🗞️ Navigating tricky employee leaves, plus 3 mistakes new nonprofits make & how to avoid them

The Beacon Brief 🗞

For HR leaders looking to find and keep the best talent for your growing company.

Keeping it brief at 1900 words, a 5-minute read. ⚡️⏱

Keep scrolling for:

• HR Answers // How to navigate tricky employee leave situations 🧭
• On Our Radar // 3 mistakes nonprofits make & how to avoid them  ✅
• Talent Tips // The power of being open to feedback as a leader 👂
• Client Love: How We Helped // Formalizing HR with the BC Green Party 🌿
• In The Community // Beacon @ Tech Talent North 💻

How to navigate tricky employee leave situations

Job abandonment 🚪

Sometimes, it happens. Your employee goes on vacation for a week and doesn’t return. Now what?

• Attempt to contact the employee. If your efforts go unanswered for a number of days, try their emergency contacts. 
• If the employee ignores your communication efforts, you can consider this a reasonable indication that they do not intend to return to work. Other reasonable indications include cleaning out their desk or telling coworkers they aren’t returning. In this case, if the employee has willfully abandoned their job with no intent to return, it would be deemed a resignation and not an involuntary termination scenario.
• Seek legal counsel: It’s always good practice to discuss the specifics of each case of job abandonment with an employment lawyer to mitigate risk to the company. 

Backfilling work of someone on short-term disability (STD) 📚

Employees in Canada can take up to several weeks of STD with income assistance depending on the parameters of their group benefits plan. This can be a long time to have a role empty and, as an employer, you may need to consider options to backfill this work. 

The first thing to know is in most cases employers are NOT allowed to permanently backfill a role of the person on STD leave, but you can consider the following options:

• Hire a contractor to backfill the work. Do this for the expected timeframe of your employee’s leave or hire on a month-by-month basis.  
• Hire an additional team member: As long as your employee on STD returns to their existing job, or a job equivalent, with unchanged pay, a new hire can take on some of their responsibilities. Only do this if there is enough work and budget to retain the new hire following your employee’s return. 
• Shuffle around your existing team: This is where most companies land when they have an employee on STD. Managers should have transparent conversations with existing team members to understand bandwidth and growth goals, before delegating out temporary responsibilities. 

Can you let go of employees on leave? ⏩

The short answer is yes: an employer has the right to terminate employment of those on leave as long as the cause is unrelated to the leave. The long answer is: it’s tricky. The cause must be laid out clearly and in alignment with provincial law, so as not to leave room for any potential legal action. We recommend consulting with your legal counsel prior to any layoffs for employees on leave. 

Navigating any employee leave can be difficult, nevermind ones that come with additional HR challenges. We recommend being well acquainted with the rules and regulations of the job protected leaves in your provinces, and consulting with employment legal experts when the situations get sticky!  

3 mistakes nonprofits make & how to avoid them

At Beacon, we’ve worked with many nonprofits over the years and it’s clear to us that there are 3 common mistakes made in the early stages of organizational development: 

Unclear roles and responsibilities 

Running successful nonprofits requires a certain level of adaptability and scrappiness, but don’t embrace this so fully that you’re ignoring a lack of clarity or disorganization within your business. Being crystal clear on the responsibilities of each role, ideally at the hiring stage, will lead to effective decision making, accountability and overall operational efficiency—so do this as early as possible! 

This is especially important when hiring your Board Members. Ask yourself these key questions as you write your job descriptions to save issues later on:

• How involved will your Board be on the operational side of the business? 
• What are the responsibilities of your Executive Director vs. your Board Members? 

And remember, job descriptions can adapt if they are not serving the best interests of your organization. Schedule a quarterly or semiannual job description review with your employees and Board Members to make any necessary adjustments and ensure you’re all on the same page. 

Check out Lever’s Ultimate Guide to Writing Effective Job Descriptions to help you with role clarity and more. 

Not having the right players on the Board 🤝

According to the 2020 Nonprofit Leadership Impact Study, 41% of nonprofits struggle to find the right Board Members. And that makes sense! It’s a tall order to find folks who are passionate about your mission, have beneficial connections and expertise, and have the time and willingness to contribute in a meaningful way. 

So how can you choose the right board members from the get-go?

• Get crystal clear on the role responsibilities for Board Members: see above! 
• Establish a thorough interview process: make sure candidates not only fit the skill qualifications of the role, but also the culture of your business. Consider inviting short-listed candidates to board meetings to see how they work with the existing Board Members. 
• Hire a diverse group of folks: carbon copies of the same skills, experience and perspectives around your board table are not conducive to peak growth or creativity. 
• Maintain an ongoing recruitment funnel: there will inevitably be turnover on your Board—continue networking so you’ll never have to start a search from scratch.  

You and your team will be working with and relying on your Board heavily in the course of your work. Make sure you are doing everything you can to hire the right folks early on!

3. Not setting up HR soon enough 🏗️

This one isn’t exclusive to nonprofits, it’s quite common for new organizations on tight budgets to delay setting up a proper HR framework. According to BambooHR, 65% of startups in 2023 had no HR support. 

Neglecting your HR needs means that vital components such as operational compliance, thorough employee contracts, and compensation and benefits administration, end up back burnered on the side of someone’s desk. Leaving these items half finished or ignored is not only a financial and reputation risk, but also an employee retention risk.

Fractional HR and outsourcing is a cost-effective solution to establish your HR framework early, especially if you’re unable to hire a full-time employee. In addition to covering your compliance and employee administration needs, a fractional HR leader can: 

• offer strategic guidance 
• aid with risk mitigation
• establish key processes and programs to enhance your employee experience and performance

If you are looking to polish up your job descriptions, hire effective Board Members, or stand up your HR function, give us a shout. We’d love to hear how Beacon could help your nonprofit get ahead of the game! 

The power of being open to feedback as a leader

Cultivating a culture of feedback within an organization and within your team is one of the most valuable things you can do as a leader. If you are open to feedback, you will:

Nurture high performance 📈

A leader who creates space for their employees to voice their concerns and commits to taking action in response will see increased engagement in their team. When employees feel heard, they are more likely to see the value they bring, increasing their sense of ownership and fuelling them to do their best work. 

Retain your talent 🙂

According to a study by DDI, 57% of employees don’t quit companies, they quit managers. It’s practically a cliche at this point, but some cliches are rooted in truth: employees who feel safe providing feedback to their leaders will voice their stickiest pain points, giving you a chance to support them and make meaningful changes before their frustration leads them out the door. 

Continue to grow 🪴

There’s a reason you hired a team of diverse thinkers, skill sets, and backgrounds: the best ideas don’t always come from the top. If you are open to ideas and feedback from all levels within your team, creative problem solving will be at its peak. And bonus: you will become an effective leader far more quickly if you embrace the perspectives and ideas of those around you. 

So how can you start cultivating a culture of feedback within your team? 

1. Make a point of asking “do you have any feedback for me?” in every 1:1. Simply opening the door to conversation is a great first step. You could also create a new 1:1 agenda template for your team that includes a section dedicated to feedback.
2. Provide access to feedback tools. Sometimes the biggest hurdle to providing feedback is not knowing how to articulate it. Check out the SBI Model as an option.
3. Dedicate time for you and your team to review engagement survey results. Especially if you get team-specific results from your company’s survey, book a dedicated meeting to unpack these with your team, hear their ideas and build an action plan together. 

Formalizing HR with the BC Green Party 

Last year, Beacon had the immense privilege of building the BC Green Party’s first formal HR structure. Following multiple changes in leadership, they were looking to get HR off their back burner and build processes and programs that aligned with their core values.

At Beacon we take on project-based and ongoing work depending on our partners’ needs. In the case of BC Greens, we’ve done a little of both! After conducting an audit of their HR practices and procedures, we delivered the following projects: 

• Reissued employment contracts
• Recruitment process refinement 
• Onboarding and offboarding procedures
• Employee handbook revision
• HRIS management

We also provide ongoing people management support to their leaders including: 

• Employee relations issues
• Terminations
• Ensuring compliance
• Coaching on fairness and good communication

Standing up a formal HR function has increased employee retention over the last year at the BC Green Party. If you’re ready to do the same at your company, we’d love to hear from you!

Beacon @ Tech Talent North

Nicole Davidson and Char Stark had an incredible time connecting with the HR tech community in Vancouver last week! The event was jam-packed with valuable insights, so we’ve compiled the ones that resonated with us most:

At the Maturn session, we dived into the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood bonus, uncovering some eye-opening statistics:

• A third of mothers have contemplated leaving their jobs due to inadequate support from employers. 
• In Canada, women's earnings decrease by 40% during the first five years of parenthood.
• Mothers are 8.2 times less likely to receive a promotion compared to women without children.

Michael Timms' session highlighted the crucial role of accountability in leadership. We are happy to be taking away his three key habits and suggested language for leaders: 

Don't blame: Blame is like a virus in an organization.

• Try saying: “Where did the process break down?” rather than “Who is to blame?” This differentiates strong leaders from weak ones. 

Look in the mirror: Reflect on how we all contribute to errors that arise.

• Try saying: “This is how I think I contributed to the problem.” This increases the feeling of physiological safety within your team and makes it safe for everyone to share their mistakes. 

Engineer a solution: Focus on process improvements, as they often yield the most significant impact.

• Try saying: “What about this [environment/process/situation] kept you from [achieving this goal/doing the right thing/staying focused]?” From there, you can create meaningful solutions that empower your employees.  

There were so many other amazing speakers at TTN this year, and we were fortunate to learn from them. We look forward to seeing and learning from more inspiring HR leaders next year!

And that’s all she wrote! If Beacon can be of any help to your company this Summer, reach out here or DM Nicole Davidson . We love to dig into all things HR and how we can best help your team 💪