The 2022 Standards Self-Assessment Membership (SSA) Report shares the new findings of how the SRE Network member organizations have grown this past year, their common strengths, and the areas for improvement in the year ahead.
The report reveals that SRE Network member organizations are successfully making gradual and steady progress along their journeys to building safer, more respectful, and equitable workplaces and communal spaces. And there is still more room to improve.
Key Findings
- Overall, organizations improved in the last year. 50% of organizations improved from 2021 and 21% sustained their progress, an accomplishment during a year of great disruption.
- The most common areas of improvement in the past year were Policies & Procedures and Reporting & Response. These are connected with the areas SRE Network invested the most support in this past year.
- Some of the most improved areas are still the most pressing priorities for further development in the year to come. Roughly a quarter of organizations improved in regularly communicating reporting & response procedures to staff, making hiring and advancement policies easily accessible to staff and frequently communicating them, and training the individuals who conduct investigations into discrimination and harassment.
- Education & Training is the area with the most room for growth. Many organizations that provide only one training a year indicate it is insufficient and cite a need for more frequent in-depth trainings.
- Communicating policies and procedures to staff on a regular basis is a key growth area priority. This includes regularly communicating the fair and equitable hiring and advancing policies; reporting and response procedures; and non-discrimination policies.
- While most organizations have successfully established processes for Reporting & Response, many have not yet communicated these procedures to staff on a regular basis nor provided training to the individuals responsible for conducting internal investigations.
About the Standards Self-Assessment
The purpose of this assessment is to help each member organization assess and strengthen its own organizational commitment and expertise in SRE areas over time, based on the SRE Standards. The survey is completed on an annual basis by one senior leader, in consultation with their leadership team. The Standards were designed by experts to prevent and address discrimination and harassment in Jewish workplaces and communal spaces.
2022 Standards Self-Assessment Membership Report, November 16, 2022, SRE Network
The Leading Edge Employee Experience Survey is intended to help individual organizations understand and improve how their employees experience work. The survey helps Jewish nonprofit leaders and managers identify organizational strengths as well as growth areas that can be addressed to improve workplace culture.
Since 2016, more than 45,000 employees working at nearly 400 organizations have received the survey. Organizations that take the survey for multiple years tend to see their numbers improve year over year as their interventions make their employees’ working lives demonstrably better.
Key Findings of the 2022 survey:
- People want to stay in this sector. A strong majority of employees surveyed (70%) want to stay in the Jewish nonprofit sector for two years or more.
- People (still) want well-being, trusted leaders, and inclusion. The top drivers of employee engagement remain what Leading Edge has seen in past years: feeling that the organization cares for employees’ well-being, confidence in leadership, feelings of belonging, and feeling that there is open and honest communication in the organization.
- Some employees are less likely to feel like they belong. LGBTQ+ employees and People of Color (particularly Black employees, both including Black Jews and Black employees who are not Jewish) are markedly less likely to feel like they belong in their organizations.
- There’s been a lot of turnover. One third (33%) of employees surveyed have been with their organizations for less than two years.
- Working with board members is common. More than one out of every four employees surveyed (27%) reports that they work with the board.
- Most employees go to work in person for at least part of their work week. Three quarters of employees surveyed (76%) reported that they work outside their homes for at least part of each week.
- People working in person (i.e., not remotely) trust their leaders more if they feel well prepared for physical security threats. For the first time, we asked employees working outside their homes about preparedness for physical security threats. Five out of six employees surveyed (72%) feel prepared to act in the event of a security threat, but those who don’t feel prepared are markedly less likely to have confidence in their organizational leadership.
Are Jewish Organizations Great Places to Work? Results from the Sixth Annual Employee Experience Survey (2022), November 1, 2022, Leading Edge
Qualitative research into people’s experiences and expertise helped Leading Edge and The Starfish Institute posit 71 causes to the persistent gender gap in top leadership at Jewish nonprofits; quantitative network analysis suggested five “keystones” among them.”Keystone” is a technical term, short for “keystone species.” The Starfish Institute borrows this term from the science of ecology, in which “a keystone species is an organism that helps define an entire ecosystem. Without its keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether.” (National Geographic.) In the ecosystem of factors mapped in this report, keystones are factors that have high “reach,” which means they affect many other issues, and high “leverage,” which means they are influenced by few others. Solving them may be difficult, but doing so could create a large ripple effect on other causes of the problem.
Most people working at Jewish nonprofits are women. But most CEOs of Jewish nonprofits— especially at the largest organizations—are men. In 2019, Leading Edge launched an investigation to better understand why that is, and how the field might begin to change it.
In this exploration, Leading Edge partnered with The Starfish Institute, an organization that has developed a methodology for applying network science to understanding complex social problems at a systemic level. Together, over the course of 18 months, Leading Edge and The Starfish Institute engaged over 1,200 people to define as many distinct causes of the persistent gender gap in top leadership at Jewish nonprofit organizations as they could identify. They then mapped how those causes likely interact with one another as an ecosystem.
“The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership: An Ecosystem View,” Leading Edge in partnership with The Starfish Institute, August 2021
Read more insights about The Gender Gap in Jewish Nonprofit Leadership: An Ecosystem View.