Let’s face it: The United Way of Rhode Island probably starts out with a slight advantage at making itself a great place to work.
Job applicants know that this is an organization dedicated to improving the lives of people in need, so they are likely to be people who care about the well-being of others.
“We start from a place where people bring a passion for our mission when they walk in the door,” says Anthony Maione, the president and CEO.
Second, in this compact organization of 50 workers, people are tuned in to one another’s achievements, shortcomings and needs. “We have people who care about each other as well as the mission,” Maione says.
Still, caring doesn’t make a happy workplace a slam-dunk. The organization also takes an approach that has proven successful almost everywhere: It encourages employees to think on their own and gives them the power to act on their ideas.
“We create flexible boundaries so that people can grow and learn,” Maione says.
In a departure from the past, Maione says, the United Way operation also is encouraging more cross-fertilization among workers. Historically, he says, UWRI tended to be compartmentalized by function. The fundraising arm brought in the money and the program development arm spent it. Now, Maione says, everyone works “across silos” with a fresh mindset that he calls “a freeing experience.”
Employees’ goodwill and flexibility have been summoned to the front lines regularly in the past two and a half years, since the organization has significantly revised its mission from raising and distributing money to the more complicated job of assessing needs and advocating for changes in public policy.
“We are going in a new direction that is not always comfortable,” Maione says.
For example, in 2005 UWRI joined The Rhode Island Foundation and HousingWorks RI to help push through the General Assembly the first-ever funding for supportive housing. Following that, United Way helped HousingWorks lobby for a bond issue for affordable housing on the 2006 ballot. United Way also joined others to push for changes in election laws that prohibited organizations from working together on ballot campaigns.
To help workers deal with the new focus of the organization, United Way gathered a variety of people from across the organization to help the process of internal change.
The bumpy road of adjustment also has gotten some help from required quarterly meetings between every employee and his or her manager to discuss what Maione calls the employee’s hits and misses. He says the meetings are a time “to celebrate the employee’s good work and to talk about how we can turn a swing and a miss into a home run.” The quarterly meetings, Maione says, have given people a chance to “connect to the mission” of the organization.
Beyond the big talk about mission change and policy advocacy, being a 2007 Best Place To Work comes down to the point where employees’ elbows intersect during the daily grind. Evelyn Thomason, a human resources assistant, says people at United Way want to know that their work has value for the community. “Everyone here knows how their role matters and how their role makes a difference,” she says.
