Personnel Committees

Personnel Committees

© Copyright Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD, Authenticity Consulting, LLC.

Vast majority of content in this topic applies to for-profits and nonprofits. This book also covers this topic.

Developing, Operating and Restoring Your Nonprofit Board - Book Cover

Overview of a Personnel Committee

The Board Personnel Committee is usually chartered to provide guidance, oversight and support to management as it develops and implements employee staffing, performance management and compensation systems. Typical annual recurring goals might include to:

  1. Ensure annual staffing analysis and planning to identify necessary expertise, roles and organization of roles to achieve strategic goals and other major priorities.
  2. Ensure comprehensive, fair and equitable employee performance management system.
  3. Ensure comprehensive, fair and equitable compensation system.
  4. Ensure Personnel Policies manual is updated and distributed to all staff and that policies and procedures are implemented in consistent manner.
  5. Ensure accurate and fair annual evaluation of Chief Executive Officer.
  6. Ensure sufficient coaching to the Chief Executive Officer, as needed, to successfully carry out the roles and responsibilities of that position.

The Committee should have a work plan that itemizes these, or very similar, annual goals and also associated objectives with each goal such that when the objectives are achieved in total, they also will have achieved its respective goal. When committees do not have work plans, they often flounder in finding valuable and focused means to provide value to the Board. Unfortunately, in these situations, many Board mistakenly conclude that “committees do not work”, or they reduce the number of committees, thinking that inactive committees were because there were too many — rather than realizing that committees can be extremely useful when focused on the most important annual recurring goals.

Additional Perspectives on Personnel Committees


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