Brian is an advancement professional who had moved to start a new job on a university advancement team. Just four months in, his son was diagnosed with leukemia. When Brian’s supervisor and the university president heard the news, they offered him their immediate support. They urged him to take time away from work so that he could care for his family during this critical time. Their frequent communication and compassion showed Brian, who was new to the team, the value of a positive workplace culture. It cemented his loyalty to the team and the institution. 

As Brian’s story shows, supportive and compassionate workplace cultures matter.  

Both of us have seen that in our research, too. We first met through a group that brings together scholar-practitioners in the advancement field, Advancement Pracademics. We were excited to find similarities in our individual doctoral research studies that each explored the related phenomena of turnover and retention in university advancement workplaces. 

As we conducted our research, we were both struck by the fact that much of the research, theories, and models about turnover and retention come from the corporate sector. Our research was motivated by our interest in understanding advancement professionals’ unique experiences and exploring approaches to talent management that are tailored to this unique context. Our respective studies identified common themes related to the causes of turnover and offered insights into the elements of positive organizational cultures that are life-giving, equitable, and inclusive. 

Read on to discover the workplace cultures that make advancement professionals want to stay.    

Turnover in Advancement: Defining the Problem  

Studies on retention in advancement began to appear in academic literature in the early 2000s. Recent data suggests that the problem persists, with a 2022 survey by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources noting that the average tenure of an advancement professional is less than five years—representing the lowest retention rate among all other administrative specialties in higher education. All of us in advancement know that developing the relationships that result in major giving can take years. But many staff members are leaving before they can even achieve success in their roles.  

When staff leave, programs, strategy, and relationships are disrupted. Institutional knowledge is lost and financial resources need to be diverted to fill vacancies at a rate that the Center for American Progress notes may cost multiple times the salary of the departing employee. Staff members who remain behind may take on additional responsibilities to cover the departures. In doing so, they are more likely to become frustrated, burned out, and at risk for turnover themselves, particularly if roles remain vacant for extended periods of time—or are not filled at all.  

Our Research: What Did We Learn About Why People Stay or ​​​​Leave?   

Turnover happens for many reasons—like lack of growth opportunities or burnout from the pressures of the job. Here’s what we uncovered in our research about advancement workplaces specifically. 

Compassion and “Being Good Humans” 

In 2021, Christina wanted to explore how organizational culture impacts the decisions that gift officers make regarding whether to remain in—or depart from—their roles. She reviewed her findings through the lens of the theory of compassion organizing. This theory, from the domain of positive organizational scholarship, describes an organization’s response to pain and suffering and its ability to improve its compassion competence to promote joy and flourishing in the workplace. 

The gift officers that Christina interviewed shared the key elements that characterize positive and compassionate work environments. These included a desire for a work environment that supported family life and a recognition of the influences that extraordinary circumstances exerted on the work environment and compassion in the workplace. The latter was particularly salient as the study was conducted against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

While Brian, the advancement professional we mentioned earlier whose son had cancer, felt compassion from his colleagues, others in the research study expressed less positive experiences. One gift officer, Josh, thought compassion was missing in many fundraising departments. He said: 

“Instead, these workplaces get hyper-focused on statistics and metrics, which are vitally important to being successful. But an overemphasis on that goes away from the human-to-human compassion,” he said. “The best leaders in advancement are the ones that can strike that balance and understand that we need to have goals, but we also have to be good humans to our fellow humans.” 

Christina’s participants also described the importance of leadership behaviors and organizational processes that supported compassionate work environments. These included:  

• supporting career paths and planning for early career fundraisers,
• leadership behaviors that centered relationships,
• consistent and fair performance reviews, and
• positive and open communication between staff and leaders across all levels of the institution.  

Without those things, advancement professions are likelier to leave their roles. Take Rachel, a gift officer who found in her workplace a lack of centralized policies and little “motivation for leadership to do anything” about it. The culture there, she said, was that people should “be grateful for the job you have that provides you with this good salary and flexibility, and don’t ask for anything more.” That led her to leave the institution.  

Flexibility, Ambition, Balance 

In 2024, Lauren also approached her research with an interest in exploring turnover and retention. Her work explored the lived experiences of women in advancement to better understand their career journeys and job-related decisions. Lauren’s research was grounded in feminist scholar Joan Acker’s 2006 theory of gendered organizations, which describes how organizational processes, structures, and behaviors may interact with gender to contribute to inequity.    

During interviews and focus groups, Lauren’s participants described the importance of flexible work structures that allowed them to manage family and caregiving responsibilities. One participant, Elizabeth, noted: 

“My husband has a demanding job, so this job works well for the work-life balance we need [with three kids]. If I’ve had an issue that I’ve had to deal with, like childcare, people are really understanding about it, whether I had to work from home or not go on a [work] trip.” 

Other participants echoed these sentiments and described how caregiving responsibilities informed their decisions to forego opportunities for higher-level roles or increased compensation because they did not want to give up trusting relationships with colleagues and sense of security that allowed them to fulfill their caregiving responsibilities. For example, advancement professional Mia noted: 

“I have some security because of my relationships, including with the president of our institution. And the work that I have done speaks for itself. Would I rather make a little bit more money or go somewhere else, have it not be a good fit, and potentially lose that job? No, I’d rather keep my job. I had to really think about what the most important thing was.” 

Participants who had remained in their roles 10 years or more discussed the importance of having direct supervisors and leaders who supported their desire to grow as professionals. They were able to be vocal about their professional goals and what they needed from the organization to keep them engaged, satisfied, and fulfilled. They were able to progress to take on new responsibilities and to higher-level roles and achieve the work-life integration that they were looking for, without having to leave the organization for alternative opportunities.  

Human-Centered Talent Management 

As we discussed our complementary research interests, we discovered similarities within our findings.    

We realized that our participants describe hallmarks of human-centered cultures, including flexibility, empathy, inclusivity, and transparency. These attributes promote a positive organizational culture and encourage team members to remain in their roles. Human-centered cultures can support psychological safety so that employees feel comfortable bringing their full selves to work, as well as the psychological availability—the self-efficacy and self-esteem—needed for employees to remain engaged in their work and contribute toward shared goals.    

Based on our research findings, which center the voices of individual employees to better illuminate how they are experiencing their organizations and making decisions about their work, we propose a new framework for human-centered talent management.   

This framework is grounded in the seven daily principles that characterize compassion organizing, which aim to alleviate pain and suffering within organizations. These principles emerged from a 2011 study, “Understanding Compassion Capacity,” about a team working in a U.S. community health system. Staff members were able to notice, feel, and respond to others compassionately if they did these seven things:  

1. Acknowledging: recognizing and honoring individuals’ contributions to the unit in various ways, 
2. Addressing problems directly: dealing with conflicts, problems, or errors immediately and in a straightforward manner, 
3. Bounded playing: engaging in diversionary activities (think: fun, collaborative, activities like escape rooms), along with an explicit awareness of the need to keep the focus on work, 
4. Celebrating: recognizing important milestones in individuals’ lives through sharing food, collective gifts,  
5. Collective decision-making: providing input and making decisions around a range of issues related to work and social aspects of the workplace,  
6. Help-offering: monitoring the potential needs of others and proactively making offers of help, and  
7. Orienting: socializing newcomers in the unit in ways that expose them to new tasks and people.    
    

Our framework is also predicated on the ideas that:    

• The unique identities, lived experiences, and perspectives that employees bring into the workplace are sources of strength. 
• Leaders and managers significantly influence organizational culture and individual work experiences. 
• Flexible organizational practices, transparent communication, and positive relationships between individual employees and their leaders/managers enhance the commitment that an individual feels to the organization.  
   

While some talent management models present each part of the process as a separate task, we suggest that leaders and managers view this as an ongoing process. The approach to talent management should be communicated to all employees within the organization so that leaders, managers, and individual employees can work in partnership to leverage talent practices to create a compassionate organizational system.    

Note: The seven daily organizational practices that serve as important indicators of the organization’s compassion capability and that align with each stage of the model are in the blue squares adjacent to the blue circles.   

Human-Centered Talent Management In a Compassionate Organizational System

1. Grow Your Team: Acknowledging, Collective Descisions
2. Align to Mission, Vision, and Values: Orienting, Help-Offering
3. Engage the Whole Person: Addressing Problems, Bounded Play, Collective Decisions, Help-Offering

4. Recognize Impact: Acknowledging, Bounded Play, Celebrating

    

Grow your team. This involves thinking critically about the organization’s current and future priorities and identifying the talent needed to address them. In both of our studies, participants described experiencing stress, burnout, and overwhelm when their colleagues decided to depart from the organization. A compassionate organization would take steps to minimize the pain and suffering that can result from turnover by proactively addressing staffing gaps. This should include not just thinking about external talent but also cultivating an internal talent pipeline that supports long-term employee retention. 

Leaders and managers can engage in ongoing talent conversations with current employees to gain a better understanding of how they want to use their strengths, their professional goals, and their career journey. In this way, a strong internal candidate may already be identified and ready to fill critical roles when gaps arise. And employees who are seeking career mobility will be able to find it without leaving their organizations.   

Align talent to the organization’s mission, vision, and values. This speaks to how leaders and managers can strengthen individual employees’ commitment to the organization. While this function is generally thought of as an important step in bringing new employees into the organization, properly onboarding existing employees who take on new roles is equally important. In a compassionate organization, organizational structures are flexible enough to allow adaptations in roles to create internal career mobility, which was important to the participants in both of our studies. Moving to a new position within the organization may involve building new relationships, adapting to new behavioral norms, and understanding how the role and its responsibilities contribute to organizational mission and vision. Ensuring that the transition process includes activities that help team members adjust to new roles can enhance confidence, satisfaction, engagement, and ultimately, retention, when positions change.   

Engage the whole person. We believe that leaders and managers should spend most of their time doing this. Participants in both of our studies wanted their managers, leaders, and colleagues to see them not just as employees, but as people with unique identities, lived experiences, and rich, full lives outside of work. Individuals in compassionate organizations develop the capacity for empathy and center the well-being and dignity of others by engaging in collaborative decision-making and problem solving. They face challenges head on, whether those are employees’ personal hardships, interpersonal conflicts, or organizational barriers that diminish employee engagement, productivity, or inclusion. They build in fun at work, which provides opportunities to think creatively, relieve stress, and build trust in low-stakes settings. This aspect of a human-centered approach to talent management can help employees and organizations as a whole develop a culture of deeper connection to their workplace, colleagues, and the work itself, which is critical to promoting long-term retention.  

Finally, recognize the impact of individual contributions on organizations. Sometimes in the busy day-to-day of our work, recognition only happens once a year at the performance management conversation. But compassionate organizations acknowledge individual contributions and successes “in the moment” and create space for reflection, play, and preparation for what comes next. Recognition should be personalized; some people like a public shout-out or celebration, while others are content with an email from leadership acknowledging their unique contributions.   

A Call to Action for Advancement Leaders  

Existing talent management theories and frameworks emphasize how recruitment, learning and development, and recognition practices can support employee engagement and job satisfaction. While these models emphasize the relationship between the employee and the work itself, there is an emerging interest in workplace flourishing, in which organizations adopt a whole-person approach to talent management. That means seeking to understand how employees’ needs, interests, and motivations—both in their personal and professional lives—influence their job-related decisions and experiences within organizations. 

We need more research on this topic as it relates to the advancement workplace—but here’s what we do know: culture is crucial. Advancement leaders have a unique opportunity to embrace the concept of a human-centered approach to talent management by demonstrating empathy and taking action to improve organizational work environments. As researcher Peter Frost observed in his book, Toxic Emotions at Work: How Compassionate Managers Handle Pain and Conflict, “Emotions are part of the human condition and thus inherent in any organizational setting, and they have an impact on function and performance. […] Compassionate managers and compassionate organizations can […] lead their systems to greater health and better performances.” 

Support from the top builds compassion and competence throughout the organization. With a compassionate and human-centered framework at the heart of our organizations, we can support joy and fulfillment at work, encourage retention, and contribute to the continued professionalization, health, and growth of our field of institutional advancement.