Leading Edge defines “employee engagement” as being motivated to do your best work, proud to work at your organization, likely to stay working there, and likely to recommend your organization to others as a place to work.

Why does employee engagement matter?

Simply put: If you want your organization to succeed, you need your people engaged and thriving.

Employee engagement has a proven relationship with organizational success. Among the vast body of research supporting this conclusion is Gallup’s The Relationship Between Engagement at Work and Organizational Outcomes, a meta-analysis of 456 research studies covering more than 2.7 million employees at 276 organizations in 54 industries in 96 countries. Gallup found that employee engagement is significantly correlated with, among many other metrics:

• Productivity
• Profitability
• Employee turnover
• Safety incidents (accidents)
• Absenteeism
• Product quality
• and more.

Everyone loves engagement. But definitions vary.

• Gallup bases employee engagement on 12 questions, some of which are like Leading Edge's definition, and others of which are different and quite specific (e.g., "I have a best friend at work".)
• Culture Amp (our survey platform partner) considers engagement to have five components: pride, recommendation, present commitment, future commitment, and motivation.
• Qualtrics defines engagement as "how much an employee is committed to helping their organization achieve its goals."
• Many more organizations have many more definitions.

Where definitions of engagement differ most is in where they draw the line between what's "engagement" vs. what's a part of the employee’s experience that might contribute to engagement, with some (like Gallup) drawing that line broadly and others (like Qualtrics) more narrowly.

What all definitions of engagement share is the goal of capturing the magical quality of being really “into” your job and likely to do your best work for your organization.

How engaged are employees in the Jewish nonprofit sector?

Our most recent data on engagement across the Jewish nonprofit sector comes from May 2023.

Jewish nonprofit employee engagement is at 75%. That’s good, but it could be better. Looking at the individual questions with which Leading Edge measures employee engagement shows how:

Employees at Jewish nonprofits are overwhelmingly proud to work for their organizations. But the other three engagement questions show significant room for growth.

It’s particularly concerning that the Jewish nonprofit workers we surveyed are less likely than the average American worker to say that they would recommend their organization as a great place to work. This question, akin to the “Net Promoter Score,” is a key barometer for any organization, and for this question, our sector’s favorability score is 11 percentage points below Culture Amp’s U.S. benchmark.

How has Jewish nonprofit engagement changed over time?

As of our latest data — which was before the world changed on October 7th, 2023 — Jewish nonprofit engagement was recovering after a field-wide dip.

More Jewish nonprofit employees were feeling engaged in May 2023 than they were in 2022, returning to the level reported in 2021. While both the dip and the recovery were small (just five percentage points each), combining it with what we have heard from the field, we see this as indicating both a real struggle and a real recovery.

Why the dip? In 2021 — the first Employee Experience Survey since the onset of COVID-19 — we were surprised to see employee engagement actually rise (slightly) relative to 2019. Perhaps, in responding to a crisis, organizations found a renewed sense of purpose and mutual support. When engagement then dipped in 2022, we interpreted this as organizations losing that sense of extraordinary solidarity and settling into a “new normal,” as well as reflecting the “Great Resignation” then underway.

Why the recovery? In 2023, as those dynamics recede and levels of job switching decreased, the recovery in employee engagement in Jewish nonprofits may represent the success of many organizations and workers in finding good matches with each other during the reshuffle of a strong labor market. People may also have been more settled into new ways of working. This recovery within our sector also dovetails with the wider economy; Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2023 report found that engagement for workers worldwide reached a record high in 2023.

It is worth reiterating that the October 7th and its aftermath have changed the field dramatically, and none of this information should be taken as up to date.

Support employees through the "engagement crater."

Charting employee engagement across tenure at organizations, we see a striking pattern. (This pattern has recurred over multiple years of our surveys.) At each end of the tenure spectrum, brand new employees (under one year of tenure) and employees who have been at the organization for more than 10 years are both more likely to be engaged than employees with between one and 10 years of tenure:

Explaining the engagement crater. Brand-new employees often enjoy the novelty of a new workplace. They know all the positive things about the organization that led them to join it, without yet knowing the drawbacks. Engagement drops during the first few years, as the “honeymoon” ends and the employee gets to know the organization’s flaws. At the same time, as new employees are seen less as “exciting new faces” around the organization, managers and colleagues may not give them as much encouragement and validation as they did when they were brand new. Employees may begin to feel taken for granted. As more time goes by, those less engaged are more likely to find opportunities to leave. Those who were more engaged all along are more likely to stay and may also develop and refine strategies to make the best of the unique quirks and challenges in their organization.

How to address the “engagement crater?” Support midtenure and new employees. Clearly, mid-tenure employees could use more support from their organizations. At the same time, newer employees represent key opportunities to break the “engagement crater” pattern in the next “generation” of employees. Leaders and managers can make a special effort to speak with and listen to new employees before their engagement crater begins, and to proactively, explicitly prepare them to navigate challenges as the “honeymoon” period of their employment wears off. Discussing this pattern openly and setting expectations of honest, respectful communication about addressing challenges might set up both employees and their managers to prevent the engagement crater—or, at least, make it a bit less steep.