Nonprofit Hub Radio
Whether starting a nonprofit or taking an existing cause to the next level, The Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast is about breaking down how nonprofits can grow. Each episode features an interview with a sector star with insight, stories, or ideas that can take your nonprofit from good to excellence. Join host Meghan Speer every week to make your good go further!
Nonprofit Hub Radio
Trust, Transparency, and Transformation: Fixing Nonprofit Workplace Culture
Burnout doesn’t always look like flames; sometimes it looks like “fine.” We dig into the hidden gap between employee satisfaction and true engagement—and why that gap quietly drains nonprofit performance even when everyone says they love the mission. With guest Kathryn Cronin Miller, founder of A Better Place to Work, we break down a practical framework leaders can use to move teams from compliant to committed.
If you lead, manage, or care about nonprofit impact, this conversation gives you tools to rebuild trust, raise energy, and turn mission passion into measurable results. Subscribe, share this with a colleague who’s ready to move beyond “fine,” and leave a quick review to help more nonprofit leaders find the show.
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SPEAKER_01:Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Speer. Joined today by Katherine Cronin Miller, who's the founder of A Better Place to Work and who is also going to be on stage with us at Coscamp this year. Very excited to have her come into Pittsburgh in November to be part of the CauseCamp Workshop Slate. Really excited for what she's bringing to the table there. Can't wait for you all to hear her. But you do get a little taste of it today, which is great. Catherine, welcome in. Thanks for having me, Megan. I'm happy to be here. Yeah. So tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your journey and a better place to work.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Well, um, so I'm a licensed clinical social worker by training. Uh, I've been in the nonprofit sector for about 20 years. And over the years, I really came into nonprofit leadership and became more interested in the human resources side of things. I think throughout my career, I was really good at putting out fires. I mean, like people and culture fires, right? And I became well known as someone who could put out these fires. But I really started to realize that in every organization I worked in, the fires were kind of the same and oftentimes they were preventable. So rather than somewhere where I was putting out the fires, right? I wanted to do some good in the sector by teaching social sector leaders how to prevent those challenges and create really engaged, inclusive, high-performing workplaces from the ground up. And the thing that I love about this work is I always say like it's win-win-win, right? Like when we do this work really well, first of all, our clients and community members win because they're receiving better services, right? Our staff members win because when they're actively engaged, they generally feel better at work. And our organization wins because our budget's protected, our outcomes soar, right? All of that. So I love the work that I'm doing. I founded the company in 2021. And yeah, I work with social sector organizations around the country.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. I love it. So I want to dig in. There's so much that we could talk about around this. But I think there's a really interesting discussion to have around the idea of employee engagement because I think a lot of I think a lot of times in a lot of organizations it gets miscontrude, misconstrued with satisfaction.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And we'll do it, we'll do an employee satisfaction survey and everybody says they love it here, so we must be fine. Yes. Right. But realistically, especially in the nonprofit sector, we might be satisfied because we like the work that we're doing, but we're teetering on the edge of burnout, right? Because there's so much demand and so much expectation. So talk to me a little bit about the difference between engagement and satisfaction and what those indicators are.
SPEAKER_02:I'm so glad that you're naming this. I would say this is probably one of the number one misconceptions that I see as a consultant in this space, right? So when we're talking about employee engagement, we're really talking about the employees' investment into their work, right? They're investing their personal energy. So I like to explain to leaders think of this as like when someone puts their whole head, hands, and heart into the work, like they're really in it, right? So this is an investment of their personal energy. And satisfaction is something pretty different. Satisfaction is my attitude or my like happiness level about the work. They're related, but they are distinct, right? So engagement, it's the number one driver of performance. If you want to increase your community impact, if you want to serve more clients, serve those clients better, right? Have better outcomes, you need to worry about engagement because engagement is the single largest driver of performance. I could say this till my face turns blue. So if you really think about that for a second, what I'm saying is it's not how much you pay them. It's not whether or not you are three days in the office or two. It's not when they last got a raise. It's not if you have the PPO or the HMO offering, despite all the hullabaloo that can occur with that. Yeah. Those are all indicators of satisfaction. And so I want you to imagine in your brain, let's say you have an employee who is kind of just going through the motions, right? As you said, teetering towards burnout, maybe. What is going on for that person? That is a person who is probably satisfied, meaning they're getting a paycheck, they feel pretty comfortable. There's nothing at work that's like really pushing them out. Like generally speaking, they're happy, they're content, but they're not engaged. They're not investing of themselves in the work, which means performance is suffering, right? So I will say, like right now, this is just a very timely topic in 2025, because we're in a different financial moment as a country. So if you remember the conversations a few years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, we were talking about the great resignation, right? All these folks that were resigning. Well, we had really low rates of engagement in the United States at that time, but we also felt pretty secure with the economy. We felt that if we resign from our jobs, the grass will be greener somewhere else, or at least just as green, and we'll be able to, right, like get another job. What's happening now? And Gallup just put out earlier this year their most recent data, we're at kind of a 10-year low for engagement in this country across sectors. But the difference is employees aren't leaving because they're not confident that they're going to be able to get another job. So if they're satisfied with their paycheck and they're generally content with their relationships with colleagues and they feel okay, even if they're not engaged, they're sticking around. And that means that as leaders, we need to be much more aware of this difference between engagement and satisfaction because our outcomes are going to suffer.
SPEAKER_01:Is this because I feel like for a while in the headlines, we had this everyone was all of a sudden terrified of the quiet quitting.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Is that a lack of engagement or is that a separate thing altogether?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, it depends. Well, I will say, generally speaking, I think yes, it's a lack of engagement. Like they're disinvesting or deinvesting their personal energy from the work, but they are not leaving. So that is exactly the situation I just described. They are satisfied with their paycheck, they are generally satisfied with, you know, their relationships at work or their benefits or whatever the situation is, but they're not putting their whole head, hands, and heart. They're not engaging in what we call citizenship behaviors. You know, sure I'll volunteer to plan that event, sure, I'll serve on this committee, sure I'll do that outreach work, sure I'll write up a blurb for the fundraising team on, you know, a recent success story. Those are the things they're not doing. They're doing the bare minimum. That is exactly right when we have low engagement but decent satisfaction.
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SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah, there's probably a lot more of that in my department than I was was willing to admit because I assumed the satisfaction rate was fine. I guess two questions. One, are there key indicators that you look for that really like kind of measure out how unengaged someone is? And at what point does that become something we need to address? And two, once we identify that it's a problem, then what? Because if it's not like I can't uh I'm putting myself into their shoes at the moment, right? I can if somebody's dissatisfied with their paycheck or with their health benefits or their uh amount of PTO time that they are allotted every year, those are tangible things that I can go to the mat for and fight for. Right to try and make someone care and go above and beyond, I feel like as a leader is a whole lot harder. So once we identify that it's a problem, then what?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Okay, so two questions there. This is really juicy stuff. First and foremost, you know, are there key indicators? Absolutely, right? And there are plenty of companies out there, they'll be happy to sell you on them. You don't need, I mean, it's lovely to hire one of these companies, it makes things really easy. Um, it's nice to have an independent consultant because it can make the data feel more anonymous and safer for folks. So it's more likely to be authentic data, but you don't need to spend that kind of money. And if if folks are listening and they're in a really small nonprofit or mid-sized nonprofit, um, they're worried about budget right now and they don't want to invest, you can get free employee engagement assessments online. There's actually one, I'm happy to give you this link. There's one on my website, you can just download it, but there's others available online. And really, what you're looking at with an employee engagement assessment, there are three drivers of engagement. Um, this all comes from this work stems from a study done by a guy by the name of William Kahn in 1990. So, this is all the most, you know, last 25 years that we've really focused on this. I will say as an aside, that study had some pretty significant limitations. But since then, that work has been replicated across the globe, across industries, across cultures. And what we find is that the results are pretty much the same everywhere. Meaning these are like kind of human connection type, right? This is a basic intrinsic fact about humans and who we are and how we relate to one another. We are inherently creatures of connection, right? And we thrive in community. And I think that like really jives with a lot of the nonprofit mindset. So, um, but these are the three drivers, right? Here you go. It's psychological safety, which is the freedom I have to bring my full self into work. We have psychological meaningfulness, and I have a lot of leaders tell me, oh, meaningfulness, right? Well, everyone here is drawn to the mission, so the work is meaningful. Oh, not so fast, right? Meaningfulness is a little bit deeper than that. It's really about on a daily basis. Do I feel like I'm getting reciprocal energy from what I put in?
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. This we can we can cut and tease that out if you're curious about that. The third one, so we have psychological safety, meaningfulness. The third one is availability. And I often encourage people to think about psychological availability as listen, you only have so much brain space at any given time for everything in your life. And so the literature talks about well, what takes up that space? And we use the term distractions, which I think can be kind of a negative term, but they could be personal distractions. So let's say you're undergoing cancer treatment, right? Or you're caring for a family member, right? Before you come into work that day, there's already some space getting taken up, right? Your dog is sick, your kid's late to school, you know, like whatever. And then for those things, a lot of our organizations, we hope that we have really good HR policies and procedures. We want people to take the time they need to take care of personal things and come back. So, where I would encourage leaders to focus is this other side, which I call professional distractions. And that's tension on teams. I don't feel comfortable with my supervisor. I think organizational leadership is hiding something. I'm worried about the potential for layoffs. I don't know why no one has told me what's happening with federal funding. I'm following the news, our budgets are getting cut. Why hasn't anyone said anything? Yeah. Right. That's the stuff that takes us away from really engaging fully in the work and getting creative with the work, right? And investing our whole selves in the work. So psychological safety, meaningfulness, and availability. So when you're looking at employee engagement assessments, when you find them online, what you'll see is most of them are looking at indicators for each of these things. Like psychological safety is it does include some equity and inclusion measures, right? Yeah. I be who I am at work without code switching constantly or masking all day, right? That mental energy, that mental gymnastics, it's gonna take away space that I have to engage. But it's also, can I disagree with a colleague as long as I'm respectful or do I feel like I'm getting my head bit off, right? Yeah, it's okay to provide feedback to leadership. Again, as long as I'm respectful. This is psychological safety. So the indicators for that are gonna include things like, you know, I trust leadership or I trust my direct supervisor, I believe that our team is strong, things like that. For meaningfulness, you're gonna see things that have to do with creativity and autonomy in the work. This is like I have my unique skills. I'm not just a number, I'm a human. I have big goals at work, and then I have the creativity and autonomy to dig into them. Why? Because like it feels really good when we're given a problem and we can solve it, right? So meaningfulness indicators look like that. And then availability is gonna be everything from like imposter syndrome, lack of confidence, lack of training to do my job, right? To also things like the distractions we just mentioned, right? So it can be what's pulling my energy away from the work at hand. Now, you can, I would, I would say as a baseline, I always recommend that organizations do an employee engagement survey every six months. It's also a recommendation from Gallup. So I didn't just wake up this morning and make that up. It's a great baseline. If you're an organization that is actively struggling with engagement, you might want to do it more frequently. You might want to do it every quarter. Here's the thing with that. I just feel like this is really, really important. It's not enough to just do an assessment. You have got to close the loop. I see organizational leaders fall into this trap time and time again. Here's what happens. If there's a problem with engagement, let's say there's a problem with psychological safety, people think they're even like the stink eye to leadership, right? They're like, I don't trust them, I'm not sure what's going on, but they're afraid to say something. Well, here comes an anonymous survey. Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say something, I'm gonna speak up. And it's a little scary for them, but they go ahead and do that. And then they hear back nothing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And they don't know if leaders heard them, and now they're even more scared and more mistrustful, right? So we need to report back, and it could just be a couple of quick slides. Here's the top three themes that I heard. And you know, if the themes relate to leadership and they're critical of leadership, we can, I mean, this is a little bit more of a 201 kind of conversation, but how we resolve these issues is by focusing on those building blocks, often of trust. And so, trust, trustworthiness. How do you get to trust? You build your trustworthiness first. It's all about transparency, vulnerability, and integrity. I'm gonna do what I say I'm gonna do when I don't, I'm gonna own it. And so this is a perfect opportunity to practice that, right? You've got some critical feedback, practice appropriate vulnerability, put it on the side and don't put everything, not saying you have to bear your soul to staff. Sure. Listen, point number three, I want everybody to know that a lot of the feedback we heard, it was critical of leadership and the way that we've been providing feedback or the way we've been responding to you know changes in our funding sources. And um I don't have all the details, or I'm not gonna share all the details now, but I will tell you that the message has been received and we are working on a plan to be more transparent with you moving forward. Um, and we'll check in about that next quarter, that kind of thing, right? Like that level of vulnerability, I think adds that human element and it makes people realize, like, oh, okay, they're not hiding something, right? Yeah, to being honest. So this is a very long-winded answer, but I would say like those are the indicators folks are gonna want to look for. And if there's a problem, you're gonna, depending on where your indicators take you, if the problem is with meaningfulness, we've got to find creative ways to engage people in the the meaning of the work and help them understand or help them see that they're getting something back from the energy they're putting in.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So that's great. So let's, I'm gonna flip the script for a second. If someone is listening who is maybe not the leader, right? Or they are they're working for a nonprofit and they're finding themselves in a place where they are recognizing themselves in what you're saying about employees who are disengaged or maybe not feeling safe. How do we, if we're in that boat, how do we go about addressing those issues, especially if we're not working for an organization that's doing some of the survey work or who's you know has a mechanism for driving that? Because I could see where there's a real like I don't want to rock the boat, I don't want to be the one that's complaining, I don't necessarily want to take the emotionally vulnerable risk of bringing my concerns to my boss, right? Because there could be all sorts of things that go along with that. So if we're finding ourselves in a place where we are feeling disconnected, feeling unengaged, just kind of eh about the whole thing within our organization, then what what are some things that we can do personally to help drive that from the bottom?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So I mean, I a lot of the clients that I work with are what I would describe as mid-level managers. So anyway, from supervisors to directors. Um, and then of course I do have like some some more executive circles, but it's a very timely question, Megan, because in 2024, the largest gaps in engagement in the United States were among managers. And managers dipped, I think it was 5%, which if you're not checking this data, that probably doesn't mean much. That's a huge drop for a one year year over year, 5% for managers. And among women managers, it was 7%. Here's the problem with that. The number one person who has the power to increase someone's level of engagement is their direct supervisor.
SPEAKER_01:So if we And if that person is unengaged and increasingly higher rate. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02:You have we have like a little bit of a crisis going on right now where our managers are feeling stretched. And you know, this makes perfect sense to me because the job of a mid-level manager has changed dramatically in the last couple of decades. Um, we're expecting managers to do not just like, let's say they're doing human services type work, right? They're not just doing casework, they still are working with clients, they're still doing events, they're still doing whatever, but they're also managing people. And nine times out of 10, they're not getting any training on how to do that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Here's a fast, easy solution among managers who are disengaged. We can cut that rate of disengagement in half if we give them role-specific leadership training. So that's really, and that's directly related to their what we would call psychological availability, right? I don't feel that I know I'm being asked to do these things. These problems are insane, and I have no idea how to fix them. I don't have the training, I don't feel supported. I'm asking for help, but my executive is just as stressed out as I am, right? Simple fix, invest. You know, if you think about it, if the training's a couple thousand bucks, 500 bucks, think about the cost of the ROI on the training rather than risking the turnover and having this reciprocal effect on everyone that person supervises. I just need to see smart one. So that's that's a fast tip. Um, if you yourself are listening to this and you're like, yes, I am super disengaged, I would encourage folks to manage up. And I know we use that term and people are like managing up, like I don't even really know what that means, right? So the thing is, because so much of this relates to leadership, there's only so much that an individual actor can really do, right? There is actually, I could give people some links if they're interested. There's a great book called Love and Work by Marcus Buckingham. He's the co-founder of Strengthsbinder, if you know Works Gallop. And uh he so he put out this book a few years ago during the pandemic, Love and Work, and he talks to individual folks. Now, one thing I'll say is I'll tell you about managing up in a second, but one thing he says is listen, the majority of people who are unhappy with their roles actually say that they have the power to change things for themselves, but they don't do it. And this is like this weird trap we find ourselves in, right? We get we get downtrodden, we get complacent, and also sometimes it's scary to ask for what we need. So that leads me back to managing up. I encourage people like, what does managing up mean? It's I would say it's a combination of things. It's speaking up for yourself, but it's doing it in a way that your leaders can hear what you're saying, right? And our bodies, we're really primed. I'm big on trauma-informed practices. Our bodies are primed to sort of look for threats. And we have this cortisol pumping and we have this adrenaline pumping. How do we approach people with requests in a way that they can hear us? Well, we're gonna do it in a really specific way to try to make them, you know, hear what we're saying so it's not a threat, right? We're collaborating with them, we're identifying a problem and we're presenting a solution, we're asking for their input, right? We're um doing that in a way that is like pretty safe. We're not coming at them with accusatory, we're we're not pointing fingers. So if folks are interested in that, you know, that's just where I would start. And I would say, like, if you're trying and trying and trying and the message is not getting across, then we're in a different camp. As a leader, this is when the disengagement, not like this middle of the road, I'm not necessarily engaged or disengaged, the full-on active disengagement, which is when we see people looking for jobs at work, right, planning to leave, telling all their friends what a horrible agency this is, right? Telling people not to come here anymore. When people are asking for support and they're doing it in an appropriate way and they don't feel heard, that reverberates and pushes them into that act of disengagement. So I just encourage folks, you know, speak up. I cannot guarantee that even if you use all the tools and you're the most appropriate, that you're always gonna get what you want. But you'll get information and response that will help you determine how you move forward.
SPEAKER_01:That's so good. Okay, so I wanna we're just gonna keep speaking to different audiences with this topic. So I'd love to talk to at this point, that very top leader who maybe could feel called out right now by the lack of engagement for their employees. How did they help to change our culture?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Is there is transparency the top thing they can do, or is there an actionable, like, hey, this is a really great place where I am personally committing to changing the culture around here and to changing how we communicate with each other and to building that level of communication. What is what's the kind of the top piece for the top leaders right now? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So I mean, one thing I will say, here's the preface, right? Which is engagement can suffer based on any of those three drivers. Yeah. If you have a big problem with meaningfulness, your solutions need to target meaningfulness.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:But what I see very typically, I do see a crisis of trust in a lot of organizations, right? And this is not necessarily like we're not pointing fingers here, right? This is not in the business of like shaming executive leaders. In fact, most of the executives I work with are trying so hard and kind of bending over backwards to increase their engagement and satisfaction metrics. I think where we go wrong is that not everyone on staff is receiving the information and we don't have that level of transparency to give us the precursors to trust. So if you're listening to this as an executive leader and this is resonating, like, yeah, no matter what I do, I'm the narrative in our organization is still that I'm out to get people, or our team is out to get people, or HR is out to fire people, or we're not being honest, or we don't care about people, or we're not paying them, whatever that narrative is. What I would say is usually there's this lack of trust. And before we get to trust, we have to build trustworthiness. You have to be worthy of trust before it magically occurs, right? Yeah. That is all about integrity, vulnerability, right? So transparency. So do what you say you're gonna do when you can't, because life happens, own it and be human. Again, like I mentioned this call, right? But like that appropriate vulnerability. So here's what that sounds like. And Megan, I'm gonna use the example you just started with because that's a perfect part. When executive leaders realize that there's a deep-rooted problem with this, first of all, I would say, can you make it a we problem? Right. So this is like you're having a town hall, you're you're at staff meeting, you're you know getting all stuff together in some way, and you are appropriately vulnerable. You say, All right, I just want everyone to know the number one thing in my mind right now is our organizational culture. Over the last 10 months, I'm totally making this up right now, right? But like over the last year, whatever, I'm continuously hearing this narrative or these stories. And I'm really curious about that. I want this to be a place where folks feel comfortable, folks feel like they can be themselves and they're here and they can do their best work. And I want to create that environment. To that end, introduce employee engagement survey number one, right? And I want your feedback. And here's the plan, but like lay it out for them, be transparent. Here's the plan. You're gonna, there's a two-week window, we're gonna do this survey, and then you can expect that results will come back in about six weeks. We're gonna give high-level results, we're gonna keep people informed. Maybe you collaborate, maybe you say, is uh if there's any staff that are interested in working on a you know, a team to foster these initiatives, we're gonna have the openings for that, right? Like collaboration, transparency, all of those things are the building blocks. If there was a number one piece of advice I would say to leaders who are struggling with culture challenges, just because I see trust come up so much, I would say your number one advice is ask for feedback often in multiple formats, right? Over and over this if it's anonymous or name optional. And if it's scary for people, right? And I get that folks can unleash, right, in an anonymous format. But here's the thing you cannot fix a problem that you don't know about. And if they're thinking it, they're saying it, whether they're saying it to you or they're saying it to someone else. And that's brand. So, you know, getting that out there, closing the loop, reporting back the feedback, and you're gonna continuously do this probably every quarter if you're actively struggling with engagement until you find you're back on track.
SPEAKER_01:That's so good. So typically this season on the podcast, I've been asking everyone as a closing question of what would your one piece of advice or encouragement or wisdom be? But there it was, I love it. Yeah, actually do the work. Yeah. So, but I do want to certainly give you time to answer that question as well. So, if there was another piece of encouragement or wisdom that you would pass along to nonprofit leaders at this point, what would that encouragement be?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I'll say one other thing we haven't really touched upon, which is that a lot of times these issues. Connect also to narratives around equity and inclusion or the lack of organization. Right. And things get really sticky. I would encourage leaders not to be afraid. I think sometimes we're afraid that if we start the surveys or we ask people what they think or we invite their participation, we're going to open up Pandora's box and all heck is going to break loose, right? Yeah. And it might, right? Like as a consultant, I often tell people, listen, if we're going to go into this engagement, I need you to know we have to see it through because it's like when you have a messy closet. Sometimes you take everything out before you can put it back together nicely, right? Yeah. But even in the messiest of circumstances, do not be afraid. People want to be heard, right? We can go too far on that and we still need to be comfortable setting boundaries, but there's a way to set those boundaries in a way that is still respectful, right? And doesn't sacrifice engagement. So don't be afraid to dig in. You will, if you can get through it to the other side, you will see that there's a ton of possibilities waiting for you. And you can increase performance and increase the culture in ways you never thought were possible. Um, I have clients who say it's just so much better than I ever imagined. Yeah, but you've got to get started. And I know that's the scary part.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Be afraid to jump in.
SPEAKER_01:I love it. Well, Catherine, thank you so much. I think this has been some really helpful information, if nothing else, to level set everyone's expectations and help really understand the difference between engagement and anything else and how to maybe right the ship a little bit in that regard. So I appreciate all that you had to share. That was great.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome. Well, thanks for having me, Megan. It's great to be here.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. And if you'd like to hear more from Catherine, we would love to have you join us for Cause Camp this year. It's gonna be November 4th and 5th in Pittsburgh. Uh, Catherine will be on the slate of speakers sharing about that as well. But we'd love to see you there. So uh this kind of training and this kind of insight is what we're doing for two days. So we'd love to see you be there a part of that. Uh, this has been another episode of the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Speer, and we'll see you next time.