Whether you’re running a small team of mission-driven individuals or a massive nonprofit with goals and projects that stretch decades into the future, it’s important that you ensure that your staff is supported by skilled human resources (HR) professionals. It can be tempting to reduce this to an “ideal” number or a ratio of HR team members to employees, but the importance of HR to nonprofit organizations means it’s best that you consider your HR team, their collective skills, and your organizational needs carefully.
A cursory search online around the topic of HR team size will inevitably lead to a “calculator” or some research-supported ideal ratio, often around one dedicated HR professional per every 100 employees. However, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll probably find just as many experts recommending a more nuanced approach for nonprofits, as they often have organizational considerations, staff needs, compliance obligations, and hiring issues that require a more significant investment.
Additionally, many of the studies and statistics simply research and document the average amount of HR professionals relative to organizational size, but do not look into other important issues, like whether this average is functioning well, what the turnover is like for HR professionals at these organizations, and whether their staff feels adequately supported.
There is no “ideal” number of HR professionals that applies to every organization. Instead of looking for one, it’s better to explore exactly what you need HR to do, and whether team size is a limitation:
What are your biggest HR challenges?
While this may seem like an obvious starting point, many organizations avoid this question, building an HR team because they think it’s “the right time” to do so rather than identifying why they need one. You should speak to stakeholders, including your existing HR team if you have one, your employees, managers, and even contractors who interact with HR and get a sense of what your organization needs.
Once you have a clearly defined list of three to five challenges, you can draw on that list to set specific goals and benchmarks, and help your HR team come up with solutions as well as metrics to measure the effectiveness of those solutions. This is a critical step because it allows you to explore lots of different approaches and solutions, many of which won’t involve hiring new HR professionals. Here are some common HR issues that may indicate a need for more HR team members:
Difficulty recruiting
Nonprofits in particular can struggle to recruit individuals who are interested in long-term mission-driven work. Because they are often less well-resourced than for-profit organizations, they can struggle to hit recruitment targets or build up a large pool of quality candidates. You could also find that your HR team members are valuable team members in other respects, but lack experience and training in recruitment best practices.
Depending on the issues identified, you may seek out additional training for your HR staff or a trial program of online recruiting platforms. If this is a major issue, you can also consider augmenting your HR team with a recruiter who is dedicated to creating and refreshing a pool of qualified job candidates, and on measuring the success of your team building efforts.
Insufficient staff support
The last few years have been challenging for organizations of all sizes, and HR teams in particular have seen an unusual amount of turnover, burnout, and retention issues. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which you will likely encounter as you dig into your HR team’s performance and issues. What makes this especially important is that challenges in HR can lead directly to challenges across the organization — overworked HR departments can provide only limited support to other teams, creating a broad impact.
The silver lining is that this issue can be easy to detect, as you’ll likely hear about issues across the organization as well as from your HR team directly. Burnout isn’t always a product of understaffing, but it is a common culprit, which is why many are starting to push back on one-size-fits-all ratios for HR team size. Addressing burnout can mean hiring more specialized staff to handle time-consuming functions, investing in training for your existing staff, and onboarding new platforms and solutions to automate repetitive tasks as much as possible.
Employee retention issues
An issue of growing importance is employee retention. While retention issues have their roots in every aspect of an organization, HR plays a particularly central role, as they are the team which has to recruit to backfill lost employees, conduct offboarding and onboarding, manage access control, benefits, and payroll, and many other components of increased staff churn. While this issue’s persistence has led many organizations to come up with novel solutions, it remains a significant issue at nonprofits of all sizes.
Retention issues on other teams quite often lead to lower productivity in HR, as a larger and larger percentage of their time and budget is spent trying to “staunch the bleeding” by constantly recruiting. The high costs of constantly recruiting do not just show up in terms of money spent, but in the opportunity cost, as it can prevent HR from making significant headway with other programs. Depending on the effects, this can actually add to the issue, as the lack of support from HR leads to more turnover, and so on.
Addressing this requires you to partner with HR to uncover the underlying issues leading to this churn, whether they be remuneration, benefits, schedule flexibility, overwork, mismanagement or any other issues. HR can be an asset, helping you to gather this information and analyze it, but be careful this effort does not lead to overwork. This is another situation where you’d do well to consider a dedicated recruiting and retention expert.
About Us
For more than 40 years, 501(c) Services has been a leader in offering solutions for unemployment costs, claims management, and HR support to nonprofit organizations. Two of our most popular programs are the 501(c) Agencies Trust and 501(c) HR Services. We understand the importance of compliance and accuracy and are committed to providing our clients with customized plans that fit their needs.
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