Question: We received a request from the State Department of Labor, Division of Research and Statistics, to provide information for “Occupational Employment Statistics Report in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Labor.” Is our participation mandatory or required?
Answer: Your state department of labor has asked you to participate in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Current Employment Statistics survey. Providing information is voluntary under federal law and is mandatory under state law only in North Carolina, Oregon, and South Carolina.
The report is based on a sample of 390,000 business establishments nationwide. The survey produces monthly estimates of employment, hours, and earnings for the nation, states, and major metropolitan areas. Preliminary national estimates for a given reference month are typically published on the first Friday of the following month, in conjunction with data derived from a separate survey of households, the Current Population Survey. See the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey page and the Current Employment Statistics page for more information.
Although voluntary in most states, employers are encouraged to complete and submit the report accordingly. No penalties exist for those who choose not to report in states where participation is not mandatory.
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From 2007 to 2016, the nonprofit sector experienced substantial growth in employment and a range of industries reaped the benefits of this growth. During this time, nonprofits surpassed the for-profit sector in employment growth with a 16.7 percent increase compared to the 4.6 percent increase in the for-profit sector. With consistent resilience and very little recognition for these efforts, nonprofits had the ability to employ nearly twice as many workers as construction, finance, insurance and transportation.
When looking at how nonprofit employment is distributed across a variety of industries, it can be helpful to see which industries benefited from this growth. Hospitals came in at the highest with 34 percent of the total, along with other health care sectors (e.g., nursing homes and health clinics) at another 21 percent. Next, is education with 14 percent of nonprofit employment then social services with 12 percent. An interesting point made in The 2019 Nonprofit Employment Report is “within the industries noted above, nonprofit workers tend to out-earn for-profit workers” and an example of this is, “an average nonprofit worker in ambulatory health earns $1,364 a week versus $1,101 for a person employed in the same industry by a for-profit firm. That is a 24 percent nonprofit wage advantage. In the social assistance sector, the nonprofit wage advantage is a stunning 55 percent.”
While nonprofits are less impacted by recessions than for-profit firms, they still face other obstacles that are unavoidable. For-profits continue to make advancements and are outpace nonprofits in a number of the traditional nonprofit sectors, such as nursing and residential care field, hospital field, social assistance; to name a few. For-profits also continue to grow in the private sector and while nonprofits are growing in the service(s) sectors, they are growing faster than the economy can accommodate.
With the nonprofit sector continuing to show resilience while battling with the many economic pressures and in constant competition with the for-profit sector, the nonprofit sector continues to push on. However, attention needs to be given to the many factors that impact the future of nonprofit business models.
Most people spend the majority of their weekday hours getting ready for work, commuting to and from work and actively working. As a standard rule of thumb, we make it a priority to ensure we live in a safe environment at home–free from negative energy. But what about our work environment? How can we ensure the environment is safe there as well?
Some typical issues encountered in the workplace that can be bothersome include poor lighting and fluctuating temperatures, but other issues that are surprisingly common that can seriously undermine employee health are workplace bullying and sexual harassment. These types of behavior can have an extremely negative impact on the well-being, productivity, and health of everyone in the office, not just those directly involved. Creating a safe work environment means focusing on culture and eliminating harmful behavior.
Many people think these negative behaviors stop once the graduation caps have been tossed in the air. Unfortunately, bullying is a common problem that can occur in any setting involving a large group of people, and the workplace is no exception. With digital tools like office chatrooms, texting, and email, there are more ways than ever for abusers to target others. Workplace harassment can encompass a number of harmful behaviors, including threats, humiliation, sabotage, and intimidation. It is this repeated harassment that can affect the victim’s ability to concentrate and/or feel safe at work.
One of the biggest problems with workplace harassment is that many people don’t recognize it when they see it. Not all harassment is obvious. Sometimes, it’s subtle and the effects build up over time. Alternatively, the abuser may be using digital tools that no one else can see rather than engaging in inappropriate behavior in front of others. In other cases, people that are witness to bullying may not feel safe coming forward. Research indicates that a shocking 37% of workers in the United States have been directly bullied in the workplace. When you factor in the people who witnesses bullying, the number reaches 49%. All in all, even if a person hasn’t been bullied on the job, chances are they know someone who has. Because of the negative consequences, these behaviors are a leading contributor of toxic work environments around the country.
Not only does workplace harassment cause victims to lose their confidence and experience increased stress, it can also lead to poor productivity, illness, and possibly, to the person quitting. A toxic culture increases turnover rates and can even open up companies to legal trouble if allowed to continue.
Workplace harassment is a serious issue and should therefore, be handled promptly. Not only can it lead to mental and physical health problems for your employees, it can also impact your bottom line and even hurt your reputation. Eliminating toxic behavior through education and awareness are key when it comes to ending workplace harassment of any kind and of the utmost importance in creating a safe and healthy work environment. Mandatory trainings for managers and employees, strict policies on harassment, and other safeguards can help ensure a safe and healthy environment for all.
This article was created in collaboration with Quinn Cooley of DC Scholarships.
As a nonprofit manager, it is important to be able to give constructive feedback effectively to your employees. Being able to share and receive feedback is vital to self- improvement. Examples of how to give constructive feedback include, discussing appropriate behaviors, asking questions, creating an action plan together and building trust, to name a few. On the other hand, there are a number of ways that your feedback could cause more harm than good.
Listed below are five bad habits your nonprofit organization should avoid when giving constructive feedback:
1) Waiting for the annual performance review to give feedback – This method can cause confusion and make things more challenging to work through. Waiting too long to provide feedback could make people feel caught off guard or defensive rather than being open to having a productive conversation.
2) Not providing specific examples – Concepts like “be more of a team player,” “be more professional” or “show more initiative” do not typically sink in without the use of specific examples to illustrate them. Labels without examples can leave people feeling at a loss of how to go about making changes because they are unsure of what you’re looking for. Make sure to be specific with your feedback.
3) Lack of preparation – Making an assessment or judgment call prior to gathering all the facts and examining the logic of your assessment, can lead to a very negative outcome. Situations like these could lead to resentment or loss of respect for the manager. Every statement you share, whether it be criticism or praise, should be backed up with specific details.
4) Making an assumption of how to praise an employee – A natural tactic is to praise an employee the same way you like to be praised. However, what may work for one type of person or personality may not have the same impact on another. This is one of the many areas of managing where learning personality types can be extremely useful.
5) Only giving corrective feedback without any positive feedback – If the only time you give feedback is to say something negative, employees will inevitably develop an automatic defensive reaction the moment you try to give them any type of feedback, whether it be positive or negative. Such conditions can be deemed hazardous for a constructive conversation and effect the overall culture of the workplace.
Some situations in life are just uncomfortable and performance reviews are often one of them. By planning ahead, these conversations can be extremely productive and used to strengthen employee-manager relationships while driving positive outcomes for the business. Set clear expectations, continuously monitor employee performance, regularly check-in, offer praise for good performance and continually work on staff development. You will be well on your way to creating a positive work environment where both parties are appreciated and respected.
Technology continues to create more tools for recruiters to use to reach potential candidates—whether it be via email, social platforms like LinkedIn or the most popular, texting. While texting is an informal way to communicate, it can act as simple way to vet someone to see if they are a good fit for your company or at the very least, see if they are interested—this can be an optimal time saver. The number of technology companies creating messaging tools to help organizations reach potential employees by text continues to grow.
With most nonprofit organizations are constrained by limited bandwidth, utilizing a text-messaging platform could be a beneficial solution that could help bring in the ideal employee while managing time more effectively. Adding this type of tool to your hiring process can help fine tune interview logistics and allow for pre-screening questions prior to scheduling a phone or in-person interview. In such a highly competitive market, nonprofits are always looking for solutions to grab the attention of candidates that are the best fit for the job as well as better manage how they communicate with those seeking an open position.
Compared to email and job board email listings, incorporating text messaging into your recruiting process can increase the likelihood of actually getting a response. Texting offers a quick back and forth conversation, which can help move the process along at a quicker pace, allowing employers to ask basic questions regarding requirements, experience and availability—while candidates can ask about benefits or pay. This could all be discussed before scheduling a meeting or even a phone call—preventing the off chance of wasting either parties’ time. Texting also offers an informal environment that can help decrease the chances of any awkwardness of a first-time discussion.
While text-based recruiting is more commonly used for higher volume job categories such as retail, food service, nursing and customer service, there are some companies using these solutions for professional jobs or high-demand positions such as software programming. These messaging tools are being used to hire a wide-range of positions and continue to become more sophisticated as the demand increases.
Performance management enables business leaders to motivate staff members and maximize worker productivity. Go-getting employees thrive on productive feedback, while others need a clear plan to boost their productivity.
While large corporations devote huge sums of money toward highly complex and feature-rich performance management software suites, these systems typically focus on standardized forms and universal rating systems. Often, this kind of one-size-fits-all management is unproductive and ineffective. Fortunately, there are newer, cost-effective performance management applications that are accessible to even the smallest organizations that do a better job of boosting performance.
With the abundance of available software suites on the market, small organizations can lease performance management applications for pennies on the dollar. Of course, business leaders must also consider the costs involved with managing these kinds of applications. As such, it makes good sense to choose a management suite that is easy to use and integrates well with existing work processes.
To learn more about how low-budget organizations can effectively achieve their goals through data and performance management, check out Rutgers University’s infographic on Using Data to Improve Performance in Nonprofits.
The role of an HR professional requires wearing many hats and with that comes the challenge of juggling multiple projects, involving various moving parts of a nonprofit organization. One of the biggest and most challenging tasks that lives on the desk of human resource professionals is recruiting/hiring new employees. Most have come to learn that the hiring process has a tendency to be biased, which comes with moments of being unfair to certain applicants. While most of it comes from an unconscious bias, these acts still play an intricate role in making a decision when hiring a new employee.
While bringing awareness to our natural bias and attempting to correct these behaviors can be difficult, there are solutions that can be put into place to offer your human resource’s team a strategic plan to help prevent such biases from occurring.
1) Reformat your job descriptions: A job description is one of the most crucial parts of the hiring process. It sets the tone for everything that follows and the parameters around the type of person you’re looking to hire—from their skills to their capabilities. The use of different words can have a greater impact than you realize on the candidates that come across your job listing. For example, certain adjectives like “competitive” and “determined” can be more appealing to men where as “collaborative” and “cooperative” tend to resonate more with women.
2) Try “blind hiring”: A technique that “blinds” you from seeing any demographic-related information for a particular candidate. This approach can help improve the chances of not weeding out a great candidate and to retain a more dynamic interview pool without your natural bias interfering with the hiring process.
3) Assessments using work examples: Offering a test to solve work-related problems can be a helpful indicator to both the potential hire and employer— revealing their level of job performance and the opportunity for the candidate to demonstrate his or her skill level. This can help eliminate the bias and unconscious judgement of appearance, gender, age and personality.
4) Create a consistent interview process: While an unstructured interview can allow for a more organic conversation, it tends to be unreliable when predicting job success. Whereas in a structured interview, the candidate is asked a set of defined questions, allowing employers to focus on the key factors that have an impact on performance—this approach offers a consistent interview process and minimizes potential bias.
5) Implement goals of diversity: Creating these goals will offer guidance and define the parameters in which to abide by—this helps keep diversity and equality top of mind when hiring future employees.
Question: Can we require our employees to get flu shots?
Answer: While there is no law that prohibits employers from mandating flu shots — and in some states, the law requires all healthcare workers to get flu shots — you should carefully determine if the benefits to your business outweigh the risks. There has been a rise in litigation brought by employees who object to this requirement for medical, religious or personal reasons. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has filed or joined several lawsuits over claims that inflexible mandatory vaccination policies are discriminatory.
Employees may be entitled to exemptions from a flu shot policy for medical reasons under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or religious reasons under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Requests for exemptions must be evaluated individually yet treated consistently, a difficult task. You will need to engage in an interactive process with the employee, just as you would for any other request for accommodations, to determine if they can be granted without presenting undue hardship to your company.
The EEOC recommends against mandatory flu shot policies, instead suggesting employers encourage employees get vaccinated on their own. Offering no-cost flu shots on site can further improve workplace vaccination rates by making it more convenient for employees.
If you choose to enact a mandatory flu shot policy, write it carefully to protect your company from the risk of discrimination claims and be sure to run it by your legal counsel. Make sure the policy:
With holidays on the horizon, this is the time for holiday shopping, family gatherings and ringing in the New Year. With so much on our plates, time can get away from us—causing us to miss important deadlines. As a 501 (c)(3) organization, November is the deadline month to exercise your state unemployment tax exemption for 2019. This means time is running out.
Unlike for-profit organizations, 501(c)(3) nonprofits have the unique opportunity – as allowed by Federal law – to opt-out of the state unemployment tax system and instead only reimburse the state, if and when they have an actual unemployment claim. It can be a savings opportunity for many nonprofits who have lower claims than what they pay in state unemployment taxes—which are often driven up by for-profit organizations and other companies that go out of business, as well as state fund deficits and improper payments made in error.
UST helps nonprofits to better manage their cash flow through proper claims administration and various funding options. With access to e-Filing capabilities, state-specific claims advice and a plethora of on-demand HR services, UST participants are able to streamline operations and reduce back-office paperwork burdens.
Last year alone, UST helped program participants save $26.2 million in unemployment claims costs. That’s millions of dollars more for the nonprofit sector and the communities they serve.
More than 2,200 of your nonprofit peers are already exercising their unique tax alternative with UST. In a time of such uncertainty and ongoing legal changes, shouldn’t you investigate whether UST can help your organization safeguard valuable time and funding?
Submit your FREE Cost Analysis Formno later than November 15th in order to meet the state deadline for 2019 enrollment – which for most states is December 1st. Unfortunately, if a nonprofit misses the state deadline, they have to wait until the following year to exercise their tax exemption and join the UST program.
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This Privacy Policy and the Terms of Use for our site is subject to change.
UST maintains a secure site. This means that information we obtain from you in the process of enrolling is protected and cannot be viewed by others. Information about your agency is provided to our various service providers once you enroll in UST for the purpose of providing you with the best possible service. Your information will never be sold or rented to other entities that are not affiliated with UST. Agencies that are actively enrolled in UST are listed for review by other agencies, UST’s sponsors and potential participants, but no information specific to your agency can be reviewed by anyone not affiliated with UST and not otherwise engaged in providing services to you except as required by law or valid legal process.
Your use of this site and the provision of basic information constitute your consent for UST to use the information supplied.
UST may collect generic information about overall website traffic, and use other analytical information and tools to help us improve our website and provide the best possible information and service. As you browse UST’s website, cookies may also be placed on your computer so that we can better understand what information our visitors are most interested in, and to help direct you to other relevant information. These cookies do not collect personal information such as your name, email, postal address or phone number. To opt out of some of these cookies, click here. If you are a Twitter user, and prefer not to have Twitter ad content tailored to you, learn more here.
Further, our website may contain links to other sites. Anytime you connect to another website, their respective privacy policy will apply and UST is not responsible for the privacy practices of others.
This Privacy Policy and the Terms of Use for our site is subject to change.
Whether intentional, or unintentional, only 5 percent of those who were screened by Lexis Nexus Risk Solutions had ever been involved in any kind of criminal activity. But more than 1-in-5 of those who had a criminal background had been convicted of serious charges, including drug-related offenses, sexually-based crimes, kidnapping, and murder.
Nearly 1,200 nonprofit employees who were given background checks during the study had been convicted of murder. There were also 600 kidnapping offenses included in the audit.
Every year, Lexis Nexus combines forces with thousands of nonprofit agencies across the United States to conduct background checks and gather information designed to better protect nonprofit organizations in the event of a bad, or worse, accidental, criminal hire.
New EEOC Guidance May Soon Change This
In April, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission approved new guidance on criminal background checks that requires all employers to individually assess whether an applicant’s past criminal conduct is job related or consistent with business necessity before throwing them out of the hiring pool.
For nonprofits who have encountered problems with employees whose criminal background prove not so distant, and for those who protect clients from criminals, the new rules will be jarring because the EEOC provides only 2 circumstances in which an employer can meet the “job related and consistent with business necessity” on a consistent basis. The first occurs when an employer is able to validate the criminal conduct screen for the position in question. This can only be done in accordance with the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures Standards if the data about the candidates’ criminal conduct, as related to their work performance, is available and can be validated.
The second, more time consuming and personal, option requires that a nonprofit employer must develop a targeted screen of all applicants considering the nature of their crimes, the time elapsed, and the nature of the job available. The employer must then provide applicants excluded by the screen the chance for an individual assessment to determine whether the policy, as-applied, is job related and consistent with business necessity.
The individual assessment would further require that the candidate is notified that they have been excluded from consideration because of a criminal conviction. According to the EEOC, the notice would have to include an opportunity for the screened candidate to demonstrate that the exclusion should not be applied based on the particulars of the candidates’ circumstances.
The employer must also consider their appeal with merit to the particular circumstances that are revealed during the consideration period.
What It All Means
Thankfully, the same study that found that only 5 percent of those employed by nonprofits have criminal backgrounds found that the number of nonprofit employees with criminal backgrounds has declined for five consecutive years, dropping from 7 percent in 2007 to 5.3 percent in both 2010 and 2011.
According to the study, which is called The Power of Positive Information, “The results… demonstrate that our background screening programs are working for nonprofits and underscore the importance of continued screening vigilance at nonprofits since nearly one-fourth of the records included in the audit were for serious offenses.”
More importantly, the study shares several best practices and program recommendations including:
To learn more about the study or how you can better improve the security of your nonprofit, visit http://www.lexisnexis.com/nonprofit for the full study.