
Facilitate Connections between NOLS Employees by Funding Employee-Sponsored NOLS Projects: 2023 marked the first year that we disbursed funds towards employee-sponsored projects around the school in quite some time. We hope to continue this disbursal of funds, with a goal of providing $1000 in funding to employee projects per year. Here is a picture of the sauna being built at the NOLS Teton Valley Branch with Flamingo Funds!
Raise $3000 via Fundraising in 2024 – This will help us not only fund our employee-sponsored projects, but will allow us to add to our “endowment,” which can eventually spin off enough cash to fund employee projects on its own each year. If you’d like to donate to the Flamingo Fund, please use this QR Code!
Finances – The NEA continues to be in a stable financial position after last year’s financial reset.
2023 Actions:
Got rid of the legacy website and launched a new one (www.nolsemployeeassociation.com), saving us ~$2000/year.
Focused on fundraising, bringing in ~$2000, which included many NOLS Board Members, for which we are very grateful.
Invested in a 5% Fixed-Rate CD, spinning off cashflow to help cover our new yearly website expenses.
2024 Outlook:
Current Assets - Checking: $6300; Fixed-Rate CD: $4400
We will transfer $3500 more to the fixed-rate CD, with the goal of spinning off enough cash flow to completely cover our website expenses.
We will budget $1000/year to support employee projects around the school.
Continue to fundraise so we can increase our financial support of employee-sponsored projects.
Requests and Ideas from Employees
New Employee Seminar: NOLS attracts many talented individuals due to its reputation as a leader in the outdoor industry. As we bring in outside expertise, we need to introduce NOLS culture to these new employees. Whether a seasoned professional is joining the Executive Team from another organization, or a young college grad is starting at NOLS as their first job, we need to a way to instill our values and culture into every new employee.
NOLS is an organization that values connections and culture, and newer employees can often feel on the outside of that culture. We would like NOLS to have a more formalized “On-Ramp” program for new HQ and location employees. This On-Ramp program should mandate a “New Employee NOLS Seminar,” allowing new employees to get into the field or Wilderness Medicine classroom to learn about the NOLS product, build connections with one another, and feel a part of something larger than themselves, especially in an increasingly digital world.
Align Summer Student Demand with Instructor Supply: We are once again hearing that NOLS’ summer 2024 student demand will be similar to summer 2023. In summer 2023, waitlists numbered in the hundreds of students who could not go on NOLS courses due to a lack of key instructors, specifically Hiking Course Leaders. While large summer waitlists may seem like a “good problem” to have, in reality, it represents a severe mismatch of internal resources to market demand. This supply and demand mismatch is a problem that many organizations that rely on seasonal workers experience.
In general, there are two ways to match worker supply with customer demand. The first is by changing prices to control customer demand. If NOLS is experiencing high summer waitlists for two years in a row, that could be a signal that prices for many summer offerings are too low. NOLS could use one of a myriad of online pricing software available to help it more precisely price courses to match the summer course supply curve.
The other way to capture unmet customer demand is by increasing the supply of summer courses on offer. NOLS could offer bold bonuses to key instructors during the summers, such as Hiking Course Leaders, to attract these staff to work more summer courses. For example, one could reasonably assume that if Hiking Course Leaders’ pay were to double, significantly more Hiking Course Leaders would apply for summer work. While a doubling of Hiking Course Leader pay would only result in an added marginal cost per month-long course of $5000, it would bring in $100k of revenue (~$8k/student, 12-15 students) per additional course that NOLS is able to provide. Hopefully, NOLS’ margins for each 30-day field course is higher than 5%, especially when this strategy is combined with a market-adjusted pricing strategy for summer courses.
We believe that appropriately priced summer courses combined with significantly increasing the pay of key summer staff needed to run those courses can allow NOLS to both capture a larger profit while paying its key summer staff more. A win-win!
Hire a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSOs): Employees around the world care about their organization’s impact on the environment, and this concern is especially true at NOLS, with our mission of teaching “skills and leadership that serve people and the environment.”
Modern organizations have realized the importance of centralizing their environmental accountability, and data shows that as of 2021, more CSOs have been hired than the previous five years combined (https://hbr.org/2023/03/the-8-responsibilities-of-chief-sustainability-officers). Similarly to how NOLS hired a Director of DE&I, which employees appreciate, we would like NOLS to also have a Chief Sustainability Officer. This position can monitor and evaluate NOLS’ impact on the environment, develop an environmental strategy, and coordinate sustainability efforts. This position is different from the coordinator of public policy that was part of the past, and we believe that a more overarching role of Chief Sustainability Officer would offer a more holistic approach towards NOLS’ care for the environment.
A CSO is a relatively new position in organizations, and their purview is evolving rapidly. We recommend implementing best practices learned from other organizations (https://hbr.org/2023/07/the-evolving-role-of-chief-sustainability-officers) to NOLS’ CSO so that we can continue developing leaders who serve the environment!