Ensuring Nonprofit Healthcare Employees of Color Feel Valued and Included

Overview: Among nonprofit healthcare employees of color, workgroup inclusion serves as a critical focal point for increasing department level inclusion, job satisfaction, and commitment. Nonprofit healthcare leaders who make intentional efforts to help historically marginalized employees feel valued, help increase feelings of job satisfaction and commitment for employees of color.Proposal text:

Background: Nonprofit human service and healthcare organizations are one of the fastest growing sectors in the United States with the third largest workforce employing 12.5 million workers in 2020 (Nonprofit Employment Report, 2016). At the same time, workforce diversity continues to increase with approximately 35% to 40% of social assistance workers self-identifying as a member of a racial and ethnic minority group (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). Although the nonprofit sector is a promising field for job creation and workforce diversity, the sector struggles with high turnover rates and low employee job satisfaction, particularly among employees of color (Lee, 2016). Workplace inclusion is recommended for improving human service employee job satisfaction and commitment (Mor Barak, Luria, Brimhall, 2021), however limited research explores these implications at different organizational levels [feeling valued by immediate coworkers (workgroup inclusion) and/or feeling valued by higher management (department inclusion)] and whether the influences of inclusion differ by employee race and ethnicity.

Purpose: This study investigated the relationships between employee perceptions of department and workgroup inclusion with employee job satisfaction and commitment at the department and workgroup levels, and whether these perceptions differed by employee race and ethnicity (employees of color relative to white employees).

Approach: Data were collected at three time points 6-months apart from a U.S. nonprofit healthcare organization. Response rates for each time point ranged from 71%−74% (n = 213−245). Approximately half of the sample self-identified being an employee of color.

Results: Multilevel longitudinal multiple group structural equation modeling results revealed employees of color experience inclusion differently than white employees. For employees of color, there were several significant direct and indirect effects from workgroup inclusion to job satisfaction and commitment, whereas there were no direct or indirect effects from inclusion to job satisfaction or commitment for white employees.

Conclusions/implications: Among nonprofit healthcare employees of color, perceptions of inclusion at the workgroup level serves as a critical focal point for cultivating more favorable perceptions of department level inclusion, employee job satisfaction, and employee feelings of workgroup commitment. Among white employees, there were no associations between inclusion and job satisfaction and commitment. This suggests that exposure to events in the workplace (interactions between coworkers and/or leaders designed to promote inclusion) among those from underrepresented demographic groups and from majority demographic groups result in differences in interpretation of the work environment regarding the importance of inclusion (Mor Barak et al., 2021). It may be possible that among white participants, efforts toward inclusion may go unnoticed or may be interpreted differently than participants from racial and ethnic minority groups. This information highlights the need for nonprofit healthcare leaders to make intentional efforts to increase feelings of inclusion for historically marginalized employees, and that doing so can help increase feelings of job satisfaction and commitment for employees of color. This information is critical to ensuring the design of workplace interventions are culturally competent and sensitive to employees’ unique characteristics.