World Vision Australia is the country’s largest charitable group with 400,000 supporters every year, and in order to effectively communicate with them, staff need to implicitly understand how World Vision goes about making a tangible difference through donations, according to its head of HR.
Over the past three years, World Vision Australia’s director of people & culture, Nathan Callaghan, said there has been a strong focus on internal communications, and Yammer is employed internally to help staff share and communicate messages and stories to help engage supporters in a meaningful way.
Leadership communication also supports this process, and Callaghan said this plays an important role in helping employees understand how their day-to-day tasks are having an overall impact on organisational goals in order to feel like they are having an impact.
He added that transparency and accountability are also important to how World Vision communicates with supporters (the charity has won PwC’s Transparency Awards for quality and transparency of reporting in the not-for-profit sector twice over the past five years).
“I think supporters appreciate that honesty, and that is a key to our success in the long term,” he said.
There is a strong focus at leadership and broader organisational levels on the key behaviours required to help World Vision achieve its strategy, and Callaghan said the three key ones are courage, action and respect.
“These are about making sure that we are trying new things, having that courage to test and learn, and then taking action in a meaningful way with a deliberate focus on specific outcomes we’re working towards,” he said.
“And this all needs to be done in a way that is respectful of supporters and communities to understand their needs, so we are making a difference together.
“And this all starts with our leadership. This isn’t something that HR puts together; we help empower our leaders to understand what these behaviours mean, and demonstrate how they look in our organisation.”
The not-for-profit sector is a competitive one, and in Australia, World Vision leads the way in terms of share of donations.
A recent Australian National University Development Policy Centre report, for example, found that World Vision received 30 to 40 per cent of all money donated by people between 2000 and 2010 (at times nearly equal to the total share of the next 14 largest non-government organisations combined).
World Vision Australia does attract some very high calibre people, according to Callaghan, who said one of his key goals is to align the passion of this talent with the organisation’s goals.
To this end, an employee engagement survey is conducted to track staff satisfaction (employee engagement improved from 66 per cent in FY12 to 70 per cent in FY13) with a view to developing initiatives to improving engagement and retention (voluntary staff turnover also fell from 19 per cent in FY12 to 16 per cent in FY13, while 65 per cent of vacancies were filled by existing staff in FY14).
World Vision also sets individual performance and development plans, conducts employee surveys and polls on hot topics, and ensures employees have regular one-on-one discussions with their manager to proactively manage positive employee and manager relationships.
5 steps: how HR leaders and CEOs can work together
Nathan Callaghan, director of people & culture for World Vision Australia, shared his perspective on how HR leaders can best work with CEOs to achieve organisational outcomes.
- 1. HR leaders need to know how the business is performing and what the external market challenges are. If HR leaders can connect the conversation between what’s going on “out there” to what’s going on “in here”, you will be in a far better position to support the CEO.
- 2. Understand your CEO’s vision for their leadership team. Working on and in this leadership team then becomes the challenge. However, when done well, this has a large influence on organisational culture.
- 3. Know your organisation’s talent and anticipate the CEO’s future needs for the organisation. We have all heard about the importance of having the right people in the right place at the right time. Knowing your talent and engaging your CEO in this information is critical.
- 4. Proximity: it sounds very basic, but it’s helpful to understand the movements of your CEO and the interactions they have through the week. You can then leverage these interactions, enable your CEO to be efficient and create opportunities for your CEO to deliver symbolic actions that impact culture.
- 5. Build trust through robust debate and discussion. CEOs and HR leaders need to be able to openly and honestly share their points of view. It’s the wins and losses that build trust over time.
For the full story and interview with Callaghan together with World Vision Australia CEO, Tim Costello, see the current issue of Inside HR magazine. Image source: Nicole Corbett
