Case Study: Hour Children
Performance Management
The Project
Hour Children needed a Performance Management Service Grant to improve morale and engage employees in service of their mission to provide compassionate and loving care to children of incarcerated women.
The Need
Founded in 1995 by the Sisters of St. Joseph, Hour Children is a residential center for the children of imprisoned mothers. Having experienced dramatic growth in recent years, Hour Children now provides a wide range of services to incarcerated women and their families. These services include housing support, advocacy for the reunification of families, and programs aimed at support and empowerment of mothers and their children.
Executive Director Sister Tesa Fitzgerald was stretched thin with her programmatic responsibilities, including frequent trips to prisons in New York City and surrounding areas, and was challenged in managing the growing staff, most of whom were themselves formerly incarcerated women. As a result, Hour Children was struggling to restructure reporting lines to ensure consistent development opportunities for staff, as well as more proactively stave off performance issues and align individual responsibilities with organizational goals.
Having previously worked with the Taproot Foundation on Basic Website (2004) and Annual Report (2005) Service Grants, Hour Children applied in 2008 for a Performance Management Service Grant to harness pro bono Leadership Development and Strategic HR support.
The Work
The pro bono consultant team set to work getting to know Hour Children in order to identify their key challenges and ensure that the new measures would address the specific issues Hour Children was facing. Account Director Peter Hess felt that Sr. Tesa was like a "spider in the middle of a web" and needed a better system to manage and develop her staff. He recognized that the system would need to be tailored specifically to the audience: a diverse staff with limited professional experience. The team understood that "for systems to be relevant, they couldn't be too cumbersome."
The team recommended a performance and development program that would create opportunities for every member of the organization to learn and understand Hour Children's values and then to build upon the skills that most directly align with the organization's mission. They created a handbook that outlines workshops and activities designed to relate Hour Children's mission to staff objectives, and establish the performance and development process so staff better understand what is expected of them. The consultants work included a guide to enhancing communication, a performance and development cycle, advice on coaching and providing feedback, and several performance review templates. At the conclusion of the project, the pro bono consultants led an extensive training for the management at Hour Children.
The Impact
Sr. Tesa told the Taproot Foundation, "Since Hour Children was founded, we have been guided by values rooted in our mission, which are very important because they define the behaviors we expect of each other. All of this is now captured in our performance and development process."
The work of the Pro Bono Consultant team provided digestible yet comprehensive Performance Management systems for Hour Children. By clarifying job descriptions, the organization now has a clear foundation for recruiting and training staff, as well as established benchmarks against which to gauge achievement and engagement. With these stronger processes in place, the organization was able to strategically invest in their HR management capacity. Sr. Tesa is now able to delegate Performance Management tasks to her staff, while knowing that they are all held to a consistent standard, ensuring fair and thorough assessment and development processes. The organization is benefitting from this improved level of leadership, in terms of employee morale, engagement, retention and development. Their staff is now free to focus on achieving their mission.
The Pro Bono Consulting Team
Peter Hess was the pro bono Account Director. Peter is an HR executive with over 20 years of experience in change management, corporate values and culture, leadership and team-building. He has run CHANGE Partners, Inc. for the past ten years and holds an MS in HR Management and Labor Relations from Rutgers University.
Rosalind Shane served as the Internal Communications Manager for the pro bono team. As an experienced HR executive with strong history of innovative HR management, Rosalind was successful in driving this Performance Management project to actively support Hour Children's needs. She holds a Senior Professional in HR credential.
Taniya Gunasekara (Manager of HR and Analytics for Teachers College at Columbia University), Jack Moscou (former President of Organizational Renewal Dynamics) and Kwame Creamer (Assistant Vice President at Citigroup) rounded out the pro bono consulting team. The five consultants brought a collective 75 years of HR expertise to create a comprehensive Performance Management system for Hour Children.
About the Client
With more than 11,000 children in New York State whose mothers are imprisoned, Hour Children is providing critical care and attention to ensure that all children grow up free from crime, substance abuse, and with the tools to lead healthy, independent lives. For more information, please visit www.hourchildren.org.
About the Taproot Foundation
Every year, hundreds of nonprofit organizations rely on the Taproot Foundation's award-winning Service Grant program to provide millions of dollars worth of pro bono Strategy Management, Marketing, Leadership Development & Strategic HR and IT consulting services that better equip them to tackle our society's toughest challenges.
About the Sponsors
The Leadership Development & Strategic HR Practice is presented by American Express as part of their ongoing commitment to building the leadership capacity of the nonprofit sector.
The Performance Management Service Grant project materials were produced with generous support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
