In this first of two articles on staff retention, we investigate what encourages people to stick with their jobs in the sheltering field—and what leads them to clock out one day and never come back. Through interviews with shelters and researchers, we show how good communication, clear expectations, consistent procedures, and ample feedback and recognition set the stage for happy, motivated staff. The second article explores how to turn good employees into long-timers by offering opportunities for advancement, providing training, and creating a supportive environment.

The Revolving Door

For Laurie Adams, it ended—temporarily, at least—with a glove. On a day about two years after she had begun working at Johnson County Animal Control, it came time to euthanize another dog. “I had my latex gloves on,” she said. “And I put my hand up to the cage and he came up to the cage and he, with his little incisors, pulled my glove off my hand. Like, ‘Please don’t do that,’ and gave me that look, and I had to get up and walk away.”

Adams felt burned out. “I mean, I couldn’t look at an animal. I couldn’t look at one on TV; I couldn’t look at one on the streets. I couldn’t look at anything without breaking down. And asking myself, why? Why does this have to be like this? Why can’t people do what’s right? And I had to step away. I just said that I can’t euthanize anymore.”

After a couple of months, Adams returned to the agency, where she’s now the administrative assistant. She also runs a pit bull rescue on her own time. During her time away, she realized that she truly was helping animals while at the shelter, and that she belonged in the field, she says. “I couldn’t stay away. You can’t stay away.”

But while Adams returned to the field, and to the same agency, many people don’t. High turnover is a fact of life at many animal shelters and animal care and control agencies. In a 2003 survey commissioned by the Society of Animal Welfare Administrators, the average annual turnover rate at participating organizations was found to exceed 40 percent.

That probably doesn’t come as a surprise to shelter employees, many of whom face an array of challenges every day—for starters, euthanasia, hard physical work, rude members of the public, low pay, and feelings of being misunderstood by family and friends.

“I think that retention is certainly one of the most difficult aspects of animal welfare because unfortunately, people are very often forced to choose between doing work that pays the bills but they don’t really love so much or doing work that they really love that doesn’t pay the bills ...” says Hilary Anne Hager, programs manager at the Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in Lynnwood, Washington.

“[D]ay after day after day of getting attached to these animals—that are not ours—we feed them, we bathe them, we walk them,” says Adams. “And then every day we have to euthanize and put an animal down. And it is so hard, and to be called a killer on top of that ...”

Many people in the field agree that the highest turnover rates can be found among kennel workers. As Kim Intino explains, “I think it is the lowest paid of the jobs, it is the most emotional. ... [Think of] somebody who is a construction worker or doing some other hard labor job—okay, they have to do hard labor, and we’ll give them that,” says Intino, manager of The HSUS’s Animal Services Consultation program. “But it’s bricks and rocks and nothing matters as far as emotion, whereas this person in the shelter is doing a pretty good deal of hard labor and being affected by living, breathing creatures.”

The job of a shelter worker is like no other, confirms Steven Rogelberg, PhD, an associate professor and director of the industrial organizational psychology program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Rogelberg and his UNC colleague, Charlie Reeve, PhD, have been studying workplace issues in animal shelters, including euthanasia-related stress. Before beginning the research, Rogelberg says, he had never studied animal shelters. “[W]e’ve definitely found elements of the sheltering environment that are quite unique,” he says. “Obviously euthanasia is a very unique activity. And no [other kind of] organization probably has an activity like that.”

Rogelberg and Reeve have found that compared to other shelter employees, those who perform euthanasia feel more stress, are more likely to suffer from headaches and other physical expressions of that stress, and are more likely to quit. But in general, Rogelberg says, the shelter workplace isn’t so different from most others. “I guess what is most surprising is that a shelter is an organization and functions like another organization ...” he says. “That the same things that are driving health and retention in IBM are pretty much the things that will drive it in a shelter.”

In any workplace, when one person leaves, others often follow. Turnover is contagious, says Rogelberg. Some long-time shelter employees have seen so many people come and go over the years that they feel they’re able to guess how long a new hire will stay in the job.

When she worked in shelters, Intino says, it was often easy to tell how long someone would stay. “I think you could tell within a matter of days, a week at the most. You could almost lay a bet that this person was going to be gone. You could easily say, ‘She won’t last.’ ” Later, when Intino became the one doing the hiring, she did her best to select people who could handle the work.

The people who stayed shared several traits, she says. They really cared about the animals, not about leaving as soon as their shift was up. They supported and respected the other employees at the shelter, no matter what their jobs. They were realistic, and they weren’t squeamish, she says.

© Carrie Allan

The employees who don’t stay for long often have one thing in common—they’re just in it for the paycheck, says Linda Workman, assistant director of the Tuscaloosa Metro Animal Shelter in Alabama. When the money isn’t enough, they leave. Or else, she says, they just can’t handle the job. Some employees quit on their first day; others clock out for lunch and never return. Two weeks’ notice definitely isn’t the norm, Workman says.

Faced with unhappy employees or a wave of turnover, management may wonder what they can do to remedy the situation. How can agencies help employees feel more like George Cyr, an animal services officer at the Piedmont and Emeryville police departments in California who plans to remain in that job until he retires? When organizations find it impossible to significantly increase salaries or hire several additional people, plenty of other strategies are available to improve retention.

Sometimes these strategies can mean major changes or reorganization. Leigh Ann Harms, director of shelter operations at Woods Humane Society in San Luis Obispo, California, took a major step to reduce stress among animal care staff: she put an end to full-time positions. All of the animal care positions are now part-time. The full-timers’ “level of patience slowly decreased through the week,” she says. “Which in turn rubbed off on the animals; the animals pick up on that ...” And if one of the three employees called in sick, she says, no substitute was available.

In the absence of full-time animal caregiver positions, things have changed for the better, says Harms. “I’ve had staff sticking around a lot longer, because I don’t think it’s as emotionally and physically stressful on them if they’re not here 40 hours a week.”

Determining the reasons behind employees’ decisions to leave the shelter can help management keep the ones who remain. Rogelberg suggests that managers administer exit interviews for outgoing employees in order to understand why they’ve decided to leave; not only may valuable information be uncovered, but other employees will appreciate the gesture. “It’s important to recognize that it is still not going to be definitive data, because employees might not provide their real reasons to you . . . but it’s still a good start,” he says.

It’s the regular, consistent workplace conditions that count the most. As agencies work toward their ultimate goals—in their research, Rogelberg and Reeve have found a link between higher adoption rates and improved employee health—they can simultaneously improve workplace conditions.

Creating a healthy environment for employees involves letting them know what they should be doing, whether they’re doing it well, and when there might be opportunities to do something even better. Employees also should feel like they have a say in aspects of how the shelter is run. Shelters can work toward accomplishing these goals by starting with good organizational communication, clear job descriptions and standard operating procedures, thorough initial training, and fair and frequent appraisals of employees’ job performance.

Opinions, Please ...

Consistent and efficient communication benefits everyone at an organization, and it’s a goal that every employee can help achieve.

“I’ll tell you, the number-one complaint on management is lack of communication,” says Keane Menefee, animal control supervisor at Fort Worth Animal Care and Control. “But coming from management, the number-one complaint on employees is lack of communication. They think just because they slap you with the supervisor or manager title, that they also give you this magic hat that reads minds and sees all in the corner of the buildings. And it just doesn’t happen that way.”

Good, open communication conveys much more than the messages themselves, according to Rogelberg. “By communicating with your employees, it says so much to them,” he says. “It says to them that you’re interested in what they have to say, you care—and those are the key things that contribute to feelings of support. ... [T]hose feelings of support are such a key predictor of employee retention.”

Holding regular staff meetings is one way to open the lines of communication. Workman says the shelter tries to hold meetings—at which free bagels usually make an appearance—once a week. Shelter staff seem to value these opportunities to discuss new ideas. “Every week, they go, ‘Are we having our staff meeting this week?’ ‘Are we having our staff meeting?’ They want to know if they’re having that staff meeting. So usually everybody participates; they come up with some really good ideas and I just think that [meetings are] a way to get stuff out in the open.”

Staff meetings provide Workman and the shelter’s director an opportunity to show employees that they value their input. “We’ll come out in meetings and say, ‘If anybody has an idea about this or this, please tell us,’ ” she says. “And we’ve used several ideas. And sometimes we just take people aside individually—like if they work on a certain side, we may ask them questions; it’s stuff we don’t even know because we’re not back in the kennels. They know the animals better than we do.”

In their efforts to create a mission statement for Tuscaloosa, the shelter’s managers plan to ask staff for ideas of what to include. “Everybody’s going to be a part of that,” Workman says.

When Harms institutes a new policy or procedure at Woods Humane Society, she often tells staff, “[L]et’s just try it, see how it works, and if it doesn’t work, then let me know. Or if you have suggestions, share them with me and then we can go from there.” She adds, “I tell everyone, ‘This is something that’s got to work for 90 percent of the people, 90 percent of the time.’ ”

Like Workman, Harms finds meetings with front office and animal care staff effective in soliciting people’s input, especially when getting together in smaller groups. “I’ll hold just operations staff meetings and people tend to be ... a little bit more open during those meetings rather than if there was an executive director sitting in or something like that; they tend to share a little bit more. So … I’ll say, ‘Look, this is what I’m thinking about; what do you think? And would you be willing to try it?’ ”

Many workplaces have suggestion boxes, but at Woods Humane Society, “nobody uses it,” Harms says. She believes that when employees are able to air their complaints about a procedure out loud, it’s often a way for them to relieve stress or frustration, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s something wrong with the procedure or that the employees really want to see a change implemented. “[T]he suggestion box is if you really want to make a change, then you can put that in there.”

Soliciting employees’ opinions can result in benefits that go beyond simply getting fresh ideas or input. The shelters that are healthy tend to give employees “a say in shelter affairs, so in other words, when employees are asked their opinions ... people listen to [them], and the issues [they can comment on] are really varied,” UNC’s Rogelberg says.

Those issues can include general ideas for improvement, he says; managers should try to find out how employees believe the workplace could be made better. Employee surveys can also solicit input on what workers like and dislike about their work and their job conditions.

Workman recently surveyed her employees to find out why they remained at the shelter. The answers she received ranged from feelings of making a difference to learning new skills and taking part in new experiences. “It was good for us to know,” she says. “I’m glad I did it.”

Without good, consistent communication between managers and staff, employees are left in the dark and may compensate with other, less reliable information. “Organizations often don’t realize ... that the absence of communication is communication in and of itself,” says Rogelberg. “Because when there’s no communication, employees will just make up stuff. There’ll be rumors, there’ll be gossip, but that communication void will be filled, and what shelter management wants to do is be sure that they have the first opportunity to fill it with correct information.”

Communication will be threatened if shelter workers are afraid of voicing their views, says Intino. Shelter employees often experience feelings of helplessness, she says, and managers need to be open to addressing staff input or questions about everything from adoption policies to euthanasia.
“[T]here have been [shelter evaluations] that we have done where people have been afraid to tell us things because they said their manager would make their life miserable,” she says.

Start Off on the Right Foot

If the initial training of a new hire isn’t thorough or effective enough, she probably won’t stick around long enough to be a part of policy development and critical decision making. And employees can’t be effectively and correctly evaluated, recognized, or rewarded by their supervisors unless they have a clear idea of what they’re supposed to be doing and why they’re doing it. They should also understand the goals and purpose of the organization.

Inadequate training can create feelings of confusion and unease in a new employee, not to mention unsafe conditions for that person, the people she works with, and the animals she cares for. Along with the job training itself, the employee’s orientation should include a manual with information on benefits and other HR policies, Intino says.

New hires at the Tuscaloosa Metro Animal Shelter attend an orientation day and review the employee handbook with Workman before signing it. Workman also reviews basic workplace issues like punctuality, safety on the job, and sexual harassment. Employees sign a confidentiality agreement, pledging not to publicize certain information about employees or about the dogs picked up by animal control. “[E]verybody knows what our goals are when they get hired. We tell them right off the bat: ‘This is what we’re here for; you will not do this,’ ” Workman says.

Employees who start out in the kennels—where most new staff are placed—receive a job description sheet that explains expectations and duties. “And then they have to sign that, and I put that in their folder,” says Workman.

Before the actual hands-on training of new employees begins, managers determine which area of the kennels they are best suited to work in—the stray area or adoption area. When that’s decided, the zone leader of that area trains the new hires, working with them for a week. “If they don’t get it in a week, they’re not going to get it ...” Workman says. “It’s hard work, but it’s easy [to learn]. There aren’t a lot of things to remember.”

Menefee remembers his first week on the job, which was much more haphazard than the first days of employees now hired by Fort Worth. He and four other officers were hired around the same time, he says. “I think we rode in a truck with somebody for about three days. And then that Saturday … we started working weekends by ourselves. They gave us the key to the building to unlock the door, and ... here we are, just stunned. We’re on call—I mean, we didn’t really know what was going on.”

Officers’ initial training at the agency has been greatly expanded since that day seven years ago. New officers train for at least six weeks, riding along with a more experienced officer. Next, they spend time with specialty officers—the cruelty investigators, bite investigators, educators, and a general investigator—to become familiar with what they do. Add to that a day in the shelter—“animal attendants have to bust their rump eight hours a day, so it gives [new officers] a chance to see what type of work’s going on here in the shelter,” Menefee says—and a couple of days with Menefee himself, and an officer is ready for the field.

At Woods Humane Society, Harms tailors the job training to the learning style of the new hire. “[T]he first question I always ask them is, ‘Are you a reading learner or are you a hands-on learner?’ Because if you’re a reading learner, then I’m going to give you a book and you can sit down and read through it, and then we’ll go from there. If you’re a hands-on learner, I’m going to walk you through each step and then I’ll have you read something.”

As in the Tuscaloosa shelter, clear, complete job descriptions at Woods Humane Society not only help employees understand what their jobs entail but also serve as a basis for their evaluation. Staff evaluations can be difficult to administer if they don’t correspond with job descriptions, says Harms.

© Marianne Skoczek

Harms puts faith in detailed job descriptions but goes one step further. On the recommendation of a facilitator hired to help the shelter, she provides a “RASIC” chart. The acronym stands for Responsibility, Approve, Support, Inform, and Consult. Harms illustrates the concept by explaining the creation of dog exercise groups. The animal care supervisor is responsible for creating these exercise groups, and he consults the animal care staff for input. After the groups are formed, the supervisor will inform the animal care staff, who support this task by exercising the dogs in the groups created. The director of shelter operations must approve the task and may make or strongly suggest changes—however, once the animal care supervisor is competent and fully trained, she no longer needs to seek approval.

The RASIC chart explains an employee’s job in detail. “[I]t allows for you to pass that along to other staff members and say, ‘This is exactly what you’re responsible for,’ ” Harms says. “Or: ‘This is exactly what you’re supposed to do to help out the person that’s responsible for that.’ So it broke down the job into each individual thing ...”

A Flexible Consistency

Unclear directives can lead to frustration among supervisors and employees alike. “A lot of supervisors, they just do a horrible job of relaying expectations,” says Menefee. “I mean, their boss tells them what they expect done, and then they kind of file it away. And then at the end of the year, when it doesn’t get done, and [the bosses] get jumped on, then they go jump on the staff. ... Well, it was either one of two things; either they didn’t relay it right on how they expected it to get done, or they didn’t quite tell them. And I find that becomes a huge problem.”

Hager of PAWS feels that relaying expectations properly should be the highest priority for organizations trying to improve retention. “I think the most important thing ... is to be very clear about expectations. And to be very clear about the roles that people are going to be playing in the organization.”

Making expectations crystal clear to staff doesn’t mean that you expect them to be mindless automatons. In her interactions with volunteers, Hager makes it clear that although they aren’t expected to sacrifice their opinions, they’re expected to do things as they are asked. She thinks the approach works with paid staff, too.

“I say, ‘Listen, I’m not here to convince you that we’re right,’ ” Hager says. “ ‘And I’m not going to convince you that you have to believe exactly what I’m saying to you. What I’m telling you is this is how we do it, and we’re inviting you to be a part of that. And so if you disagree with anything that I’m saying to you, then ... we can agree to disagree. But when you’re here, you’re doing it this particular way.’ ”

Standard operating procedures can help ensure that employees know what that “particular way” is. With clear SOPs, employees will know what to do and how to do it, no matter who trains them.

Sometimes there’s nothing worse than being disciplined by a supervisor for doing something that you were told to do by a colleague. Without consistent procedures, employees can receive conflicting information that can turn into a source of stress, says The HSUS’s Intino. People sometimes “think their job is one way and then they find out it’s a different way—they get yelled at by somebody or they get written up by somebody; well, that’s because that’s how Sam told them how to do it—but that’s not the way to do it.”

One of the recommendations that Intino and her assistant manager frequently make in their shelter evaluations is “operating procedures—step-by-step instructions on how to clean this cat cage, how to clean this dog cage, how to give vaccinations, how to do an adoption—whatever you do, it should be written,” she says. “It should be written so that you could bring people in who didn’t really know too much, hand them the book, and they could do the job. It wouldn’t be perfect, but they could do the job.”

© Nan Kené Arthur

Rogelberg calls standard operating procedures a double- edged sword. “Clarity is obviously important, but so is flexibility. So to the extent that things are heavily documented, [that] can be useful, but you don’t necessarily want the employees to think that this is a document that cannot be changed.”

Rather than rules set in stone, SOPs should be viewed as fluid documents. Management can alter them when needed—for example, when staff comments make it clear that a procedure should be revised.

With the right approach, SOPs can be valuable tools. “It depends on how they’re written, it depends on how frequently they’re reviewed,” says Rogelberg. “It depends on whether there are certain pieces of the standard operating procedures [in which] employees actually have discretion. ... So the standard operating procedure itself can have some flexibility built into it.”

When animal services officer George Cyr started over a decade ago, he found a focus on enforcement rather than education. “The sergeant was ragging on me about not writing citations,” he says. “And my captain, I guess, heard [him], and she said, ‘You know, you don’t have to write tickets. Just do what you think is right.’ And since that day, I carry four or five cheap leashes, and if some 65-year-old senior citizen has their little dog off the leash, I’m certainly not going to write her a ticket; I’m going to offer her a leash and thank her.”

Woods Humane Society uses a combination of standard operating procedures and checklists to keep the day-to-day shelter operations running smoothly. Checklists can be an excellent tool to remind staff what needs to be done and keep them focused on the tasks at hand. For example, in the kennel area of the shelter, one item on the daily checklist reminds staff to make sure that all of the drains are cleaned.

Some may consider the checklists too prescribed, Harms says, but when it comes to vital tasks like disinfection, she believes that the health of the animals makes this specificity necessary. “So, yes, there are certain parts of your job that are very square, step by step, you have to do it this way. But there’s also other parts of your job that you don’t—[for example,] when you’re helping a customer. There are guidelines—‘This is what we recommend’—and so forth. But that’s just a guideline. You can use your gut feeling on things.”

Harms feels that having standard operating procedures—like the many SOPs in place for the front office procedures at the shelter—can help reduce turnover by facilitating training. Tasks like adopting out an animal require a lot of paperwork, she says, so it helps to have a source to reference each step that’s required.

Other tools that help get the job done at Woods Humane Society include quick-reference binders in the front office with phone numbers and other key information for staff. “If somebody calls you and asked you a question on the phone, pretty much I would say 75 percent of the ... answers to those questions are in that binder,” Harms says.

Staff at Fort Worth are also equipped with the right tools to cope with questions or challenges they might face. Officers receive three bound books containing everything they’ll need to refer to on the job: SOPs, city ordinances, and state laws. “So when ... someone’s arguing with them out in the field why they should have to quarantine their [dog who has bitten someone],” Menefee says, “they can open it up and show them to kind of defuse the situation [and say,] ‘This is why … not just because I’m telling you, but because the state handed down this law.’ ”

Viable policies and procedures only stay viable if they are allowed to evolve and reflect new challenges, goals, and practices. Three years and frequent revisions have resulted in well-developed standard operating procedures at Fort Worth, Menefee says. “[They’re] something we go through once a year and update and correct, and we’ll do trainings on them and so forth to make sure [staff] still understand the SOPs.”

Scoring the Goals

Clarifying expectations through written documents can also help with goal-setting; supervisors can set targets for staff to aim for when they’re doing their work. To make sure that his staff know what’s expected of them, Menefee sets benchmarks and makes sure everyone is aware of them. He created the benchmarks in response to the conditions he found when he began supervising the officers.

“The officers weren’t meeting people,” he says. “They were just throwing dogs on trucks and running out of the neighborhood. And they weren’t really solving problems, so the person who called didn’t know they’d ever even come and solved the problem; the dog owner has no clue that his dog was just impounded, and really wasn’t held responsible for anything.”

To get a handle on the problem, Menefee began creating targets for employees to meet: a certain number of calls a month to take, a certain number of people to meet, and a certain number of surveys to distribute to citizens. Officers and animal attendants must hand out a minimum of 30 surveys a month, and at least ten percent of those need to be returned by citizens. These targets are spelled out in the evaluation packet Menefee gives new hires.

For animal attendants in the kennels, whom Menefee has been supervising since last fall, benchmarks apply to tasks like aiding clerical staff when needed and lending a hand at the receiving desk.

There’s one number that the benchmarks for officers don’t ever include, Menefee says: the number of animals they pick up. He delivers this message consistently. “[O]ur officers will pull into the loading bay and they’ll think it’s a great day because they have 15 dogs on the truck. And they’ll tell me, ‘Hey, I picked up 15 dogs.’ [My] same generic response every time is, ‘Well, did you solve 15 problems?’ That’s all I care about.”

In this way, management should clearly communicate to employees the goals and mission of the organization. Working toward something specific always holds more appeal than simply working. “I think that when you have success is when the agency’s goals and people’s individual goals are obviously in the same place,” Hager says. “Which seems like an oversimplification, but I also think that it gets overlooked a lot.”

Intino agrees. When certain policies and procedures—for example, rules regarding behavior evaluations or hierarchies for critical decision making—are known and agreed upon, future conflict among staff may be lessened. “In any shelter, your mission and vision should be known, your philosophy should be known, and people who work there should share it to at least a certain degree,” she says.

Ensuring that employees realize how their attitudes and specific job tasks relate to the “big picture” is essential. Management should make sure employees become familiar with the mission of the organization, keep them informed of new decisions, and allow them to provide input. And successes, big or small, should be communicated to staff—at Fort Wayne Animal Care and Control, adoptions are celebrated over the shelter loudspeaker.

To make the vision for the shelter known to all staff, Woods Humane Society includes it on every job description and will soon post it by the time clock and in the feed room. The facilitator who visited encouraged Harms to create a description of the ideal environment for the organization, which she wrote over the course of two days.

The vision statement reads: “The Woods Humane Society staff thrives on bestowing all patrons with top-notch customer service, all animals with the best possible care our resources permit; to approach each and every animal and person with compassion and understanding; to perform daily in an effective and efficient manner and to provide a pleasurable work environment rich in practical learning and team work.”

In Fort Worth, when Menefee talks about the department’s aims, he makes sure to link them to individual employee goals. “If I tell the officers, ‘Hey, we’ve got to do 40,000 calls this year,’ that really doesn’t develop too well in their minds of, ‘What’s 40,000 calls to me?’ But if I say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to do 250 calls per month in order for us to meet our goal of 40,000 calls per year, because there are 20 of you, then they get that.”

It’s important that employees know the current procedures and policies—and that they be informed when these things are changed. Harms emphasizes the importance of keeping employees in the loop. “I feel that it’s not fair to implement a change in the facility unless everybody’s informed about it and it’s in writing, because that way, people have something to reference,” she says. “Change is hard for anybody, anyhow. ... As much as I change things around here, when somebody goes and changes something with my job, that makes it hard for me.”

When management needs to communicate something to employees, Intino recommends that details be put into several different written formats. The new or revised policies and procedures should be included in SOP manuals as well as memos that direct staff to the changes in those manuals. Employees should be required to sign a form noting that they received or read the new information. “Things could also be posted,” she adds. “There should be a staff bulletin board—however; there shouldn’t be a ton of posted memos all over the shelter.”

Recognize and Reward

In addition to the purrs and tail wags that shelter employees receive from the animals, a few words of praise or a free lunch from their fellow humans help remind staff that their hard work is appreciated and help to counter the less pleasant moments of the day—like interactions with screaming members of the public.

© Marianne Skoczek

It can be discouraging to work and work all day without any recognition of your efforts, says Adams of Johnson County. “When I was in the kennels, it’s easy in a lot of places to ... feel like you’re lost,” she says. “You know, [to feel like] I’m just here, nobody cares, nobody. . . notices that I swept out this extra corner, I hung this up to try to be more efficient.”

Supervisors should make sure to distribute recognition evenly among departments. “Our motto here is nobody’s job is more important than the next. ... A lot of times in a lot of facilities, the only people that get recognized are the people in the Admin. Or the ACOs, and a lot of people forget the kennel people. And to me that’s the backbone of animal control,” says Adams.

Although salary raises alone aren’t enough to retain employees, they can help. But as much as supervisors may want to recognize everyone with salary increases or bonuses, they find that monetary recognition often doesn’t fit into the reality of the nonprofit or municipal worlds of the shelter or animal control agency.

Money constraints can be frustrating, says Menefee: “You’d like to say, ‘Hey, you know, Bob, you did a great job, so here’s a five percent raise,’ or ‘Here’s this or that.’ ”

Instead, Menefee, who supervises 31 employees, makes sure to commend a job well done. “The best recognition I can give them is recognizing what they’ve done, you know, give them a pat on the back, and the ‘Good job,’ ” he says. “A lot of people wouldn’t think that means a lot, but it’s amazing how few people give that sort of stuff out.” Menefee also rewards staff with chances to attend conferences.

When the chief of police or other police officers receive a note from a member of the public praising something animal services officer Cyr has done, they let him know about it, Cyr says. “They’ll say, ‘Well, tell me about it, what happened?’ and ‘Well, that’s good work, thanks.’ ”

That sort of recognition can be a good alternative to money, says Rogelberg, who ticks off a catalogue of non-monetary rewards that can be used to acknowledge good work. Employers can provide extra vacation time, assign enjoyable tasks, offer training opportunities, present certificates of appreciation, create a “wall of fame” that recognizes good work, or even just give plain old pats on the back. “These informal and non-monetary types of rewards are really incredibly effective,” he says.

Not only do employees feel good that their hard work has been noticed, but praise directed at a coworker can inspire staff members to go the extra mile as well. That strategy is put to good use at Woods Humane Society. Employees jot down things that have made them happy recently and place the notes in the “happy box.” The notes are then read during staff meetings.

“Say one day it’s a really stressful day, and you have a ton of laundry,” says Harms. “And one person took the initiative to finish all the laundry that day. I might put a note in a box that said, ‘Erica finishing all the laundry makes me happy.’ So you read that in front of the other staff and you want to think that the other staff will pick up on that and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, well gosh, it’s those little things that make people happy; I could do more of those.’ ”

For the past year, monthly staff meetings at PAWS have included a similar component. Along with the memo announcing each upcoming meeting, the shelter director includes a form that reads, “I’d like to recognize my coworker ________ for the following . . . ” The written notes are read aloud, and the first four employees whose work is praised receive “silly gifts,” Hager says, like microwave popcorn or other snacks, calendars, or books the shelter receives as donations.

“We’ve had this system in place for well over a year now,” Hager says, “and I half-expected the enthusiasm about the program to wane, but it really hasn’t. ... And guessing the handwriting to figure out who the recognition is from is fun, too.”

© Marianne Skoczek

Hagar, who manages a team of five people, writes notes to each of those employees with their paychecks. She takes care to make them personal. “I thank them for specific tasks, not just like a ‘Gee, thanks for all that you do,’ but I thank them specifically for something they did. I let them know how ... it affected me. Like what it made easier for me, or how my job was eased by what they did. Because I think that is a little bit more relevant for people.”

But in the absence of any other recognition, pats on the back start to lose their effectiveness after a while, Hager believes. “I don’t mean to discount the power of a thank you, because I think it is really important. [But] I think that there’s a point of diminishing returns a little bit, where it stops meaning as much when that’s all people are getting. That’s the challenge, I think, [for] organizations—I don’t know what the solution is, though.”

In lieu of cold hard cash, food is an always welcomed, rarely refused form of appreciation. Celebrating staff birthdays with cake and ice cream, a popular workplace custom, is a regular occurrence at Johnson County Animal Control, Adams says.

Woods Humane Society counts hungry college students among its employees, and Harms tailors her efforts accordingly. In addition to her monthly offerings of doughnuts, her Valentine’s Day gift bags were a hit with staff.

“You’d hear them come in [and say], ‘Well, I don’t have any food money to buy food this week,’ ” says Harms, who took a trip to the local warehouse store and stocked up on college-friendly foods like ramen noodles and fruit. “It didn’t cost me very much, and it came out of my pocket and I didn’t mind. They were all like, ‘Wow!’ ”

Taking employees out to lunch can serve two purposes—recognition for staff and a chance to get to know them better. At the Tuscaloosa Metro Animal Shelter, managers have recently begun treating staff to lunch each week, one at a time. They make sure that lunch takes place outside the shelter. “A lot of them don’t leave at lunchtime, and they have to get out of here! You really should leave for that hour,” Workman says. Talk inevitably turns to shelter happenings, but “we try not to focus on work,” she says.

Other non-monetary rewards can help employees stretch their thin budgets. A couple of employees at the Tuscaloosa shelter pass a toll bridge on their daily commute, so they are given toll cards paid for by the shelter, says Workman.

Letting the public know that you value your employees can help staff feel appreciated. Workman posts photos of staff in the adoption center; staff choose their favorite adoptable animal and share the spotlight. “They always say, ‘Oh God, here she comes with the camera,’ but they love it. Not one person says, ‘I don’t want my picture taken.’ They … all go back and grab a dog and they’re up here in a matter of seconds,” she says. “They like to be recognized for what they do. And it doesn’t cost anything—just the cost of some paper and creativity.”

Vacation time can be another effective reward. Julie Justman, field services manager at Pueblo Animal Services in Colorado, gives eight hours of vacation to officers who make it to 20,000 miles on the job without a traffic ticket or accident. She also rewards officers for getting animals outfitted with identification. The officer who sells the most licenses in the field is awarded a free lunch.

Feed the Need for Feedback

It’s important not only to reward staff for hard work or a job well done, but to give them feedback to let them know what they’re doing well and what could use some improvement. “Feedback … should be immediate,” says UNC’s Rogelberg. “To be effective, it must be immediate, as close as possible to the behavior.”

Menefee makes sure to give feedback as quickly as possible. “I don’t believe in storing things away. If something good happens or if something bad happens, I really don’t just stick it in a drawer someplace and wait until the opportune moment to spring it on people. So I like to say people are held accountable here more than anything—good or bad. And they know there’s nothing personal when it comes to it ...”

Of course, to be able to know when to reward or correct employees, the supervisor needs to be aware of what’s taking place outside her office and to hear what staff have to say. “There’s an expression that a manager should be walking the floor,” says Rogelberg. He adds, “[I]n fact, there’s even a management theory [that] ... by walking around, by being out there, by being in the employees’ sight, it just provides a much easier mechanism for the employees to be in contact with the management. And as a result, management is going to have their hands on the pulse of why things are happening as [they are] in their organization.”

Menefee believes that more supervisors need to get out and observe staff. “I think one of the biggest mistakes that a supervisor makes is overlooking what the staff has accomplished or done. Getting too [preoccupied with end results] and not actually getting out there and seeing what they’re doing on a day in, day out basis. Prying themselves from their desk—I know I get accused of it often, too, but sometimes we get a bit too comfortable in our offices and we fail to get out there and see the big picture of things.”

A major way to provide employees with feedback is a staff evaluation program. What’s said during appraisals of employees should never be a surprise, says Rogelberg.

“Performance appraisals should never be an event,” he says. “It should always be a process. [But] what many organizations do is once a year, this performance appraisal thing happens. And that’s pretty ineffective. ... What would happen is after the performance appraisal takes place, and certain actions are decided upon or goals set, they’re implemented and then the process and progress of those actions is assessed constantly.”

Menefee administers monthly evaluations, with additional evaluations at six-month and one-year increments. “It ... gives them a chance to [realize], you know, March wasn’t a good month, so I’ll bust butt in April and I can bring it back up. I don’t think it’s fair for them to be caught off guard or surprised ...”

Officers’ performance is charted regularly. “I’ve found [evaluations] help motivate them,” says Menefee. “I’ll post a bar graph at the end of each month showing who’s where on the calls. I’ll show the last three months’ patterns for each person, so they know ‘Hey, you know, I’m starting to slide here, I’m going up here.’ It becomes a competition thing, but I think it’s a healthy competition.”

Menefee also keeps tabs on things at Fort Worth using what he calls an “officer and attendant weekly progress sheet.” “During the week I just make notes, good or bad . . . I listen to the radio, what goes on in the field, because I’m not able to get out there much. ... If a dispatcher’s trying to give an officer calls and the officer jumps all over him or so forth, I’ll make a note of that.” Each week, Menefee types up the notes and adds them to his four years’ worth of progress sheets.

The notes that go into that “happy box” at Woods Humane Society aren’t just read at staff meetings; they get a second life in the staff evaluation process. To create a “glory file,” employees complete a form and staple their “happy notes” to the form, which Workman places in their personal files. “What I try to tell people is, as much as I’d like to say that I can remember everything good that happens around here, it’s very hard and so ... let’s put it in the file, because when I ... do your review then I have something to go off of.”