Poor culture, disastrous HR, unfair hiring and incident handling - Associate Director Americares Employee Review

Thank you for sharing your perspective on the organization, we are committed to thinking through every piece of feedback we receive. At Americares, we’re very focused on building out systems that create transparency for staff, and build equity into the fabric of how we do things. In the last two years, some examples of what we have implemented include: Structured salary scales for every team at the organization, with defined ranges for each level role; Salary transparency procedures, including sharing with every staff member the bottom, midpoint and top of their salary range, as well as the midpoint of the level above them; Posting salary ranges on all job descriptions, and explaining our commitment to fair salary ranges to candidates; Building out clear expectations of staff at each level of the organization and shifting performance reviews to assess all staff against these competencies (examples include everything from ownership and results in their work, to communication, teamwork and conflict resolution, to management and strategy for team leaders); Adding anonymous 360 feedback to our performance review process, as well as direct-report to manager feedback, allowing for a more holistic and objective evaluation; Doubling our salary increase pool, allowing us to provide merit increases to staff; Rolling out trainings on feedback, manager evaluations, and DEI; Adding a guaranteed professional development budget for every single staff member, based on their tenure at Americares. We also post all roles internally, ensuring staff have the ability to grow within the organization, and since 2022, 23% of our Headquarters/U.S./Puerto Rico staff had promotions or applied for higher level roles and are now in those roles. We are always looking to balance the amount we roll out to the team with the desire to have the best systems in place. Next on our roadmap is management training, including tools and experiential learning for all people managers at the organization. We’re very excited about it! We also always protect the confidentiality of individuals who may be giving or receiving difficult feedback, and are proud to give this respect to staff, even when it means we cannot give complete visibility to all. Last, we’re proud to share that staff have many vehicles for requesting support when difficult situations arise. In addition to direct managers and the support our People and Talent team provides, we have 3 separate anonymous mechanisms where staff can reach out, depending on the situation at hand, and also collect engagement data through weekly surveys. We’re excited to continue to grow and build systems that have equity at their core.