An Interview with Bill Coy, Senior Associate of Human Resources Consulting, La Piana Associates, Inc.

Introduction: The Need for a Dedicated Human Resources Function

Many nonprofits do not establish a formal Human Resources (HR) function due to having a small number of staff and/or trying to achieve efficiencies. Rather, organizational staff whose primary responsibilities lie within other areas are responsible for performing HR activities — such as recruitment, hiring, training, performance reviews, design and delivery of compensation and benefits programs, and termination. Most typically, the finance staff, office manager, or other administrative staff performs the HR duties. While this may be the best option in small organizations, at a certain point the size of the organization necessitates a separate, dedicated HR function.

In sum, when an organization reaches a critical mass — a point that varies depending on the specifics of the organization — it is more efficient to have a dedicated HR function.

In this interview, La Piana Associates’ resident HR expert, Bill Coy, discusses the value of HR, and how to design and implement an HR function to assure its effectiveness. Bill uses a real-life example — his experience as HR Director for Yosemite National Institutes (YNI) — to illustrate these concepts. While the situation at YNI involved an organization that had grown to a point necessitating a dedicated HR staff, the concepts that Bill discusses are ones that have relevance to all organizations. Even small organizations without a formal HR function can benefit from applying these concepts to address their HR-related needs.

Challenges Specific to Yosemite National Institutes (YNI)

As an organization, YNI has several features that both contributed to the need for a dedicated HR function and added to the challenges of developing one. These included:

• YNI is composed of multiple sites in disparate locations, each with its own executive director and organizational culture. These sites include a corporate office, with about 12 employees, and three sites, each having 20-40 employees.
• Employees typically live on site, making for a close-knit community.
• Each site has a variety of types or categories of employees, including administrative, kitchen, maintenance, and field education. The latter comprises the majority of each site’s staff. YNI is typically the first job out of college for the field education staff, and tends to be a transitional job. The other staff categories tend to have longer-term employees who are a bit older (in their 30’s and 40’s, as compared to the field education staff who are in their 20’s).

Background

Interviewer: Bill, it would be helpful to set the stage by giving us some background on YNI.

BC: To quote from YNI’s mission statement: “YNI is a private nonprofit environmental organization dedicated to inspiring a personal connection to the natural world and responsible actions to sustain it. YNI achieves this by providing educational adventures in nature’s classroom.”

For more than 30 years, YNI has served youth and adults through a unique variety of environmental education programs at three campuses spanning two states. These include Yosemite Institute (at Yosemite National Park in California), Olympic Park Institute (on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State), and Headlands Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area. On average, these sites now serve a combined 40,000 individuals each year.

A complex organizational structure . . .

BC: For a relatively small organization, YNI is very complex. YNI is the umbrella corporate organization with a full governing board and CEO. As a corporate body, YNI provides strategic direction and integrated support to the campuses. Each campus or institute has its own advisory board and executive director providing direction and leadership. All are part of the same 501(c)(3) organization.

Because the programs are all residential and wilderness-based, the organization has to provide meals, housing, supervision, equipment, and support for visitors representing a range of ages and circumstances. Each campus has to have administrative staff, kitchen / maintenance staff, and instructional staff. The latter — called field education staff — represents about 50% of each site’s staff, with the other categories each making up about 25%. Each staff member has to be very skilled, flexible, and competent; able to work with kids; and willing to work for a relatively low wage. Most staff members live on the campus.

From 1970 to 1998, YNI operated without a formal HR function. An overworked finance department was maintaining basic payroll, benefits, and record keeping. By 1998, the organization had grown from a handful of staff to more than 125 employees. A dedicated, professional HR function was long overdue. That’s when I was hired.

The Need For an HR Department

Interviewer: That’s pretty significant growth! What made YNI decide to hire you? Clearly the finance staff must have been stretched thin, but were there particular issues that led to the decision to design and implement a formal HR function?

BC: The organization had reached a certain critical mass. As each institute was growing and developing, the potential was high for the staffs to identify only with the single campus where they were employed instead of with a larger organizational entity. While the local institutes were critical to building community, and needed to reflect their surroundings, YNI wanted the management and staff of each campus to be part of a larger whole. Providing strong, flexible and competent central HR services was a key to creating that sense of cohesion and identity.

A variety of organizational cultures housed under one corporate umbrella . . .

BC: Across sites, the organizational cultures are pretty different. This is common in organizations with branch offices in multiple locations, and particularly so when the work of the offices is directly tied to the local environment. For example, staff in Yosemite tends to be high energy, adrenaline-driven climbers that hate restraint. Yosemite, as the largest campus, also considers itself the flagship of the organization. Living in the shadow of the rainforest, the typical Olympic Park staff person might be characterized as a vegan who is into “grunge” counterculture. At Marin Headlands, located close to San Francisco, staff is as much urban as rural. They tend to be more refined and desire harmony above all else.

At all sites, staff feels great pride in their individual institute. Each site has is own local executive director who brings to the mix his/her own personality, and skills, strengths, and weaknesses.

The Role of HR

Interviewer: So, how can an HR function foster a sense of a unified organization, while allowing the individual sites enough autonomy so they can be effectively integrated into the local environment?

BC: The work of HR is people, processes, and problem resolution. HR can effectively develop a vision to not only solve the problems of working with people, but also anticipate and prevent them from reoccurring. It was clear that while the finance department at YNI could effectively handle the paperwork functions, it could not address the complex needs presented by this organizational configuration. Nor could finance provide the higher end functions of strategic human resources such as training and development, employee relations, strategic planning, and organizational development. To be effective, the HR function had to be seen as a strategic partner in the work of the institutes.

As the parent organization, YNI really holds the three institutes together in both a corporate and an organizational sense. It had to continue to prove that it added value to the institutes and was not just a subsidized group of bureaucrats. My job was to make sure that HR was an asset to be valued.

HR in a complex organization requires a very special skill set. We had to be firm in areas of policy, safety, quality, and with our core cultural values in order to bring some sense of cohesion and unity. We had to be loose in areas of adaptive functions, unique needs, and expression of those core values in the local scene in order to allow the individual institutes to maintain their individual character. The HR function had to find balance between the negotiables and non-negotiables; sometimes it was a skill simply to know the difference between the two.

Since HR has the core responsibility for risk management, we also had to know the local realities and employee relations issues, as well as the labor laws and insurance requirements in both California and Washington.

The Objectives of the HR Function

Interviewer: In sum, what were the key objectives of YNI’s management in bringing you on board to create and implement the HR function?

BC: YNI needed to balance the management of employee risk with the development of tools, resources, training, and policies that would increase organizational effectiveness. Clearly these were not mutually exclusive tasks, but you could err on either extreme.

Underlying this, my objectives were to create an HR function that would:

• Balance systems needs and staff concerns;
• Protect the institution from liability without treating each employee as a potential litigant;
• Engage and influence staff without exerting overt control;
• Be perceived as a resource, mentor, and educator — rather than a rule-maker and obstacle; and
• Be an ally in the work of management and staff, supporting the attainment of YNI’s mission.

Interviewer: It seems that a key challenge in this situation would be to overcome the distrust that staff often have of HR and to demonstrate the value of the HR function.

BC: Absolutely. Compounding this, the situation at YNI presented some additional specific challenges and issues that needed to be addressed, including:

• Managing “Generation X’ers” who didn’t like to be “managed;”
• Helping people to be good managers when they themselves had not had good models of management;
• Managing staff in a residential situation where you were with them 24/7 — where you not only worked with them, but lived with them;
• Helping staff to see the importance of their work;
• Encouraging creativity while preserving basic environmental education standards;
• Creating a system that ties rewards to performance when the outcomes are intangible (education);
• Creating stability and continuity when the majority of employees are transitional, and where recruiting and training is a constant; and
• Building bonds between different types of workers — from varied backgrounds and with divergent career paths and objectives — who must work cohesively to achieve optimal outcomes for the organization.

It should be noted that a number of these challenges are really quite generic; they arise in many organizations. In order to address them, HR must first create a solid foundation.

Creating an HR department

Interviewer: How did you create this solid foundation for HR at YNI?

The three essential values of HR: credibility, competence, and compassion . . .

BC: It was very important to create a positive experience of the HR function from the start. To achieve this, I focused on demonstrating what I consider to be the three essential values that an effective HR function must embody: credibility, competence, and compassion.

• Credibility is created when promises are kept and trust is built. It is grounded in honesty, openness, and follow-through. HR becomes credible when its communications and actions are in harmony — in other words, by “walking the talk.” Through this, HR builds relationships and builds its reputation. This takes time.
• Competence is doing something well, and exhibiting knowledge and skill. To be effective, HR must demonstrate competence in everything it does.
• Compassion is showing care and concern for the organization and its employees and stakeholders. HR must exhibit unwavering compassion and care in all situations.

This is a high standard to meet. But by doing this one step at a time, HR’s ability to influence management and staff in more difficult and challenging situations is greatly enhanced. When the HR function adopts these values and objectives, the staff will come to view HR as a resource and problem-solver. Without these three basic tenets, the HR function will never achieve its full potential.

Interviewer: This all makes sense, but how did you accomplish it? Can you give us some examples of the steps you took to design and implement YNI’s HR function so as to achieve these objectives and demonstrate these values?

Establishing credibility . . .

BC: I first set out to establish my credibility and, by extension, the credibility of the HR function. Without having the trust of the entire staff, it would be impossible to be fully effective.

To establish credibility, I did something that reaped benefits many times over. Remember, this organization was spread over two states and three locations. My office was located on the Marin County campus, meaning that I still did not know most of the staff at the other sites and the actual issues that they faced. So the first thing I did was to get out and meet all the staff.

As long as you remain nameless and faceless, you can be dismissed. Getting out into the field and spending time with staff — learning about their concerns and getting them to know me — was essential. I had to engage, participate, and understand their work and the working relationship that they had with the organization.

This ranged from meeting with the professional environmental educators to the staff working in the kitchen. In fact, the kitchen staff was often the most disaffected, doing hard and often thankless work. I honestly had little idea what they were dealing with in their work or what their real concerns were. My solution: Spend a weekend as a dishwasher in the kitchen.

Each campus had a full professional culinary staff. The kitchen was a never-ending source of human resource problems. Not unlike other similar workplaces, the kitchen of each institute was characterized by conflicts between staff; worker’s compensation claims; and overtime, staffing, and morale problems.

By spending time in the working environment of the kitchen, I gained a much better perspective about what the real issues were. This also had the added benefit of earning me a great deal of credibility in the eyes of the staff. This may seem like a waste of valuable management time, but it was one of the smartest moves that I made at the beginning of the process.

Interviewer: We often hear about “management by walking around.” What you did was to take this to the next level, putting yourself in the shoes of the staff. It sounds like it was an invaluable experience both from the standpoint of gaining the trust of staff, and also from the perspective of your being able to understand the issues first-hand.

Demonstrating competence . . .

Interviewer: How did you go about establishing the competence of HR?

BC: First of all, you have to know your stuff. You have to be an excellent technician in the science of HR management. But you also have to know the art of HR management. This means that beyond law, rules and regulations, and policy and procedures, you know how to interpret, communicate, listen, and speak the language that really works in your context.

A good HR function provides effective and appropriate resources to both management and staff. I had to understand the context and the culture of each institute to develop tools that made sense. No resource of value is ever deployed in a vacuum. Communication and training had to fit the culture and individual expectations without compromising the real core and integrity of the information. This was a real challenge, but became easier after several victories and quick wins.

For example, the benefits packages offered at each campus were never communicated to the employees in an appropriate manner, so there was unnecessary frustration and a sense of having an inadequate program, which translated to the employees feeling that they were not valued. Many of them were right out of college, so this was their first job and they simply did not know a great deal about insurance and benefits.

I did not have to revamp the benefits program; I just had to create communication vehicles that were user-friendly and easily accessible. I developed a four-page handout that outlined all the benefits, and another FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) document about our benefits program. That solved a lot of problems.

Interviewer: So, by improving communications, you demonstrated the competence of the HR function and the value that it provides. We often hear of the importance of communicating these “quick wins.” Did you do any sort of “PR” for the HR function so that everyone in the organization would be aware of these victories and would see the value of HR?

BC: Actually, we did not. In fact, it would have been against the group norms to put forward too much of your own accomplishments. You really had to believe that the good work would spread and that the word would get out. It was a small organization, 120 employees, so the word did get around that we were doing some great things. And feedback mechanisms had to be well developed. I made sure that each event, resource, and meeting was evaluated. This was critical in knowing what I was doing right, and what I had to change.

Showing compassion . . .

Interviewer: Tell us about that third “C,” compassion. How did you demonstrate this?

BC: You do this by helping management and staff in those areas that they most value and in which they seek assistance. Everyone in the organization is your client, so the opportunities for compassionate service and building credibility are constantly present. You develop both sympathy and empathy for the perceptions and needs of your clients.

Showing compassion means listening more than speaking. It means becoming more receptive to the needs that managers express to each other and directly to HR. The HR priority list needs to be constantly reformed and reframed based upon what the management and staff articulate as important to them. What HR views as a priority or a preference is not valuable if management and staff do not see it as a priority.

For example, I was always more interested in the higher end organizational development issues than in benefits administration. But dealing with someone’s dental coverage was really a priority to them, so it had to be something I saw as valuable. Additionally, training was something I did well, and it was always well received — but I had to know that the timing, content, and placement of the training worked for the staff, or everyone would end up being frustrated.

A “customer service” orientation . . .

Interviewer: You’ve mentioned three key components of establishing an effective HR function — credibility, competence, and compassion — and you’ve given some great examples of how HR can do this. If you had to sum up in one sentence, what advice do you think is most important to maximizing the effectiveness of the HR function?

BC: If I had to sum it up in one sentence, that would be: “I am from HR and I am here to help you.” If HR professionals could develop a reputation of customer service, it would be impossible for management or staff to dismiss HR as obstacle creators or deskbound paper pushers.

By creating a positive experience of the HR function, the ability of HR to influence management and staff in more difficult and challenging situations is greatly enhanced. Staff will look to HR as a resource and problem solver if HR adopts this perception of itself first.

Positive Outcomes

Interviewer: Building on this foundation of credibility, competence, and compassion, what outcomes did YNI experience?

BC: Over the course of two years, YNI created a very successful HR department. The benchmarks for success were a reputation of service, managers checking in with employee relationship issues, employees dropping by to ask questions and air concerns, an increase in requests for training, and finally a request by the management team for an even more strategically evolved and involved HR department.

The decision to create an HR function had been based on the desire to bring professionalism and competence to the “people issues.” I believe we accomplished this. HR became a true strategic partner in the work of YNI. We were able to identify trends in areas such as compensation, benefits, management development, and employee relations. We analyzed these in the context of YNI, and provided unified solutions that made the work of the institutes more effective. HR helped YNI to have the confidence that it was doing the right thing in any given situation — that it was not just reacting to individual circumstances, but that thought, intention, and resources were brought to bear on all situations. People became more accountable for their work. They saw that what they did mattered, and that they were part of something bigger than their own institute. As a result, the mission of YNI was advanced.

A case in point . . .

BC: An example of how HR at YNI demonstrated a forward-thinking presence — one that reflected its credibility, competence, and compassion — comes in a sad context. This case shows the reality of the tremendously important issues that a strategic HR function must address.

I had seen the general need for an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) to offer counseling and resources related to life issues for employees, so in July of 2000, I negotiated a contract with an EAP provider. The very next month, an employee was murdered at Yosemite. The EAP provided extraordinary support to us, helping the staff at all three institutes to deal with their grief and to support each other through this very painful experience.

While this is a tragic example, it demonstrates the important role that HR plays in keeping the organization focused on, and taking care of, its greatest asset: the people.