TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Aubrey Bergauer: Support for this episode comes from audience view, the all-in-one ticketing, marketing and fundraising platform solution. Whether your organization's events are theater, dance, opera, symphony, or any other artistic discipline, audience view helps you elevate the experience for your customers while giving you the tools you need on the backend.

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Hello everyone. Or maybe I should say Bula, which I've learned means hello in Fijian [00:01:00] because when this episode drops, I will be on summer vacation on an island in August. It. Fiji. Fun fact. Fiji has 333 islands and we are going to be visiting three of them. The quick rundown is we fly into the main island, the city of Nandi, where we'll do some hiking and exploring, but we won't be there for long.

We go to then some kind of what I've been calling Surf Camp Island, and if you were hearing this and thinking, I didn't know you surfed Aubrey, you are correct because I do not surf at all. My partner does though. He totally loves it. And months ago when we were planning a vacation and trying to decide where to go, I had said, you know, while we live on the West coast, let's go west somewhere in the Pacific or even farther West Australia, New Zealand, Asia.

You know, somewhere that's a little easier to get to from California than from other places in the us. [00:02:00] And he said he wanted to surf and Fiji is supposedly one of the best places for surfing. It's supposed to be really great. And I said, well, you know what else? Fiji has beautiful beaches and I will be happy as a clam, not surfing, but on the beach reading, getting some sun.

So that is exactly what we're doing. And then the last several days after Surf Camp Island, We go to another island that's more of a typical resort, you know, scuba diving and more beaching and all that kind of stuff. So that's the plan. I'll be somewhere in the middle of all of that when this episode drops.

So know my Kindle is loaded up with books. I'm ready to go. And if you are a bookworm like me, and if you like or know of my year end book review posts, I'll definitely be reading some titles that will be on this year's review. If you haven't seen those posts, I've done these end of year, calendar year.

That is end of [00:03:00] calendar year book review roundups for the last six years, I went back and looked, I couldn't even believe it had been six years of that now. And the point is I read a lot of business books and in these posts do a quick. Summary or review of each title through the lens of an arts administrator, how does this book apply to our work?

So I'll link to those posts in the show notes in case you're looking for any ideas for your own summer reading list. And for the record, I will be bringing with me some non-business reads for sure, cuz it's vacation. So, has anybody read Prince Harry's book Spare yet? Okay. Nobody at me. If you're not a Harry and Meghan fan, that definitely will not be on the end of year review post.

But I am a super team, Harry and Meghan person, so you know, that's loaded up on the Kindle too. Anyways, if you are listening, the day this episode comes out, it's July 4th back home in the United States, so Happy Independence Day everybody. Onto today's agenda, we are talking [00:04:00] about the state of the workforce in arts and culture, hiring.

What's next? After the great reshuffle, we know there's a lot of hiring and movement among employees in our sector. Especially last year as organizations, were hiring back so many people and roles and true, especially at this time of year in the summer, just about always as well. We see a lot of shuffling going on.

We talked about this in the last episode. Summer is kind of a time, a natural point of reflection and change. So we see that in the job market. And just to give some facts about this and to lay the groundwork here. Even February of this year, 2023, there was still a bit of great resignation happening. A lot of economists and people who watched the labor market originally thought it was over at the end of 2022, because in January of this year, the number of people who quit their jobs dropped below 4 million for the first time and several months of that.

But then in February, the [00:05:00] Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that quits, as they call it, Topped 4 million again, so went back up in February, which is the rate it had been every month for almost all of 2022. So again, as of February, people were still saying, oh, I guess the great resignation isn't over yet.

And then if you follow these broader labor market trends, you know, around March or April of this year, the conversation turned from great resignation to quiet, quitting. Meaning fewer people actually quitting, actually leaving their job, but instead staying and doing just the bare minimum basically to get by and not get fired.

Right. Okay. So then also around that time and continuing for the next several months were the big tech layoffs, and that conversation started dominating the news and the labor headlines, and now it's now. Summer of 2023. So what does all of this [00:06:00] mean for the arts? Some or even many, I suppose, of these broader labor trends absolutely apply to us too.

And now we have data specific to our sector, which is what we are going to hear about today. We are seeing just like every other sector changes in this area of labor, both from the employer side and the employee side. We are seeing changes in things like salary disclosure. I mean, that used to not be a thing at all anywhere, ever in our sector or in many others.

And now it's kind of expected or at least more of a common practice, you know? So we're seeing these shifts and we are also seeing shifts in what employees are looking for in an employer, not just salary disclosure in that example, but. We're seeing how bullish employees and potential employees are, rightfully so, in my opinion, bullish about [00:07:00] looking for these desired traits.

So we are gonna dive into that. Dive into what we're hearing and seeing in our sector with someone who led an extensive field-wide national research project on this topic, and who is so data-driven in what arts organizations, hiring managers and employees can learn and do differently as the narrative is changing on this topic of labor, hiring, job satisfaction, all of that.

So whether you are somewhere barbecuing for Independence Day or laying low, or on summer vacation yourself, or listening at some other time entirely, this is the penultimate episode of season two. And that means it's episode 10 of 11 on how the narrative is changing for arts and culture, and it starts right now.

Hey everyone, I'm Aubrey Bergauer and welcome to my podcast. If we haven't met, [00:08:00] I'm known in the arts world for being customer centric, data obsessed, and for growing revenue. The arts are my vehicle to make the change I wanna see in this world, like creating places of belonging, pursuing gender and racial equality, developing high performing teams and leaders, and leveraging technology to elevate our work.

In this season, I'm bringing you conversations with some of my favorite experts from both inside and outside the arts. All to help build the vibrant future we know is possible for our institutions and for ourselves as offstage administrators and leaders. You are listening to the offstage mic.

If you listen to this podcast regularly, you've heard me talk about how education programs present a huge opportunity to drive revenue for your organization. Whether you have an education program or offering that's already monetized or are interested in starting one. I'm excited to introduce you to Core Storm.

Core Storm takes care of managing class [00:09:00] registrations, collecting payments, and promoting your classes. It includes simple registration forms, built-in payment processing, and automated marketing tools. It literally takes just minutes to set up a catalog. Core Storm also seamlessly integrates with ticketing and donor management platforms like.

Patron Manager, as well as hundreds of others through Zapier join arts organizations already using Course Storm, like the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, Princeton Academy of Art, Miami Theater Center, and others. The best part though, course Storms pricing is designed for your success. You never get a bill from Course Storm.

You only get payouts, and there's no contractor or minimum time using the service required. How amazing is that? Visit course storm.com/aubrey. That's C O U R S E S T O R m.com/aubrey and set up a sample catalog or request a demo with class registration and everything else taken care of through Course Storm.

[00:10:00] You can focus on what's important helping your patrons grow as artists and performers through education. And 

[00:10:07] Karen Freeman: we're back today on Top Tunes the music producer, is it just me or does this sound terrible? Wait, I think I heard of someone who might be able to help us. There's this company called Novo Music.

They provide 

[00:10:18] Aubrey Bergauer: across the board audio solutions from recording repair, 

[00:10:21] Karen Freeman: to audio editing, to original music and sound design and beyond. Well, what are we waiting for today? On top tunes the music. Now 

[00:10:29] Aubrey Bergauer: that's better. Novo Music. Conducting your creative vision. Find out more@novomusic.co. Today's guest is Karen Freeman, who is the Executive Director of Research at Advisory Board for the Arts Advisory Board for the Arts.

If you are not familiar with them, is a company that is the largest global network-based learning organization in the cultural sector today. They use their network research capabilities and expertise to bring [00:11:00] together the best ideas from around the globe to help arts organizations both large and small.

Find breakthrough solutions and achieve lasting success. Karen Freeman also has a background as a player. She played cello and piano growing up. She was an Interlochen kid and then went on to obtain degrees from Harvard and m i t. She worked at McKinsey where she was the global head of digital and analytics learning for generalist consultants.

And what that means is she was responsible for training 17,000 consultants there at McKinsey and analytics modeling, training them in digital transformations, design thinking, and then when Advisory Board for the Arts came. It really put all of that together for her, her arts background, her research career.

She joined a b A in 2019, and the study that she led that we're gonna dive into today is called the Future of Work, attracting and [00:12:00] Retaining Staff Talent With all of that, Karen, I'm so glad you're here. It's. So great to be doing this with you. So I wanna dive right in. So my understanding is that ABA does one major broad survey, sort of field-wide data, deep dive a year, and this past year that topic was on the future of work and specifically attracting and retaining talent.

So can you. Explain the methodology, your approach, and did you have specific questions in mind that you sought out to answer? 

[00:12:37] Karen Freeman: Sure. Happy to do that. Before I do that, just a quick introduction about who ABA is, cuz I'm not sure people know that we're a. Membership-based research organization. It means we have about 80 members around the world and they can ask us for research on any topic at any time.

And the membership is that when we do a piece of research, when we finish it, we share it with all the rest of our membership. So they [00:13:00] all get access to great research on what's happening in the industry across. The arts and culture, but we do one big research study a year and we try to gather as much big data as we can.

Like you said, this year, what we were hearing about when we started asking what we should do for our next topic in November, December of last year was the great resignation, sort of funny, sort slash sad, how we're still talking about it now, right here. It's been almost a year later. So when we first were asking people about.

The great resignation, how it's affecting them, what are the questions that they had? It became clear pretty quickly that we didn't wanna run a standard engagement survey. How do you feel about your job? What do you like? There's so many of those out there already, and we wanted to add to the conversation something a little bit different.

So we decided to use methodology that we could borrow from the marketing world called conjoint analysis. I'm not sure how familiar people are with this idea of conent analysis. I'm gonna happy to answer any specific questions about it, but let me give you a high level overview of what it [00:14:00] is. Conent analysis forces you to choose between things.

It's often used in marketing for choosing between products. Would you rather have this product or that product? We're using it in jobs to have people choose between a few potential job offers. So would you take a job with more pay, but fewer health benefits or a better manager? But less flexible work.

And if you ask people in general, you know, what do you want out of your job? They'll say, sure, I want all of those things. So that's the reason why conjoin is so helpful, is it forces people to make those trade offs. You can have this or that, but not all. And the way it works is it has, you do kind of several iterations of job after job choice.

And as you do those choices, it learns. What you care about most and what you care about least, or what's really positive or what's really negative. That's a methodology thing we did. It gives us two really interesting things. It gives us both importance, like how important something is relative to everything else.

And then the other thing is utility, which puts a really. [00:15:00] Tangible and ultimately financial value on it. Like if we know the utility of something, we can actually say, this is worth $5,000 in salary to you each year. So those are the two outputs we get from this. Okay. I get excited about the methodology, but the things we were asking were just what matters most, right?

When people, when push comes to shove, what is it that people most want out of a job? And the attributes we were asking about were like, Organizational things like artistic reputation, inclusive decision making, emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. Are you following through on those things? I.

Job attributes, like the ability to work from home, the room for advancement in your job, um, and then benefits like healthcare, professional development, free tickets, what have you. So we, uh, that was the methodology and the questions that we asked. And then in the end, we had. Nearly 1500 people take our survey across 52 organizations globally.

[00:15:57] Aubrey Bergauer: Um, I was just gonna say us or Okay. Globally. [00:16:00] Thank you for all of that. So what I want you to do now is just really get into the top line findings. Sure. 

[00:16:05] Karen Freeman: Four things that were most interesting across this whole survey. There's a lot that we can talk about and so I will try to keep it simple to the four that matter most.

First is, in addition to asking people to make tradeoffs, Choices about what they wanted from a job. We rate their attributes. So it gave us this really interesting picture of what an average arts organization looks like. 72% of people said that they have good job, excellent job security. Uh, so it's a testament to the kind of benefit that a job in nonprofit can really help you.

With. Um, and then third is that 50% of our respondents said that they have an organization with the highest artistic reputation for the highest quality, which is interesting, right. Um, and gives a bit of a Lake wobegon effect going on [00:17:00] perhaps. At any rate, I won't go through them all, but aside from those three categories, in pretty much everywhere else there is room for improvement.

Like the average organization is somewhere in the middle on all of these attributes. So that was thing one that I thought was interesting is just what does the average organization look like and the fact that the average organization, at least as perceived by staff, has the highest level of artistic reputation.

The second thing is we looked at what matters most. Right. So key question of this whole survey, just a moment of methodology maybe will help make this clear. As I mentioned earlier, one of the things we get out of a conjoint survey is this thing called a utility score. It just tells us apples to apples, how important something is compared to something else.

And we also asked people a little bit about salary, right? So one of the things they were trading off in that list of trade-offs was. A 10% salary increase or a 10% salary decrease here or there. And so we could actually calculate how much. Money things were worth different [00:18:00] people. So when we did that, we compared it to average.

We said, what are the things that an arts organization can do to differentiate themselves and make staff happier? What has the greatest opportunity to improve staff likelihood to stay in happiness? We grouped things together. So these are all those attributes. We grouped them together into the different ways that probably would think about it, right?

You can work on having a more inclusive culture. You can work on having more flexibility, you can have better advancement opportunities, you can have better managers, and so on. People don't care that much about their workplace investment in technology or office space. So those are some things that's easy for us to not worry about too much way at the top though, is an inclusive culture, an inclusive and participatory culture.

So we're seeing a huge opportunity in arts organizations improving organizational transparency in following through on their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, and access in having an inclusive decision making [00:19:00] culture and improving job accountability. Those four things together are worth almost $6,000 per person per year in salary.

Huge opportunity there. Flexibility, I think is the second, you know, most important here and interesting to see. I think a lot of organizations have already taken some steps here, but there's still even more room to improve there 

[00:19:20] Aubrey Bergauer: as well. I do want you to go on, but I just wanna underscore, I always thought, I guess wrongly clearly that like wanting an inclusive culture was some subset of people.

I don't know, like myself being part of that, but now I'm seeing this in the data. No, we, I can't say we all, but it's the number one finding that means. Huge 

[00:19:40] Karen Freeman: opportunity area. Yeah. Yeah. And perhaps it is reflective of this moment in particular. I'm sure we'll end up talking about this some more, but this time people have been through a lot, right?

And so the opportunity to participate in their organization and haven't. [00:20:00] Influence and help their organization do good in the world, even more so than they might in their individual role, in a bigger sense, is really important to people. I think especially 

[00:20:09] Aubrey Bergauer: right now. I love that. Oh my gosh. And you're attaching a dollar figure to it, which is fascinating.

So, okay, I'm gonna stop. I want you to keep going. Please. 

[00:20:17] Karen Freeman: So, so this is just looking at the overall averages of the value, the potential of going from average to great for arts organizations group together. We also looked at differences. We had collected those sorts of demographic information, age.

Department. Of course we had all different regions and we didn't see a lot of big differences. Most places, I will say, in case we have folks outside of the us, healthcare is a US specific thing, right? You see healthcare is pretty large in here. It's pretty important to people. That's not true in the UK and us, I mean outside of the US and artistic operational staff cared less about working from home.

Makes sense, right? It's not something that you usually can do, but we didn't see many other differences. Where we saw a huge difference though, was in [00:21:00] generation. Different age groups have just really different preferences, so this is just ranking the preferences, so healthcare benefits by age groups. So I think it's really, really interesting when you look at how important the arts organization's artistic reputation is.

Baby boomers, it's one of the top, maybe second most important thing on this list. For Gen Z, it's not even in the top 10. Right. And you would think that the youngest people would be the most interested in having a place they can go establish themselves with a great artistic reputation. Like the higher the artistic reputation, the more their career will take off.

Right. But no, it's the lowest. 

[00:21:41] Aubrey Bergauer: I'm just assessing this on this fly, but it's inversely proportionate, basically. I mean, it's, that's incredible. Yeah. I mean, 

[00:21:47] Karen Freeman: who knows if, but it's not like they're necessarily thinking about these two things together, but Right. In contrast, there's the exact opposite trend happening for diversity, equity, inclusion, and access, where it's like number three on the [00:22:00] list for the youngest staff, no matter who they are.

Right. They're interested in seeing the organization take. A stand and make real progress in diversity, equity, inclusion, there's that word again, and access. And then baby boomers. It's just much less important. Not unimportant, but much less important. So this like contrast between what young people and older people are looking for out of their arts career is fascinating.

And the fact that millennials and Gen Z care much less about artistic reputation and care much more about diversity, equity, inclusion tells you this is likely to. Stick around in future, right? Mm-hmm. It's not just a moment in time thing. That's right. 

[00:22:37] Aubrey Bergauer: Yeah. I appreciate you underscoring that. There was 

[00:22:39] Karen Freeman: another group, small group that had different opinion than everybody else, and it's a good reminder to us that we sometimes let our own biases get in the way, and that was the C-suite.

They cared a whole lot more about artistic reputation and a whole lot less about job schedule flexibility In ours. This just shows it on a different scale, like percentage more they cared about it. So almost twice as much Kara C-Suite cared [00:23:00] more about artistic reputation than people in the artistic department did.

Right. I think that's really interesting. These are people who are making policy, right? And with the message we always say is right, you're not the consumer. Don't use your own preferences to determine policy. This is why it's a survey like this can be really important cuz if they just went off what they wanted, it's gonna be different.

Now this is their personal preferences, right? I'm not saying people in the C-suite can get out of their own heads, it's just a reminder to get out of their own heads. All right. I got one more. The last thing we did with the cool thing you can do with conjoin analysis is you can run simulations. You can say, okay, different jobs in the world, how many people would take one versus another?

And the reason that that's important is sometimes the averages can hide strong preferences, right? I have a little example. People either love. Coke and hate Pepsi, or love Pepsi and hate Coke, right? Oh, yeah. Totally 

[00:23:48] Aubrey Bergauer: polarizing. 

[00:23:49] Karen Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. I'm a Coke person. You're probably, I don't know which, which one are you?

But nobody really has strong feelings about Sprite, right? So if you did a conj analysis, you'd [00:24:00] see results kind of like this, where weirdly Sprite would actually come out as the best. Right, but if you actually put those products out, right? The same respondents in something in the same survey would show, one person would pick Coke, one per person would pick Pepsi.

Nobody would pick Sprite. So if there are strong opinions about something, the average is weirdly going to hide it. So that's why you do simulations. We gotta make sure we don't have the Coke and Pepsi, in fact, going on with any of our data. Anyway, there were two simulations that we did that were pretty.

Stark and different than what we would've expected. So the first simulation that we did was whether people would trade off artistic reputation for more pay. So behind door number one is Job A, where it is an organization that has no artistic reputation, right? They just are still building their artistic reputation, but they're offering 10% more pay behind.

Door B is an organization with an artistic reputation for the highest quality, but you'd be getting your normal, the same salary you [00:25:00] get today. And so we can run the simulation and what it tells us is that 54% of people will give up artistic reputation for a 10% pay increase. They'll just go to an organization that doesn't have a strong artistic reputation for more money.

So interesting. Especially, gosh, if you look at your average arts organization's career page, what you'll see on there is we, you know, all this. Commentary about what a impressive artistic reputation they have and how they built this impressive reputation over time. Yeah, and that is, I'm sure, incredibly helpful for audiences to come and understand that they're getting a great experience out of it.

It's really useful for great artists to come and work with you, but as a staff attraction lever, it doesn't seem to be all that powerful. We tried another one, which was culture, right? Going back to that. Inclusive, transparent culture. So [00:26:00] behind Door A is an organization that has no transparency. They're top down decision making, low accountability, and performative diversity, equity, inclusion, and access.

Very sad, but 10% more pay so you can get paid more. Or organization B uh, is better culture on all those dimensions, but you're getting paid what you get paid today. Which one do people choose? Most people will turn down a pay increase for a better culture. Much stronger and much more powerful lever for attracting and retaining staff than artistic reputation is, which is the thing that's on everybody's career page.

So for me, that was the other really interesting finding from all of this, that we have a lot of opportunity in inclusive culture and that it is really powerful. Like if we do it well, people will stay. That's what we learned 

[00:26:48] Aubrey Bergauer: from the survey. Oh my gosh. Okay. Thank I have so many things to follow up with.

Okay. My first follow up question on this. Is, you know, this whole series I said at the top is how the narrative is changing for arts and [00:27:00] culture. And to me there's one finding that really maybe exemplifies that. I dunno, a lot of this exemplifies that. I guess. I think the stat was more than half, more than 50% of administrative employees say they prefer to work for an organization that has flexible work components.

Over artistic reputation, and even though we just spent a lot of time talking about the D E I aspects over artistic reputation, but I think that's a shift. Definitely. I mean, we talked about the generational shift for sure, and all of that, but I want you to say more about this and unpack this a little, but not all jobs lend themselves to remote work or flexible work either.

So I've really been trying to grapple with that and I don't know, I just wanna hear you weigh in on that some 

[00:27:37] Karen Freeman: more if you would. Well, you know, by the way, that statistic about more than 50% of people going for a flexible job. It is true, and I think it's pretty important. One thing that I'll note is that there's two parts to flexibility.

One is I. Being able to work from home, which is what we often end up talking about in the news and sort of hear about, people are like, I want to work from home one or two days, and we are able to do that in the [00:28:00] pandemic. Why can't we do it now? The second thing is flexibility to go to a doctor's appointment, and so on.

That second one, flexibility about when you work is way more important than the ability to work from home across our survey. So, I think it's just an interesting context point for the conversation that everybody's a part of. Often we just jump straight to work from home, but actually what people are really looking for is the ability to have a little bit more control over when and how they work.

So we can talk a little bit about what that means for places where it's more challenging, but thinking about flexibility and then that concept of inclusive culture that we were just talking about a moment ago as we step back. And say, why is that so important right now? I think it's helpful to get ourselves in the heads of where.

Our staff have been for the past three years, and I think it'll tell us not only why there's been a shift, but why it's gonna stick around, right? Even before Covid in the US we had a tough political environment that made a lot of nonprofit employees kind of wonder about the country [00:29:00] they lived in and not sure they understood there was a lot of partisan concerns and not speaking to each other.

Next Covid, right? Sudden shutdowns fear for our jobs, our health, our safety for people who got to keep their jobs. They were scenario planning every day and then the scenarios were thrown out and there was a new set of scenarios. They were stretched into new jobs. The return alive actually just doubled the work for a lot of people as they were kind of coming back from the pandemic cuz they'd taken on projects and times they were closed if they were fortunate enough to keep their jobs.

All of that to say, not only are people feeling burnt out right now, But I think there's this feeling of disconnect or lack of control, right? Which is not arts organization's fault, it's the world around us that has caused this so much swirling around. It makes us want to exert some control where we can.

And I think we're seeing that throughout this data, right? Staff, especially younger staff, but everyone, everyone wants more [00:30:00] of a voice in the inner workings of the organization. They wanna believe they're having impact and they wanna have some control over how things operate. They want the art organization that they work for to be a model for how they want the world to work, right?

So that's why staff want more flexibility, but that's, Even more importantly, why staff want like an inclusive or participatory culture. I think 

[00:30:22] Aubrey Bergauer: I really appreciate, Karen, how you just have such empathy as you're sharing the data with us. And I just, I think that is powerful. Not in the sense that we all wanna be seen, which is true, but also in the sense of, and you said this earlier, When people who are hiring are trying to figure out how to get a better, larger, whatever applicant pool this matters.

Yeah. And so empathy in that way, I'm always saying, know your audience. Right, right. Well in this case, your employer, your audience is the candidate pool or potential candidate pool. So I'm just sort of like putting a few threads together here, if I may, but I, you know, you talked about. Not leading with artistic quality.

There are these other things that [00:31:00] matter more. And then even, um, going back to the lead conference, even in my session, somebody from LinkedIn came and said, across their entire data set, employers that talk about remote work and mention it in the job posting. See? I think it was like 2.6 times. So yeah, that's a increase in applicants, sorry, is the rest of that sentence.

Um, but like just an incredible increase in number of applicants. Mm-hmm. So I just think for anybody, there are so many people hiring. I said at the top, every day somebody sending me a new posting saying, who can you recommend? So these things matter for recruiting talent. 

[00:31:32] Karen Freeman: Emphasizing your flexibility, your options to work from home.

Those are some easy, if you've already made that policy, emphasize it. And then emphasizing things about your culture, right? What makes you a unique place to work? So often we fall back on the artistry and community engagement work, which is important. It's important work, but it's not actually what's attracting staff these days.

[00:31:50] Aubrey Bergauer: Are there on this topic of things evolving, changing, shifting through our eyes, are there any other findings like this where it just sort of emerged and you were like, Hmm, [00:32:00] that's a shift 

[00:32:01] Karen Freeman: on the talent front? I think I kind of went through the big. Changes that we've seen, but even across our membership on a broader level, there's two big trends that we've seen across the industry and I, it's probably not news for those of you who work in the industry, but I think it's amazing how consistently we see it across our membership.

So if we're talking to. Different arts organizations each day, and they tend to have a lot of the same conversations, which tells you this is a trend. So first one, audience development at a deeper level, right? We've been talking about. The concerns around audience shrinking for a long time, and certainly at this moment there's this concern that they're not coming back fast enough, right?

People lost habits. Fear of covid is now replaced with just happiness on the couch, but there's this opportunity, I think people are seeing it as an opportunity to bring people in who haven't come before. It's not a new conversation, but I see more willingness to make more change than ever before. So that's one big trend with you're making changes in programming and investments, [00:33:00] community engagement, all those sorts of things that people are doing way more.

[00:33:03] Aubrey Bergauer: I see that too. In my own work, I narrative is changing. Yes, there is more. Mm-hmm. Sometimes not fast enough for some of us, for others, maybe too fast. You know, there's a spectrum for sure. But Sure. 

[00:33:13] Karen Freeman: The goalpost changes as soon as you move them, because as they should, right? We always wanna be making progress.

The other thing we see is a lot of community engagement and being really following through on that promise of investing in the and and being part of the community. I think that's part of a strategic plan of almost every arts organization I've talked to and we've helped our members. Make job descriptions for new roles in community engagement and education and think about the scope of those roles and also how they measure impact.

So those, those are some conversations we're also having in a different kind way, I think, than we would've had. Four or five 

[00:33:46] Aubrey Bergauer: years ago. Circling back, can you speak about general accountability and psychological safety best practices? Guidances? I don't know if that's meaning as part of the methodology or anything else that bubbled up in terms of the culture [00:34:00] people care about.

[00:34:01] Karen Freeman: As part of this research, we talked with dozens of arts organizations specifically about what they're doing in inclusion, right? Because if the number one finding is improving an inclusive and participatory culture, then what do you do about it? And. We had some conversations, one with a, with an organization that is really made incredible strides where staff even have an opportunity, and this is a theater to have a say in what scripts are chosen from the artistic team.

Right. Like really participatory in that way, but we also have some great, just simple and helpful best practices to those things you were talking about, psychological safety and inclusion and feeling like you belong in an organization. One of the examples that we learned about was an organization that asked every employee, I think it was in a department, but eventually it's gonna be across the organization to share a user guide, like a little bit about yourself, how you like to work, how you communicate, [00:35:00] what people should know about you, what makes you different, right?

All of those things. And they've stored them in a place where you can kind of access them and they've created this culture of people sharing what makes them. Individual and how to work with them. So it helps them work together. It helps 'em with conflict resolution and understanding each other, but it also helps encourage people to, right, getting back to that psychological safety point, like talk about their differences and be comfortable sharing things, other differences.

So it's a simple thing you can do. If you're a manager and a team, you can start doing that yourself. It had a pretty big impact on the organization that we talked to. 

[00:35:35] Aubrey Bergauer: I wanna follow up actually, almost right where you left off, Karen. If somebody is working for an arts organization and they are not the chief executive or don't have a ton of decision making power, but they care about these issues, care about being data driven, that's a whole culture point too, in my opinion.

Mm-hmm. Last question then. What can somebody do? Where should they 

[00:35:53] Karen Freeman: start? Maybe there's two questions. One is, what do you do to change culture? And the other is what do you do to make an [00:36:00] organization more data driven? Love both of those questions. So change culture. There's a concept in the corporate world that I haven't really seen trickle into the nonprofit world, but it's one of my favorite concepts.

It's the difference between culture and climate. So culture is what the organization has. Talk about your organizational culture. There's some hallmarks about working there. Anyone, anywhere in the organization will feel like. This is what makes us this kind of organization climate is what your team creates and, and, right.

If you've been in part of an organization, there's always, like, this group's a little different than that group. I mean, certainly in departments of artistic, creative, artistic departments versus, you know, places where they gotta get a lot done and they're much more process oriented. You're gonna see some personality differences and that's gonna show up.

And that should show up because you wanna see different things. When you're working with like-minded people, you're gonna influence the culture. The way you influence culture is by influencing climate. No matter who you are, you can create an environment where people feel excited to work around you by influencing the climate.

And then [00:37:00] those little climates all add up to a big culture. So that's my sort of mental model for how you can influence culture, um, and why wherever you are, what you do 

[00:37:09] Aubrey Bergauer: makes a difference. So, Well with that, I wish we could spend so much more time on this, but I am so grateful, Karen, for just sharing this with us, putting data behind so much of these claims, opinions, thoughts.

It's just so helpful, and to us as employers, to us as employees, as anybody working in this industry. So really thank you. I can't thank you enough for doing this work. Hey, off, stagers. One of the things I hear from people the most is how frustrating this business can be. And for forward thinking people who want to make a difference, how to navigate that frustration in a positive way.

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That's all for today, folks. [00:40:00] Thanks so much for listening and keep up with more content like this by following me on LinkedIn or Instagram at Aubrey Bergauer. Definitely hit that follow button to subscribe to this podcast, and if you like what you heard here, Will you consider leaving a review or rating?

I'd be so grateful for your help and support in that. Thanks again. See you next time on the Offstage Mic. The Offstage Mic was produced by me, Aubrey Bergauer, and edited by Novo Music, a studio of all women, audio engineers and musicians. The narrative is changing for arts and culture, and I'm so glad you're here to be a part of it.

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