Major survey will improve the lot of communal workers

Originally published in the Jewish Chronicle on 15 June 2023.

The UK has been through a turbulent few years, with major national and global events impacting and altering the landscape of work and employment, and our community has been no less affected than any other.

The organisations within the UK community are core to providing stability, innovation and services to many who are weathering their own storms during these particularly difficult times.  At the Jewish Leadership Council, we know that there are thousands of employees across these organisations working tirelessly to ensure we cannot just survive, but thrive.  We have heard and understood that recruitment into the UK Jewish Charity Sector is challenging – as it is in the wider sector.  With a shortfall of over 330,000 people in the UK jobs market – recruitment is a real and present challenge.  We know our organisations want to attract and retain the best individuals and teams to continue to see our organisations flourish and contribute to the wider landscape.  We are focused on providing support to ensure community organisations can excel and be places that offer development to ambitious leaders – providing pathways to progress and succeed.  

That is why it is a timely moment that the Jewish Leadership Council and US Not-for-profit Leading Edge have come together to launch the first ever Jewish Community Professionals Employee Experience Survey outside of the United States.  This ground-breaking international collaboration was launched in a week that over 150 staff from across the community came together in London for the JLC-Lead Jewish Community Professionals’ conference at JW3.  This fourth annual conference was the biggest yet, more than double the size of 2022 and has a second northern conference still to be held in Manchester later in June.  These conferences represent the largest collective gathering of UK Jewish Community Professionals and are a real celebration of the growing strength and commitment of those working in the sector.

US based Leading Edge are the leader in improving the workplace, culture, experience and leadership in the US Jewish community. Since 2016, more than 52,000 employees working at nearly 500 organisations have received the survey.

In coming together in this unique collaboration, we aim to bring the skill and experience they have gained from their work in this field, from the US to the UK.  This pilot survey will give the JLC the opportunity to work with community organisations to understand, analyse and consider key areas of strength as well as growth within organisations as well as an important overview across the sector.  This will then support the strategic planning, provision and offering to support the further development of the professional landscape in the UK Jewish Charity Sector.

In carrying out the survey we hope to understand more about key engagement factors for staff.  Questions will focus on a number of areas exploring various aspects of employee experience, including what they value from their workplaces, what motivates them to stay and how they feel about their prospective development in their role and organisation.   The results of the survey will be available for participating organisations to benchmark their data against equivalent UK-wide results by sector and comparable to counterparts in the United States.  Responses will be confidential (even to the JLC) and only aggregated data will be published.  No organisational results will be published unless the individual organisation chooses to do so.

One of the JLCs key strategic objectives over the coming three years is to identify barriers and motivations to professional leadership in the community and this survey will support in more depth our understanding of this.  We know from talking to JLC member organisations that in these times of challenge for recruitment and retention, a key ambition is to enhance the culture of value and appreciation of our professional staff and teams who are the workforce that keep our wonderful community going.  This has been echoed in recent research and reports carried out across the community in both the Education and Leadership sectors.

We see this opportunity as a valuable tool to further enhance, support and transform our communal workplaces.  If we want to attract the best people and equip our organisations with excellent staff we need to understand what motivates, encourages and supports them to develop and thrive into the future.

To find out more or sign up for the survey visit www.thejlc.org/leading-edge

Michelle Janes, Co-CEO of the JLC