Cut Your HR Time!

Human resources management is often one of the biggest surprises for executive directors. In the non-profit world, we usually come into our roles because of expertise in our sectors. That expertise can be strong and with decades of practical experience but very few of us also bring training in human resources management. After our first year on the job, it feels like we are spending far more hours handling everything related to HR and very little time delivering the strategic goals for the organization.   

Executive directors feel caught in the middle.

Spending months hiring and onboarding a new employee, only to lose them to a job that pays better, has better benefits, and less stress, is, to say the least, frustrating. As the executive director, we feel caught in the middle. We know our budget limitations to offer higher wages. We often go to battle with our boards to get even the most basic perks and benefits. We feel like we can never take our own vacation time because we are always hiring, training, or worrying about doing both.

Here are the five methods I work into operations to spend less time on human resources management while keeping employees as long as possible and as happy as possible. The list starts with the easiest/least expensive and builds to more complicated solutions.

Pay attention to workload challenges.

The easiest win for any executive director to avoid spending excessive hours on human resources management is to make sure you understand what causes stress for your team. Usually this is built into check-ins and check-outs for staff or team meetings. Make it a regular habit to find out how everyone is progressing on their assigned work plans and if something is causing your team to feel stressed, make corrections right on the spot.

An employee who keeps missing goals might have too big of a workload that needs to be rebalanced. Rebalancing heavy workloads is a great conversation to have with the whole team. It demonstrates that you don’t want your team to work with unreasonable expectations. It also gives you, as the executive director, the opportunity to look to other members of the team for creative solutions.

If staff/team meetings are few and far between, an execute director can set up their own casual check-in system to find out how the team is feeling. Sometimes, the information you are looking for will take a bit of reading between the lines. You can start to listen for common, or repeated, themes that need attention. This can be as simple as better scheduling or as complex as having too many strategic priorities. Correct the problem and you can spend less time on human resources management.

Pay attention to information coming in about home life.

An executive director needs to proceed with caution when inquiring about an employee’s personal life. Not only is it none of our business what happens with an employee's time away from work, most provinces/states have laws that protect an employee’s right to privacy. Respect that right but also listen for what an employee does share.

For example, an employee might express sadness that they never get to see their kid’s baseball practice because it starts 30 minutes before the workday ends. Imagine the positive impact if you had a private conversation with the employee about changing their workday hours to start, and end, a little earlier on practice days. Suddenly, your employee is happily attending an important family event. That feeling builds a better bond with the organization that might reduce employee turnover which means you can spend less time on human resources management.

Build up employee perks.

Look at the perks your organization is offering right now and try to make them more valued by your team. For example, do you offer sick days? If so, can the employee use the perk when there is a need to take care of sick kids, aging parents, or even for their own mental health? Talk to your team and ask them which perks and benefits they would love to change. Sometimes, adding a little more flexibility to an existing perk will make employees feel a little more understood and more willing to stay in the job a little longer. For you, that’s less time spent on human resources management.

If your employee benefits and perks list is a little short, its time to make some changes. You can click here to read some of my suggested perks. We all know the usual reaction when we take a list of perks to the board for approval. There are often snide comments about how a board member doesn’t get that perk at their own job, so why should someone else get it. If board members can’t embrace adding a long list of perks, don’t give them a long list. Instead, make it a scheduled practice in your board report to request the addition of one or two new perks every six months.

If the board still won’t approve the addition of new perks, then when an employee does leave for a better job, report every single benefit you don’t offer that the departing employee will be getting in their new position. You can ask the departing employee to provide you with a list. You can also report to the board, the cost of hiring and onboarding a new employee, including your time spent on the task. Yes, this is a bit of a guilt trip to dump on your board, but it is important to be direct with your board about the impact of their decisions on the organization and your workload with human resources management.

Set an annual wage increase schedule.

Increasing employee wages is one of the most welcome methods to keep employees happy and prevent you from needing to hire someone new every year. A little research goes a long way. Find out the wages for comparable jobs in the for-profit sector. Develop an annual practice that will increase wages automatically each operating year and present it to your board for approval at a meeting with ample time set aside to discuss.

Not only will the scheduled increases help employees feel they are being paid industry-standard wages, but it will reduce the number of meetings you spend trying to convince the board to make changes year to year. Make the pitch to the board once, get the approval once, and move on. From there, the changes simply become an administrative task and not an ongoing battle, which reduces the amount of time an executive director spends on human resources management.

Keep an eye on how many programs and services are being offered.

The final method to spend less time on HR management is to ensure your programs and services line-up has not grown bigger than the team can handle. Let’s face it, non-profits do good work, and it can be exciting to see the tangible difference we are making. It is also very easy, in all the enthusiasm, to keep adding programs, applying for new grants, and doing more, and more, and more. Sometimes you need to step back and look at the limitations of your team and your budget.

Strategic and operations planning are the best time to conduct a programs and services audit and really make sure you are not leading your team into burnout and turnover. It is OK to run a non-profit that operates within the limitations of the staff team. It is equally OK to protect the amount of time you spend on human resources management.

Make it easy.

Human resources management is a sneaky task that can quickly get out of hand. While necessary, all those hours can add up and interfere with our ability to build a non-profit that meets its strategic priorities. That can turn an executive director into more of an administrative assistant and less of a leader in their sector.

Put systems and practices in place to make as many components of human resources management as easy as possible while still being valued by the employee team.

Your turn.

Your turn. How many hours do you spend on human resources each week? How does that compare to the number of hours you spend leading your organization to reach its strategic vision? I want to know! Please use the form on the side of the page to let me know, ..or send me an email, ..or message me on socials.

-Christie

…

Hi, I'm Christie. I help executive directors develop the systems and processes needed to run a non-profit.

I learned early in my career, there is no non-profit school. Browsing the internet for resources from big-city experts doesn’t provide practical solutions to balance the budget, write a work plan, or conduct an employee evaluation. Leadership development tips don’t really resonate when you are also taking out the recycling and cleaning the washroom.

I created ChristieSaas.com so non-profit leaders never need to wonder how to do the job – no matter how big or small that job is.

I have been the executive director of small-team, small-budget, non-profits for 20+ years. My experience isn’t theory. It is the real, operational, and practical solutions I use every day.

I love my work, and I want to help you love yours too.

© Christie Saas 2025 All Rights Reserved

…

Want to learn more?

Start with one of my free resources.

FREE Guides