A Global, Arts-Wide Articulation of Staff Motivations
At a time when the labor market is heating up, arts organizations must find ways to resonate better with the needs and expectations of employees in order to build employment offers capable of competing in a tight labor market.
The Advisory Board for the Arts is using conjoint analysis (also known as trade-off analysis) in order to give arts leaders a much clearer picture of what employees want, and what they are willing to trade off in order to get it. The results of conjoint analysis gives employers a map for deploying available resources to create the most compelling employment offer possible.
Participants in the research initiative will receive a customized analysis of the employment preferences of their staff, including breakdowns based on demographic factors (e.g., ethnicity), organizational factors (e.g., department), and talent factors (e.g., tenure) if participant numbers are sufficient to support it.
Preview Our Results
The Advisory Board for the Arts conducted a large-scale survey of arts staff members globally, from March-May of 2022. Fifty arts organizations participated in the initiative from the US, Canada, UK, continental Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, resulting in nearly 1500 employees completing the roughly 30-minute survey.
The survey uses a technique called conjoint analysis (essentially, forcing prioritization through choices) to tease apart preferences for attributes of jobs that individuals might struggle to evaluate individually. They evaluated 20 attributes of jobs, and also assessed their organizations against those attributes.
Key Takeaways from the survey:
Job schedule flexibility emerged as the area with the greatest opportunity for the average arts organization to improve the employment value proposition. Improving job schedule flexibility and hours is, on average, the same as giving $2,842 in salary to each staff member, annually.
Overall, older generations place more importance on artistic reputation whereas younger generations place much more importance on working in a diverse, equitable, inclusive and accessible environment.
Flexibility is a more powerful retention lever than artistic reputation for staff. The majority of staff members would trade away artistic reputation for a pay raise, but they would not make that same trade for a less flexible environment with a pay raise.
Our research team is currently recruiting participants for our second round of the global survey of arts organization employees. If you are interested in deploying the survey at your institution, please contact Diana Wang at diana.wang@advisoryarts.com by September 15, 2022.
Questions about the study and what participation entails? You can find a list of frequently asked questions below.