Elise Johansen

What does it mean to be a good employer in 2022? If you’re hiring people, you may be asking yourself that question on a near daily basis these days, and you may find yourself grappling with an answer that doesn’t totally align with your previous or even current employment practices.

It’s nearly impossible to always have philosophy and reality in total alignment. At Safe Voices we have a long history of paying consistent attention to crafting employment policies, salaries and benefits that are ethical and caretaking, that retain staff and that allow our nonprofit business to thrive. In the face of that work, there is a truth I continually come back to: person-first employment practices and the priority of making an organization a good place to work has always improved the organizations I’ve led in immeasurable (and measurable) ways.

The work that our staff does is challenging, complex and many-faceted. We provide robust training, ongoing supervision and coaching, and we encourage staff to find ways to stay engaged and healthy while doing hard, vital work. As part of our organizational values, we review and adjust our salary ranges every two years to ensure we are competitive or leading with all salaries.

Recently, due to a rapidly changing world, we found ourselves grappling with the difficult truth that many of our salary ranges no longer aligned with our philosophies. In the face of a pandemic, inflation and a tightened labor market, our compensation had quickly fallen behind. Therefore, we did a formal salary study and subsequent revision to realign our compensation with our values and with the lived reality our staff were facing economically.

What did that look like for us? In short, it meant that the leadership at Safe Voices committed to an additional $180,000 a year in order to bring our pay rates up to a livable, ethical range.

While that kind of shift is never easy to put into practice (numbers are numbers, after all, and the money must come from somewhere), it was an easy decision. In fact, we never had a conversation about whether to raise our pay ranges. The conversation was always about how to get it done.

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This fact itself is a byproduct of person-first policies. When the norm is “How do we make the right thing work?” — whatever the “right thing” is — what results is a workplace where adaptability, innovation, and growth become the norm. Safe Voices is better able to respond to crises, large and small, because the organization models this thinking at all levels.

Do these policies mean we’ve avoided the employment challenges facing Maine right now? Certainly not, but it has helped us adapt. We’re reinvesting in training people in whom we see potential and skill, rather than relying on “relevant experience” as the primary driver in hiring. We’re helping people who may have been in their positions at Safe Voices for a couple years look at what might be next in their career with us, rather than waiting for them to leave for a step up at another job.

Sometimes, the step toward another job still happens, of course, and it should be celebrated. Staff often hear me say, “if you leave Safe Voices, I want it to be because you are happy.” For me, the failure isn’t in losing employees — it’s in losing them to feelings of underappreciation or unhappiness. If they’re leaving for an exciting new opportunity, we celebrate that (and them!) because that, too, is a person-first employment practice.

Permanent remote work, hybrid options, and flexible work schedules are a few of the things we have embraced which have allowed us to retain employees who otherwise might have had to leave. Our staff have demonstrated immense flexibility, and we think this is because they see this as a norm and value held and modeled the organization as a whole.

When a shift needs to be covered, people adapt and jump in. When call volumes on our helpline are high, staff pause other work and take a phone call, even if it’s not their day to be on the helpline. These person-first practices reinforce that we are all, indeed, in this together. That’s something that sounds like it should be the norm in workplaces, but we hear time and again that actual practices in many workplaces don’t bear that out. Our staff tell us they feel valued, appreciated and happy in their role and maybe didn’t feel this way in previous workplaces.

If the global pandemic has done anything for us, collectively, it’s made people realize they can leave something that isn’t working for them, even if that’s a huge move. Employers, I think, have been slow to realize that this is the reality we now hire and work in.

Ultimately, our employees are what we do. They are how we do it. All of the work Safe Voices does around serving survivors of domestic abuse, sex trafficking and sexual exploitation is work that happens because of our people, and therefore they are everything.

Crafting our policies to meet their needs feels good because, yes, it aligns with our philosophy of how people should be treated. But more and more we are seeing that these policies are genuinely, and in major ways, setting Safe Voices and those we serve up for success.

Elise Johansen is executive director of Safe Voices, which serves Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties. She is based out of the organization’s Lewiston resource center.


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