About the Survey

In April 2024, Leading Edge surveyed 10,854 employees at 192 Jewish nonprofit organizations in the Spring cycle of our Focused Engagement Survey, which will be offered again in September (2024). (Note: The 200+ professionally-staffed Hillel campuses who participated are counted together as just one of the 192 participating organizations.) 

Of the 192 organizations that participated in this Spring 2024 survey, 155 organizations had also participated in our Spring 2023 Employee Experience Survey, offering the chance for year-over-year comparisons of the same organizations.

Leading Edge has administered employee experience surveys every year since 2016 (with the exception of 2020), making this the 8th time we offered such a survey. In 2024, however, given recent events in Israel and the global Jewish community, many organizations in the Jewish nonprofit sector needed more timely and focused feedback from their teams to understand how best to support them during this critical time. Therefore, the 2024 survey is focused on the engagement questions that our data has shown are the most powerful for driving organizational culture change.

The purpose of the survey is to help each participating organization identify ways to improve employee engagement, retention, and performance. Leading Edge also uses aggregate data from all participating organizations to inform the field about trends over time.

1. Engagement has held steady — for now?

(What is "employee engagement"? Click here for an explainer.)

After October 7th, Jewish organizations scrambled to support humanitarian and security needs in Israel, and also to support their people. Given the dramatic nature of this crisis and the subsequent ongoing upheaval, we expected to see a decline in employee engagement. Culture Amp, our survey platform partner, finds that engagement drops of up to 6% are typical after a crisis. Additionally, recent polling from Gallup finds that employee engagement across industries in the United States has dropped in 2024 to its lowest level since 2013, citing “less role clarity, lower satisfaction with their organizations, and less connection to their companies’ mission or purpose” among many employees.

That’s why it’s notable that between Spring 2023 and Spring 2024, aggregate employee engagement held steady in the Jewish nonprofit sector — not a single point down.

Several engagement metrics not only held steady, but improved:

This resilience may reflect a rallying-together effect related to the sense of crisis. We observed a similar pattern in our first major survey after the onset of COVID-19, in 2021. A rallying effect would make sense in the context of what the Jewish Federations of North America has called “The Surge and The Core.” Following October 7th and the rise in global antisemitism, they report a “surge” of Jews seeking out greater Jewish connections. Meanwhile, a “core” of already-committed Jews also wants more connection and support. The Jewish nonprofit workforce already includes many of these “core” people who may be more motivated than ever to remain in the field. The Jewish nonprofit sector may also have an opportunity to benefit from the “surge” by welcoming new applicants who, in this moment, may be more interested in a Jewish workplace.

We know that engagement — like other key drivers of the work experience — is dynamic. We will no doubt continue to see new ups and downs in engagement as time passes. 

2. Leadership, belonging, and well-being drive engagement.

Each year, Culture Amp uses an algorithm to analyze which survey questions are most strongly correlated with favorable answers to engagement questions in our data. These highly correlated questions are called “engagement drivers,” and they show what key workplace experiences contribute to higher engagement. This year, the top five engagement drivers focus on leadership, belonging, and well-being.

What’s new in top engagement drivers? Leadership communication. The top three engagement drivers, as well as the #5 engagement driver, are the exact same questions, in the same order, as appeared in our 2023 data. The only difference between 2023 and 2024 is in this year’s 4th-strongest engagement driver. In 2024, “Our leaders communicate honestly with employees” rose to the 4th-strongest engagement driver. This is especially noteworthy considering that in 2023, the same question ranked #11.

3. Internal communication is more vital than ever.

Internal communication has emerged as a prominent theme over a number of years of our survey. This year, as discussed in the previous finding, it has increased in importance, with communication from leaders rising to become a top-5 engagement driver.

Communication drives confidence in leadership, which drives employee engagement. As shown in the previous section, confidence in the organization’s leadership is the strongest driver of employee engagement. Our data shows that questions about communication are strongly correlated with confidence in leadership, particularly these ones:

• “Our leaders communicate honestly with employees.”
• “At my organization there is open and honest two-way communication.”

New this year: what we call a “broken telephone effect.” In previous years, middle managers reported the lowest favorability on internal communication. This year, individual contributors (people who don’t supervise anyone else) are least favorable about communication questions. Communications seem to be breaking down in a linear pattern from top executives to individual contributors.

Leadership communication can suffer in “crisis mode.” Since October 7th, many leaders have been operating in a “wartime” or “emergency” mode. That heightened state requires quick decision-making and execution. Leaders have less time and capacity for deliberation and open conversations with their teams or understanding how these decisions were made or may be landing. The speed of action coupled with imperfect information needed during these times often short-circuits leaders’ abilities to give context (the “why”) for new plans. Yet with so much changing, and with the stakes of the moment so high, the potential impact of effective two-way communication between leaders and teams has never been greater.

4. At risk: retention of the youngest, newest, individual contributors.

When it comes to likelihood of leaving their organizations, levels of engagement, and direction of favorability scores year to year, three groups stand out in our analysis as being particularly in need of attention and support: employees who are youngest (under 30), newest (under two years of tenure at the organization) and at the individual contributor level (they don’t supervise anyone). (In both 2023 and the spring 2024 survey cycle, this group represented approximately 20% of all respondents.) 

These employees were more likely to leave last year. When we look at who, among our 2023 survey respondents, left their organizations between Spring 2023 and Spring 2024, we see these patterns:

• Employees under age 30 were 89% more likely than their older counterparts to leave their organization.
• Employees with under two years of tenure were 65% more likely than their longer-tenured counterparts to leave their organization.
• Individual contributors were 33% more likely than employees at other job levels to leave their organization.

Intention to leave is growing in these groups. For all three of these groups (individual contributors under age 30 with less than two years of tenure), desire to stay at their organization for the next two years dropped five percentage points between 2023 and 2024. 

These employees feel less involved in decisions compared to last year. The question with the most notable drop in favorability scores from 2023 to 2024 is the same across all three of these groups: “I am appropriately involved in decisions that affect my work,” which is a question strongly correlated with both engagement and retention. Between 2023 and 2024, favorability scores changed:

• -9% for employees under age 30.
• -5% for employees less than two years on the job.
• -5% for individual contributors.
• -8% for employees in all three groups (individual contributors under age 30 with less than two years of tenure).

These employees feel declining trust that their leaders are communicating honestly. Among the 1,084 employees who are in all three categories (under 30, less than two years’ tenure, individual contributors), agreement dropped five percentage points between last year and this year for “Our leaders communicate honestly with employees.”

Younger generations are stressed beyond our field. Addressing the wider context beyond the Jewish nonprofit sector, Deloitte reports that stress levels are high for Generation Z and Millennials in 2024. We’re interested in watching this trend over time, and we will learn more from the Fall cycle of our survey.

Take Action

“How can we improve?” There is no one formula for improving workplace culture. But we all need a place to start. These Action Inspirations, written by Culture Amp and Leading Edge, with contributions from  LifeLabs Learning and research completed for Leading Edge by Prof. Adia Harvey Wingfield, are a great place to start.

What is data for? Multiple times in the Torah, the Israelites are commanded to take a census, and at these times, the Torah uses a peculiar idiom for this counting — it refers to “lifting the heads” of the people. The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks commented on this idiom:

Data — even 100% accurate data — isn’t inherently good or bad. Data is what we make of it: how we interpret it, how we use it, and what kinds of changes happen as a result. As we interpret this snapshot of one moment in time for our field, the Leading Edge team is reminding ourselves, along with our partners working to improve organizational culture across the field, that the value of this and all data can only be truly known by how well we use it to lift people up.

© 2024. This Leading Edge resource can be shared under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No-Derivatives International License 4.0.

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