Financial Series: Staffing and Compensation

Reimagine your recruitment, retention and staffing structure for a more financially sustainable future.

Staffing and Compensation is a three-day workshop for school teams to explore innovative staffing models and analyze compensation structures.

School heads and their teams don’t often have the focused time or methods for bold and constructive thinking about their staff size and compensation models. Using insights from the NAIS Salary Explorer, Faculty and Staff Satisfaction Survey, as well as other NAIS Strategy Lab curated frameworks and processes, your school team will work to generate ideas for connecting your vision of the future to optimizing staff size, quality, and retention. You’ll leave with a pitch deck and a concise and compelling story that outlines new strategic approaches for your compensation and staffing model. 

New this year—pre- and post-sessions: In the pre-workshop session, registered schools can send 1-2 people from your team to learn how to pull the critical elements of data from DASL and other sources to guide your strategic work. In the post-workshop session, the entire team that attended the main workshop can join to discuss implementation progress, next steps, and strategies for tracking metrics both in the near-and long-term to maintain momentum around your innovation efforts. 

If you have questions about this session, please contact the Strategy Lab team at strategylab@nais.org.

Topics Covered

  • Your school’s vision in connection with the challenges or opportunities that exist around staffing and compensation
  • Data dashboards to assess internal and external markers to inform strategic approaches 
  • Innovative examples from the field, such as retention and recruitment strategies, compensation benchmarks, and more
  • Tools for communicating a bold new direction and ways to outline the strategic priorities to achieve this goal

Why the addition of pre- and post-workshop sessions?

Using data in strategy and innovation work can be overwhelming at times. Where should schools go to find useful data points to drive meaningful discussion? Which data are important for comparison points? How can schools effectively communicate data that motivates future change? 

The NAIS Strategy Lab has partnered with the NAIS DASL team to answer these questions and more through the additional sessions related to this workshop.

The pre-workshop session is designed to support school leaders who struggle with where to start when collecting data and need a simple and effective process for analyzing, visualizing, and communicating insights to others. You’ll find that by embedding data collection and analysis in a problem you are already trying to address, the work becomes more motivating, relevant, and engaging for those most interested in data-driven decision-making. 

The post-workshop session will help schools consider how to be more precise in collecting evidence on what is working (or not), provide frameworks for continuous reflection, and discuss the tools needed for ongoing communication and collaboration to make lasting change. You will be better able to enact new ideas or strategies that outline what success will look like and, more importantly, how you will know if/when success is achieved.   

These sessions won’t just teach you how to pull the data, they will teach you how to use the data to address a key issue you’re facing today. 

2024–2025 Lead Facilitators

  • Mark Mitchell, Vice President of Access & Affordability, NAIS
  • Jackie Wolking, Director of Innovation Programs, NAIS 
  • Hilary LaMonte, Vice President of DASL, NAIS

Registration Information

Schools determine up to six participants who will make up their workshop team. The ideal team size is three to six participants, but schools can decide to send only two participants. Individuals are not recommended due to the significant amount of team work time built into the agenda. You will need to know the number of attendees at the time of registration. You can make updates to the attendee names that fill your spots until two weeks before the event.  

If you choose not to send a team member to the pre-workshop session, the NAIS Strategy Lab team will compile and provide your dataset for the prework analysis component of the workshop. If you send a team member(s), they will compile this dataset. There are no discounts for schools that decide not to send participants to either the pre- or post-workshop sessions.

Cancellations received up to 30 business days before the start date of the program will be fully refunded, minus a $75 administration fee. Cancellations received less than 30 business days before the program will not be refunded. Cancellation requests should be emailed to strategylab@nais.org

Dates

  • Pre-Session: March 20, 2025, 1:00–4:00 PM ET
  • Main Session: April 8–10, 2025, 1:00–4:00 PM ET each day
  • Post-Session: June 5, 2025, 1:00–2:30 PM ET

Location

Online

Audience

This is a team-based experience, so a diverse group representing a cross section of your school (from two to six people) is important. Heads, CFOs, division heads, HR directors, strategic initiative directors, or other administrators in similar roles are the primary audience.

Cost

$680 per person (members); $950 per person (nonmembers)
Register