 Good afternoon. So I'm Daniel Banks. I've been asked to facilitate this with our wonderful panelists and people who are bringing their knowledge and experience to the room. We thought, being after lunch, that we wouldn't necessarily have you sit right away because we know what happens after lunch when we sit down in our room. So the idea was to have a little bit more like a kind of a gallery type environment. Some folks have put things up on the wall about the initiatives that their organizations are doing. And maybe I'll just shout out to people now so you know who they are. We've got, please make some noise, Ari Edelson from the Orchard Project. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And Christy Hamilton from ERDA, University of Washington University of Washington. And are you officially part of the session today too, Tom? Yeah, he's always. Well, I'm not officially, but I am. And Tony Hagopian, the Executive Director of ERDA, who is here to support Jason Najoum from the Yale Theater Management Knowledge Base. And Lauren Ruffin over here from Fractured Atlas. So before we kind of settle down into our chairs and stuff, we've got a few minutes to walk around. You can meet them, say hi, look at what they've put on the wall. It'll give you a little bit of, you know, we all process information in different ways. So I wanted to have some visual information as well as some auditory information. And also please add your responses on these wall papers here. And then I've got something on the chairs for folks who don't own the never chair. So what initiatives program would you like to see at your or a workplace so you can add your voices and desires and experiences to the wall? And we'll do that for about five minutes. And then we'll pick our chairs. So please, please let the game begin. OK. Yeah. So please take a minute to read what you're writing as well on the wall. Right. How are you doing? How are you? OK. Let's take our seats. Are there options? OK. OK. I can't believe it. I mean, all these years. Right. We're always birthday twins. I mean, you're older. So what does that mean? No, you've already hit them. So we got to get rid of you. Anybody else reaction? I'm going to go with you. Mike, Brandon. Great. I mean, I know. I don't have any. This is going to make me angry. Welcome everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Again, my name is Daniel Banks. And I'm going to be helping out with the order of things today. I do want to mention that we are being live streamed by HowlRound. So thank you so much, HowlRound. And please remind me your name behind the camera again. Pia. Pia. So Pia is our facilitator for live streaming today. So Pia's request is that we speak up and use our theater voices because we're also being signed simultaneously interpreted. So that will help the interpreter be able to give accurate interpretation. So thank you very much. The other thing I just want to encapsulate that the sort of the short version of the panel or the session description is what initiatives or programs would make it be a place that you want to work. So that's just so everyone knows where we are. We're in that session and had a very fun title, but which is also going to be critiqued as well in the session. Fortunately, we have to question everything, question everything. It's a good practice. But let's just begin if you'll indulge me. I don't know folks who were in the session earlier today or the speaker talk about neurobiology and the connection to the arts. And there's actually recent studies, surprise, surprise, because people have been doing it for thousands of years. But there are recent studies that conscious breathing actually leads to accessing parts of the brain that cannot be accessed any other way. And that when we access those parts of the brain, we can actually receive new information and learn new things. And it changes us. So if you are willing, if not, you can maybe think happy thoughts or something. But if you would be willing to take things off the lap and cross your legs and put your feet on the ground, feel where we are, and we've had wonderful acknowledgments so far in the conference about whose land we are actually on. And you can think about that as well. The indigenous peoples of this land who have been out of here, privileged to be here. And close your eyes or look at the floor or the ceiling and try to, as Thich Nhat Khan would say, take some conscious breaths, which means being aware of every moment of every breath. I'll help you digest it too. I also, in my responsibilities as facilitator, would just like to re-presence the agreements that TCG has been working with for this conference. And I ask that we assume, the first one is assume good intentions. And I just ask since we don't have time to necessarily discuss and process all the agreements that we assume good intentions with these agreements as well. But I think it is always nice to start a session with just a reminder of how to navigate this many people with this many interests in one room. So these are the agreements that TCG has been using. Assume good intentions. Listen for understanding. What's learned here, leaves here. No one said stays here, which means that if people want to say confidential things in the room that they can say that with the knowledge that nobody's going to then repeat it, you know, that it came from them. Allow everyone to speak for themselves, not on behalf of a group. Move up and move back or, as I like to say, wait, why am I talking, why am I not talking? And no one knows everything, but together we know a lot that there is collective wisdom in the room and collective intelligence. And that actually helps me read the dialogue and the things that we want to see change. So thank you. Thanks for listening to that. In an ideal world, we would all go around and say our names and our gender pronouns and our access needs and where we're from. And then it would be time to go. So I am going to ask you to find a partner and we're going to do one brief listening partnership. And maybe those are some things you'd like to share in the listening partnership with your partner. Namely, you're from your gender pronouns and access needs, which some folks aren't familiar with. But those are the kinds of things that we need to know about each other so that we can actually take care of each other. I've had people in those circumstances say my epi-pen's in their pocket or I'm hypo-bycemic so if I start eating it's not me being rude, it's just me taking care of so I don't fall out. So I think that's also really another addition to the list of ways that we get to know each other. So I'll see if we can just do it the easiest way possible just people sitting next to each other. Two, maybe you and Joan. You two, can we figure this out? Can you all sort of play around? Now we're going to do that again in a slightly different way. In a second I'm going to ask you to choose an A and a B and the A will be the person whose birthday comes first in the Roman calendar year. Okay, that's going to take 10 seconds to do so go, you have 10 seconds. Great, next thing. So B's are going to speak first and the way that this works is that it's a deep listening exercise which means that B's are going to speak and A, your only job is to listen to B. And since this is theater I'm going to give you in the manner of you're going to beam your loving attention in the direction of your B. So A, you're beaming your loving direction of your B. B, you're going to speak on a topic that I'm about to suggest and then in about two minutes I'm going to ask you to switch. Switch does not mean finding a partner. Switch means that A's will speak and listen, we're creative group. I found already this group that A's will speak and B's you will do what? And B, your loving attention in the direction of your A's. So the prompt that I'm going to suggest that you speak on and if you run out of things to say you can just gaze lovingly. You can repeat what you've already said but stay with it. And again I'll just reiterate. The listener, it's not the situation of somebody starts to talk about something at their work and you're like oh yeah that happened to me too. Your job is just to listen and B, listen and B. So B's, please speak about a situation at work where either you did not feel well supported by the infrastructure of your organization and you wish that you had been in a particular way or where you were exceptionally well supported and it's really innovative that your organization does that. So you can either talk about a challenge or you can talk about a success story and I'll give you about two to two and a half minutes depending on how hot the room seems to be and then literally and metaphorically. And then I will say switch. Great, B's please begin. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm sure you'll be proud of being the manager of the company. I think I saw him in the past. I should be proud of him. I think I'm very proud of him. I'm proud of him. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Please, please finish that thought. Please finish that thought. Please finish that thought. Come back, everybody. I have been told that I'm not speaking clearly enough for the livestream. So I will speak louder, that's never been said before in my life. trying to break out of the room, so I'm just explaining why I'm talking more loudly. Can we just, before we hear from the invited speakers, I would love to hear a few share-outs from you all of things that you discussed. I will say please only share something that you share and if it's something that you, your partner shared that you really really really want to share, maybe ask them if they could share it. Because again, given the confidentiality, we want to make sure that we respect that in the room as well as outside of the room. So a couple quick shares, either a success or a challenge, and say your name. Hi, my name is Michael Sag, I'm the managing director of WP Theater in New York and one of the challenges that I think we faced is we're a very small organization and up until two weeks ago there were only two full-time employees, the artistic director myself, and when we were bouncing ideas off of each other it became very apparent that we were each firm in our opinions and about two weeks ago we added two new staff members that have now brought into every one of our conversations so that we're actually having a dialogue about what, about not just each person's set of opinions but really feeding back on what what the other person is sharing with me and being able to share back with them, my thought based on what they've said, and the dialogue has improved in such an amazing, in such an amazing way I'm just very, I'm very grateful for this change in our structure. Thank you. Was there, were you raising your hand? I had very similar success story, luckily. Could you just say your name? Sure, sorry, I'm Jenny Lauditino, managing director for page 73 in Brooklyn. I have a 17-month-old and I found out I was pregnant about five months into my new job and I was very nervous to tell people and I wanted to come back and all of that and I found nothing but support and actually helped create parental leave policy that is now just a policy for the company and was able to take an eternity leave and not be paid and you know just like being the person who happened to get pregnant you know like helped really implement this new policy in our company and supportive environment all around and it's just great. Okay, I'll share because I was in search to share. Okay. My name is Julane Havens and I'm the associate artistic director of Commonwealth Theater Center in Louisville, Kentucky and I was just sharing that at our theater center, like most theaters, we're asked for evidence of what we do and why it's important and needing numbers on things that we don't really feel we want to put numbers on and I feel just very supported from both the leadership and artistic staff of our company who went with us and many trials and errors of figuring out how to make that work and now five years later we can say here's the growth of the students in our program, here's the impact of our plays in our community and that's been very fulfilling even though I've had to do less acting and directing in those things that I love so it's been wonderful for us. Yeah, just went with us as a team. Okay, one more. I have been encouraged by my partners to do it. I'm a relatively new managing director and Jill Anderson, surrogate stage and after assessing the situation on the ground we've elected to make a couple of staffing changes as generously as we can but what we found is that even in the leadership of the systems we're not necessarily in place, literally how do we do that? Do we have an institutional protocol for email, phones, cards, building access, all those things and so we need to build some structure and support to make those conversations as hard as they're going to be anyway work better even in the voluntary department. Thank you. I think it's important personally in a room that the people who've been invited to speak are not the only sort of experts in the room that there's a lot of expertise in the room. I think it's also really good to start off a session like this knowing that there are things good and positive things that are happening and it's not all an uphill battle and maybe also there are people who would like to accomplish something like what you did so thank you for sharing. So this is what the rest of our time is going to look like. Each of the four invited speakers are going to give about a five minute overview of their institution of work life and the initiatives that they have embarked on. Then there will be time to break out into small groups. You can get with one of them. We'll figure out a way in this room to all get together and be heard. We might want to spill out into the yeah don't tell anyone I don't think that's part of it. I didn't say that. But also I encourage if none of the things that are being discussed are pertinent to your organization or your organization's already accomplished all of those feel free to have a breakout session with like minded people that you find and if you just want to shout out at some point we'll give you an opportunity as we're breaking up. I want to have a conversation about whatever it is fill out the blank and then we can also have some breakout groups that are self-defined and then we'll come back share back we'll ask that each group do a brief report of what was discussed in the group and then we'll take another breath together and go on on our way. So that's what our time is like. Ari would you like to begin? You have five minutes to talk about your and is it okay for the folks if I do this? Go for it. That's what I'm not being secreted. This is a super message. So I'm just going to fill out a little time. Great. Ari what's going on at the Orchard Project? So I'm not sure how many of you know what the Orchard Project is but we are essentially one of the major development laboratories for new work in the country. One of the things that's actually so wonderful about looking at these little tags is that I sort of see many of the places that work that started the Orchard Project has gone on to. And we're essentially a community of work. We're a community of artists. And over the course of the last 10 or so years we've developed 200 shows that have pretty much gone up on almost every single stage in the United States give or take. And one of the things that happens is we're constantly trying to be full fitting to the artists that come. We don't have a program per say. There's no capstone. We want to meet artists where they are. And in the second year of the Orchard Project right by the name of Rene Graf came to work on a play that then became a play called Compulsion with the public. And she just asked us randomly, hey can I bring my kid? And we didn't have an answer. I called the managing director at the time and I said what should we do? And he says well I guess we could just let her bring her kid. And we didn't really think much about it. You know we were young. We were just starting this thing out. We didn't really have rules to go by. But little did we know that as soon as she arrived she let us know that none of the other play development laboratories in the country would let her bring her child. It was actually against policy at that time in 2008 for her to bring her child to a number of other sort of similar institutions. And so thus became sort of a golden rule. Like treat every artist the way that you wish to be treated if you were the same as that. And over the course of the next nine or so years we probably hosted basically Great God Pan. If you did it it's because there was a child at the Orchard Project. Compulsion if you did it it was because there was a child at the Orchard Project. Wholehearted you did it because there was a child at the Orchard Project. We could sort of list the plays that the children were with and they've become a huge part of our community. We realized that wasn't enough. And so last year at the urging of the Dr. Robert Schenken who's on our board we instigated a child care initiative without any research whatsoever. We said it can't just sort of be one week. It can't be need based. We just have to say it's good business for us to make the Orchard Project entirely child friendly. So if you come with a two year old and you want to bring a caretaker we'll make that work. If you come with a three year old and you want us to find care you will make that work. If you come with a six year old and you would like us to kind of find an external program we will make that work. And we basically did that last year. We raised the money for it actually fairly quickly. We did a huge amount of research and we realized no one else had data on this. There's very little industry data about children and families. And the best we could have is we actually reached out to some economists at Cornell who were doing research on the effect of child care in America workforce in general. And their research is actually shocking because they believe and they sort of statistically prove it. And there's very small graphs here if you want to see their stats. Is that if you eliminate all of the other factors workforce participation by women is most highly correlated to child care. It is not correlated to leadership nearly as much as child care. It is not correlated to middle management nearly as much as it is to child care. And not just child care as far as presenting paid leave but an entire ecosystem of taking care of people with families. And of course we exist in a world in which there are many different versions of what that parent may be. And so it's not necessarily one definition of a family that we have to consider. There's many definitions of a family that we have to consider. And so if we're collectively invested in the idea of the representation of the most diverse group of voices as possible. And the most diverse stories as possible. Then addressing this issue is actually very important. We've learned some lessons. We're really excited about learning more as we continue doing it. It's not that hard. We learned that that kind of sort of has a peak cost per child per week around X amount. And then after so many families it actually has an economy of scale. Most of the problems that people say are very problems that we would have encountered. Like state licensing or insurance are generally faux money that excuses for not addressing this issue. And we're kind of really excited to learn alongside other institutions that want to address this collectively. Because I think just to sort of finish, I can easily foresee a day in a few years from now where there will be the institutions that address this and those that don't. And if you want to be on this side of the aisle when you're speaking to artists you may have to start figuring this out. Because the artists are talking about it and they will choose the institutions that are addressing it. So I don't need to be so mercenary. But it's kind of mercenary. I think it's a big deal. I think it's actually not just human, but it's actually really important to the businesses that we all collectively run. So Laura, anything from Fractured Outlets? Okay, I'm Lauren. Thank you so much for listening to me. That's my lovely sheet over there with sort of how I've sketched out these five minutes. You can say I'm a classical trained fine artist. So Fractured Outlets for those of you who don't know is the largest association of artists in the country. We're also the largest principal sponsor. We sponsor anywhere between 4,000 and 5,000 projects across all disciplines a year. We also have a liability insurance program. We offer visa letters for artists who back when people wanted to come into our country to perform. That was really gangbusters until recently. But also we also offer a ticketing platform in CRM called Artfully. And so those are our products. Oh, it's SpaceFinder in some cities that you might be in. You have a SpaceFinder which allows you to find creative spaces. I oversee our policy marketing communications and fundraising function. We're about a 28 million dollar a year organization, about a $5 million operating budget. And there are some things about how we're structured that makes some of the things I'm going to talk about probably harder to implement in your organization, but I figured I'd throw it out there for conversation anyway. So hopefully we can all agree on this. Work shouldn't suck. That is our core model and we're sort of we're structuring programs for our employees. We like coming to work. We try to create environment where folks can be creative. The majority of our staff are working artists. I think I'm the only person who's not a working artist and has never worked as an artist in our organization. Everyone else is either a musician, we have a bunch of performing artists. So a lot of our policy sort of came about because we had staff who wanted to have a full-time sustainable job but also were producing plays and producing work throughout the year and needed some time to be able to sort of explore their creative side. And we recognize that having a working artist is a little bit easier for our staff to be able to connect with the folks that we serve. So work shouldn't suck. The other thing that we've made pretty clear is that we're a pretty employee-first organization. We really lead into yes, similar to what Ari was saying earlier. So we currently have an unlimited vacation policy. All of the, which sounds crazy as hell, right? I was like really unlimited when I started? Really? Actually limited? But yeah, and all the research suggests that when you get people on limited vacation they actually use less of it. If you tell people they have four weeks off a year they take four weeks. Our average staff member takes about a week of just pure vacation time. The majority of staff take their time off to be producing plays so they're just working in another capacity. We also have, in terms of how we hire, we've undergone a major shift in our hiring process and it resulted in sort of number three of our ARIO policy anti-racist anti-crushion work that we've done over the last couple of years. Our hiring process has number one, because of some of the statements we've made which I'll talk about later, we now get up to, I currently have a position open that was open two years ago when I started. We got about 50 applications for it. I looked this morning at about 300 applications for it, which is a nightmare in some ways. But we've been able to really attract a different type of candidate and folks really want to come work with us because we've been so vocal about our belief systems. As far as the hiring process we now ask people to talk about their belief system with regard to sort of all of our basic community and they are sort of understanding what diversity looks like, how they're interacting in the workplace with colleagues who may have different backgrounds than they do. And so we now hire people who already have the cultural belief system that we want our organization to have as opposed to believing that we have to immediately start from scratch and train everyone from scratch. We recognize their knowledge, that's inherent in a lot of the conversations that we're having that's just out there and people have it. We start our employees at I believe 46 or 48 thousand dollars a year. That's our entry level base. We have four tiers. Everybody within the same tier okay everyone in the same tier makes the same thing. At a leadership level we have this fair amount of back and forth. I think there should be an opportunity for really great staff members to be able to get an increase in their salary and we're currently working to roll out some stuff around that but that was essentially an equity thing that was implemented prior to my starting. Our ARA policies, we've done a lot of work in this area that I think some of you probably heard we talked about yesterday at the managing director's lunch but we've done everything from and this was really spurred by employees who did not feel safe in our work space. We had a number of employees who were having really different interactions with our colleagues and really different interactions with our customer base and so it felt like management was not really hearing their concerns and so we've done everything from we've changed our call script for our customer service team all we have to having sort of agreements report for folks inside and out of the organization, our ecosystem to sort of report things that might make people uncomfortable and zombie so I'll just let you guys ask me about that. It sounds really interesting. The zombie thing is I think in every organization we have things that have always been done that I think we have a culture of killing them pretty quickly. So if there's a program that doesn't work, if there's a policy that stops working, we don't hold on to it because we have a board member or that's how it's always been. An example of that is we're currently in the process of, if anyone here has been physically sponsored by Fraction Atlas, we have a thousand dollar threshold that story has been told about why there's a thousand dollar threshold before you can apply for a grant for the foundation. I've heard everything from the foundation told us it had to be that way, it's part of the fiscal sponsorship rules. The reality is a huge barrier for folks who don't have anyone who can just write a thousand dollar check and we're really being conscious of really wanting to bring in people of color and folks from rural communities and people who just don't have access to wealth like that. It was an unfair barrier. It turns out that was just something that our founder did back in 2007 when we first started it because we were getting crappy grant proposals and he didn't feel like having to tell people their grants were shit. So it's like we had to kill that zombie quickly and we asked questions about things like that all the time and so that's just talking about how do we hold on to for reasons that probably happened a long time ago. So yeah. Kristi Hamilton from ARDA. So this year the University Residence Theatre Association has an umbrella program and it's now two years, three years old, when RA, Liz and I all met in Washington DC at TCG's conference there. We had said to RA there has to be something that we can create that will help not only small producing companies but large producing companies offer really comprehensive competitive benefits because I think something that our industry lacks or could do a little better is offering employee retention benefits. So this pension program is an effort, is a start in order to do that. I think first what I'll say is ARDA is really known for our recruitment. It's our flagship program but we do so much more than just recruitment. We do a lot of ancillary vital services to running your business. So we do payroll and we do pension and we do resource sharing and we do career development and we do it across the country. So we have a large and Michael Saig, right? You were an intern at ARDA? 1998. So we have a very deep alumni pool. So the program itself is an effort to help you retain your employees in a better way and I think that's why Liz here is our initial company that joined the umbrella with cutting balls. Yes, it was our pilot. Yes. So we've had some success with it and we'd like to continue to build that because at ARDA we believe that the profession, the pathway to profession is through quality training but also through legitimate professionalized business strategies. And that's something that you know in a lot of our programming through like ARDA Care helping actors get their health weeks. This pension program that we are devising right now called partner modeling which takes a university and a local producing company and helps them connect to share resources because I think just like Fraction Atlas, we're all in the same game. We're just at different levels and I think a misconception is that universities have all of this money. There's just ridiculous amounts of money at the university level but I can't tell you one member that has ever told me no no no I have too much money. So what we try to do throughout like our national network is to say we have resources in all of these different ways from training to producing and what we'd really like to do is help artists move through that pathway so that way you can have a very full life and a very full career in the arts. And I think that's what our mission is. I know I'm very short on that. I think that was, that's my pitch. So how does that umbrella work? Oh thank you Tony. Thank God you're here. So our umbrella is basically why it was started with that Urda has a standing pension program through Tia because we're a mainly earned service program or a company. So when we had talked to Liz and Liz was a tectonic at the time she didn't have the assets to be able to go to these pension programs and say I'd like to offer this to my employees. So in the beginning of it what we had approached Ari with, so this is what Ari's kind of labor of love for all of us, is saying well Urda has all of these assets. How do I better leverage my assets as a company so that smaller companies can then also like join and have a pension program. So a large part of that pension program is the fact that it's a collective. That what we'd like to do is have other companies join the collective because as that collective grows we can use it for an unlimited amount of things that we can negotiate for, workman's comp, health insurance, all of these things that I think as an industry of very small producing theater companies we lack. And I think this is the thing I've heard, I don't know if anybody else has heard this, but across this conference it's like there is no resource, there's no centralized data like where do I go and who do I talk to about implementing these programs. And I think that's why I think we'll see more of these hopefully. But our pension program is a collective in a way to bring all of us small to large from you know the individual artists to the university producing repertory theater or our partner theaters that they can all come together and then we can work as an industry to get better rates, better health insurance like I made it to a minute. So I think so Ari is here as an effort because he is our financial advisor and he can talk all about basis points and he can talk all about how it actually works and should be shared like compliant organization and he can absolutely answer all of those questions. And I can talk about what it's like to actually do it. Exactly. It's not hard. It's not. Who's eligible to use the umbrella? Everybody. Right? You have a university. In fact it's mostly not universities because universities actually have their own. So it's places like Cottonball or Tectonic, small theater companies that have enough regular employees that or maybe just a few regular employees that they'd like to be able to offer that but they're too small on their own. Because I think this is the other thing that I'll say is that as we legitimize our business practices and we offer comprehensive and competitive benefits, I think we as administrators are the best spokesperson for this industry when it comes to responsiveness, when it comes to change for our industry. And I don't think it's funders and I don't think it's CEOs on our boards that I'll run Fortune 500 companies or whatever. I think it's us. So in order to retain us from other sectors that hire our similar skill sets, we need to be able to offer our employees something that keeps us here. And we need to be able to retire eventually. Yeah. You can do that if there's no benefits in place. Right. Keep the train going. Great. Thank you so much. From the Yale Theater Management Knowledge Base. Hi everybody. Thank you for being here. It's so great to see so many people. So let me tell you a little bit about the Yale Theater Management Knowledge Base. I've been the managing editor there. This is like my last formal engagement in that role. So if you're interested in the knowledge base, I have information I can give you about that and my successor. The Yale Theater Management Knowledge Base was created ten years ago and it is a repository of theater management knowledge and management tools for use by educators and students and also theater practitioners. One of our biggest groups of materials are case studies, but we also have sample contracts and things like that. And so this project came out of me being in that role and also this program is nestled in the theater management department at the Yale School of Drama, which for those of you who don't know, it's sort of like a very close partnership with Yale Repertory Theater, so we're both an educational environment and workplace at the same time. So that situation sort of made this be a great laboratory for trying to experiment with a different way of thinking about evaluation, performance management, feedback, and ultimately end-to-end professional development within a work setting. So when we set out to redesign the way that we did this for students, we figured out and heard feedback really early on that actually this was totally applicable to employees in any workplace. So we did have a system before so we did, the process was that we surveyed all the people who have participated in the system before, higher parts of hierarchy, lower parts of lateral people that sort of outside the system but also would participate in like 360 reviews to see what their experience with the system was like. And then me and I did this with a colleague, Gretchen Wright, who had graduated the year before and worked at the time for an organizational performance consulting firm. We surveyed and did a meta-analysis of what is out there when it comes to performance management theory and practices. You know, yes, what had been created 50 years ago that has given us this annual review concept but also what books were released last year. And then also because all of this was done through the lens of trying to make the work at the school and the rep more inclusive, how can we apply critical race theory, how can we apply restorative justice, things like that to make this a better system. So we surveyed the field and then we created a new design, shared it with the stakeholders, got feedback and then ultimately created an implementation plan. So over the next three years, the department is going to roll this out. So that's sort of a summary of like how we did it. What it is, some fundamental theory behind it. First off, trying to reorient this process to being employee focused, like others have said, as opposed to organization focused. The idea that if your people are growing, the organization will grow. And I think the other really important thing is that and this is based on work that was written about, I can't think of the author's name but the book is covering. Catherine Schultz is being wrong as another book that talks about this, where most people spend most of their time and energy trying to pretend like they're perfect. And that's a lot of wasted energy because actually what helps people grow is making mistakes often and then learning from them. And so literally what we do usually is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing to both grow ourselves and grow the organization. So this turned out to be calling for a culture change in the department about how open and transparent we would be about what we're struggling with, what we want to learn and how we want to grow and how we can do that within our roles and then ultimately support people leaving if they want to. So this idea of, we sort of think of it like a loop. You're going along and then you make a mistake and you figure out why didn't I make that mistake, like kind of diagnosed to root cause, design a new either development solution or like, oh actually I'm never going to be good at that thing. So I need to actually pull this colleague in to help me because that's a weakness I don't want to work on. And then you sort of catapult yourself up into the next level. Or just flat lining. It requires the spin to get yourself up into the right when it thinks about what you think about, like, fulfilling your potential. Right? So then we thought, well how do we systematize that within like an employee life cycle? So actually using the framework of a student coming into a three year program actually maps really well onto hiring and onboarding through the life cycle of an employee towards eventually all of your employees are going to leave the company. So and that should be like encouraged when it's time, right? And so we sort of mapped a three year plan for how one would come to the organization, learn the systems at the organization, collect data longitudinally about what they're like, make some sort of synthesis around that, decide what they're going to do about that based on their job, and then ultimately prepare to leave. Thank you to all four of you. We have here the options and then I'll ask if anyone wants to put another option on the table. We have Ari and the child care initiative that he described. We have Lauren and the employee first various programs that were described to Fractured Atlas. We have Christie and the umbrella policy which really focuses on employee retention, if I said that correctly. And then Jason, which a whole lot of things including how to use the database or the knowledge base, but what I took away from that was also that you're really thinking about culture changes within an organization, how to create culture shifts within an organization so that you can actually create change in that organization. And also it seems to be about like the life cycle of the employee. So are there any other burning questions, desires in terms of improving work-life balance, employee culture, programs that are offered at institutions that you would like to also hold a break up session for? Is everybody happy to go to one of these four? Yes, please. Your first session and when people need to go. How do we address people knowing when to gracefully move on? My kind of creative culture where that's not a bad thing. Your first session in our field right now. Cool. I'm good. I'm not actually proposing another one and if this doesn't work then it doesn't work. Is there any possibility we could make them a little shorter and the idea of having to select which of these breakouts I'm going to go to is horrible because I want to have conversations about all four but I could at least narrow it to two if I had the opportunity. Just to throw up. There's another option which is that we don't do breakouts. So we can just do a show of hands. This is called Adaptable Leadership. My favorite new term that I learned this weekend. How many folks would like to...I think my short answer to your question is open space technology says follow your feet. So my short answer would be visit. Bumblebee. But we could also rethink and just have a big open conversation. So how many people would like to break out into breakout sessions? One, two, three. Does that mean that everybody else wants to stay in a big group? How many people want to stay in a big group? Okay, the group has it. So maybe maybe just do some Q&A now. Does that sound what would be useful? I mean, this is about you. This is what's going to be useful for you. So is there something else you would like to do? Okay, great. Q&A. It's open for Q&A. Yes, please. So for all of the panelists and probably everyone's room, I'm relatively new in the management side of the arts and performance master's degree. I'm the managing director of the Children's Theater. Very large organization. We have satellite theaters around North Texas. We run by a governing board of trustees and we have a business manager who is right out of corporate America. Every efficiency that comes out of corporate America is her world. That's not our world as artists. We have to juggle between that. If a time she does not turn to that time, they don't get paid for a month. But sometimes the time she's not on time because they got more applause for their show and it didn't end on time for them to get the paperwork. And navigating the world of the artistic reality and the spontaneity, the unique schedule that we bring against the world double business that you have to have tax deadlines, you have to have contracts. I'm struggling with that because all of my artists thrive as artists and I see where they're coming from. And then I'm met with these awkward deadlines and these awkward policies. If you didn't do your requisition form and triplicate, you're not going to get your pens to write and invest. Great. Can anyone speak to that? Am I the lone manager? So does anyone have any suggestions for Michael about how to navigate this tricky balance? Have you talked to your business manager about it? I mean that would be my first. Yes, I actually gave her the book The Rise of the Creative Class. She rejected it wholeheartedly and the first use supports her. They want the fiscal management or corporation and they want to be more corporate. And I do understand that. Of course. It's the communication between the two that I'm asking for. You hire an associate underneath her to act as an intermediary? Not my place in the organization. To Chilson McLoven and San Diego, you might look for a peer in a larger performing arts organization who could act as a counselor to the who they would look up to because it's a bigger organization and knows how the arts really were. And say why don't we arrange a meeting and just have breakfast and get together and share sort of thoughts and build an ongoing relationship there about what's normative in our world as opposed to what's normative over in the corporate world. Just to second that, we have a similar sort of problem with our paymaster program services a lot of university theaters. And those universities are very often not regularly hiring guest artists. It's a new kind of thing not by one of the artistic schools but by the procurement office or the business office. So sometimes they'll get contracts or language and stuff that they say, well, we can't do this whether it's something in an equity contract or a USA contract. And exactly what you're talking about is we find other examples from other universities that we've worked with. We had a university tell the theater that they had to pay the actors an hourly minimum wage to learn their lines outside of rehearsal because that's what the law said that this was a lawyer unfamiliar with anything to do with theater and reading. So we found another university in that state system just a different campus that we had worked with a lot and got their lawyers to say, no, no, no, here's why. And they listen to that because they're speaking the same language. So it's very similar to another resource. I don't know if there's like a VLA volunteer lawyers in the arts or something in your area, but like we have an accountant that has worked in various spaces with us over years but has worked with a lot of varying size nonprofit theaters and organizations and at this point I basically keep her for like high level analytical stuff as a sounding board. So I almost never see her on a regular basis in my office. She's very minimal hours a year, but she's very valuable especially when I have new board people coming in to come in and help explain like this is from a very experienced accountant who's been in the spaces for many many years. This is how this works. This is the challenges. This is not rocket science. This is not, you know, and just kind of walk through that wonderful sort of even keel account in a way. And that's been really, really helpful sometimes. I just want to say I want to generalize this because I don't want to isolate on this individual who could be watching this. I have a little bit of an oppositional perspective to this because everything I'm hearing is sort of like ways to work around this person, but it seems like if the board wants something, but the management wants something else and you're not able to have these conversations and that person's not budging, like there's some major underbelly culture issues that I'm hearing and I can't like diagnose them, but like I'm just saying that like they're ultimately it would be much more high functioning if you just like actually solve the problem, which was either work on like that person's understanding of the process and like why did that person even want to work at this organization and like all that, or like decide that that's not a good fit. So I would say that generally speaking, like these issues you should just tackle them head on as opposed to trying to find ways or actions. So Chris and Adam. I was going to move to a different topic. I was going to say like just one more thing generally is like do people drink, do you drink with your colleagues? Like so many of these people get caught up in their silos because people are control freaks. And this I'm learning in this industry there are a lot of things that I hear that really is the product of a person's personality and their own shit working itself out in the workplace. And I can't say I work with people who are completely different. I am the most chilled back like chilled, legally trained person you've ever meet. And there's shit that I get like no this has to be this way. And there's shit where I'm like you know what we need to go out and have a drink. We need to have lunch together, we need to spend time getting to know each other and build to trust. And so I've had a number of conversations this weekend where like what we're really talking about the underlying problems that you have a colleague that you have no working relationship. And that you guys don't trust each other yet. So what you're really trying to do is like be friends with somebody so you can say yo can you chill out and try it this way for like two weeks? Like can we just give people a break for two weeks and if it works then let's keep it going. You have to build that relationship with that person. And the converse too I would say. Exactly. Sometimes those systems like I'm the same but I have a colleague who is so systematic and when I then turn over I'm fine I'll do it and I'm like oh actually. So I think it's a two way street in that sense. So I think thank you very much for starting us off. Let's do yours Chris. I wanted to just and you alluded to it but I think all the groups kind of talk a little bit about compensation, retention, equity and you were you started where you were working under one system you're talking about evolving so I wanted to hear just what was working what wasn't directions that you're thinking of and if there's other thoughts around compensation as it relates to all of those issues. I've always worked with organizations where people were you know bonus at the end of the year based on their productivity and their successes throughout the year. It's also an interesting signaling tool. If you've gotten a $10,000 or $15,000 bonus and your colleague knows that you've gotten that and they've only gotten a $2,000 bonus then they know it's time to make some different employment choices. So Fraction Atlas has a flat tier structure and my problem with that it was done for equity reasons. We've all read wage gap stuff and we're aware that people are kind of not paid fairly based on whether they choose to negotiate or their perceived value within the organization. So everyone at a level has the same title. We have an associate specialist and then we now have an associate director and director roles. So my problem with that is you know in the last two years we've made two employees. It took a long time for us to get the reaction to them but for that 6-8 month period this person who's very low performing is making the same thing as all of their high performing colleagues at the same level. So we're literally going to fire people who are making the same thing as the high performers and the high performers know it. And that kills morale. And so the system that we're likely going to move to is a system whereby we have steps within each tier. And we're training staff because I also think that Fraction Atlas is a place for you. You come in and everyone's getting the same thing and that's great. You leave here. You're going to have to learn to negotiate for your salary and justify your value. And so I also felt like especially since we hire disproportionately young people it's their first job. Negotiating your salary and being able to justify your value in an organization is an important skill. So we're giving them negotiated training around sort of OKRs and everything's tagged to OKRs which are goals, objective key results. And they have to look back over those OKRs they've had each quarter for the last year annually and say I've done these things. And these things brought in X revenue or X members or this particular policy change or this work. And as a result this is the reason why I need to move up to the next tier. I deserve to move up to the next tier. And that's going to be a big change for our organization. So my question I think is just for Jason I feel like you were describing how you got to the tools that you developed. But we didn't quite get to hear what the tools are. And also I was wondering how proprietary these tools are. Is this a shareable model of the specific tools you've developed? So Andrew the second thing first. What we did was we synthesized things that were out there and made sense of it for our environment. But little what we did was copyrightable. So please enjoy. Keep credit if that's worth it to you. But I think the trickier thing than just taking pictures of this is actually doing it for your organization. Which requires a certain level of attention and expertise I think. In terms of the actual tools themselves. So it's easier I think to describe this based on the parts of the process. So the first part of the process is awareness. Which is sort of you could call it part of the onboarding etc. And this is about the culture and the system not necessarily about person's job. Although you could have that be part of this too if you have necessary training for the particular role. And so this is about this I think works in a school context in particular but I think actually it would work well in any context. Is there's actually like shared vocabulary just like we do with EDI that needs to be had about like what do these things mean and what are the values of this organization when it comes to this work. So for example there's a book called Mindset by Carol Dwig. And so we transition people from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. For the system to work everyone has to be on the same page about being oriented that way. And so actually having people read some chapters from that. We actually for this project created a syllabus of 12 workshops that people would do over the life cycle of them and the company. And so there's like three around the first part. The first part being getting the mindset right around what they're here to do. The second is actually about giving feedback. Something that people I think just I've heard people just think expect that you know like you learn someday but actually like kindergarten didn't teach you that very well. They did teach you about sharing but not about how to talk about when the person didn't share very well with you. And so there's actually a really great book called Thanks for the Feedback that became or has become more viable around this. Some a little bit about that there are actually three different types of feedback. This is one model. There's three different types. Appreciation, coaching and evaluation. And most systems across all industries try to do all those three things in one. But that gets very confused and they do it only once a year. And so actually breaking down that sometimes it's just about appreciation. Sometimes it's just about coaching without like a sense of like you're not doing this well enough. And then sometimes like maybe on an annual basis you do need to make decisions about promotion, raises, exit, etc. And so but it's really important for the giver and the receiver to get on the same page about what kinds of feedback they're wanting to receive in that moment and what they're not. And oftentimes the tensions come when those things get confused and actually you only need evaluation very little bit of the time. But most of the time you need coaching, you know, which is much more of a friendly relationship between supervisor and employee or even laterally than it is about like you're not doing this well enough, right? So those are some of the ways but I call it training because you need to all be on the same page about what it's worth to mean. And the last piece actually which is the part of the project that we're going through right now is actually establishing for each role and for the organization what are the core competencies and being able to like have shared vocabulary around that. So that when you want to give feedback to someone and you say I need you to pay more attention to time management or something. Do they actually know what you mean by that? Are they hearing it the way you're giving it? We make a lot of assumptions and it's received knowledge. This is actually also where white supremacist filter comes in. But not everyone actually agrees with that. And this is actually where it's customizable to the organization, right? What does this group of people want to do when it comes to their values and the culture that they want to have? The first part of it, then there's, you know, then I could go through it but those are some of the, like that's deep dive into one particular part of it. Thank you. So you've been waiting for a while and then also I think you, did you have your hand up before? You still aren't just sitting? Sorry? So I I've recently taken over as the executive director of the ensemble studio theater. I'm very happy to be there. And I, and it is an organization, like many arts organizations where I've worked that has no no formal review structure at all. I've worked so many, I mean I'm sure this is true in a lot of industries, but I mean certainly everywhere I've worked it's a huge struggle and it's something that I really believe in but I want to approach really mindfully and and I'm, I was really interested to hear these sort of resources and I'm wondering if you if anyone here or any of the panelists had any resources or thoughts on A, creating and instituting that sort of procedure and B, any tips on how it's gone well or badly? I would say we recently, I'm from Ditchery Gardens Theater, we recently shipped into twice a year reviews. First is before the budget is approved so that you can make your case for a raise and that that's the time that you talk about your value and negotiate where you are and then halfway through the year we check back on our bowls and that's the coaching portion and that seems to work really well. We've got a lot of young staff and we've gotten, we flipped almost all of our staff in the past year so it's been a bit easier to implement because we got new, new, new kids than some of us, but it seems like the separation and just telling everybody in the month of July you need to meet with your supervisor and then whoever at the top tier is holding supervisors in the department as accountable, it's been not very, very difficult for us to implement but the separating it is what has been really used for us. I should also just say one, this is not something I normally talk about, my colleague Tim can be here for some family reasons our website has all of Tim's work, we have a section called how we work, everything from all of our policies to how we hire, how we evaluate staff he's worked on a manual that talks exactly about what you were asking we've worked with our organizations to implement starting evaluations, we do crucial conversations, trainings and we're in the process of actually building a menu of sliding scale services but it's all Tim's work, I'm like just the worst stand-in ever for him so a lot of what you're saying, I think if you checked out our website and I'm happy to connect you with Tim, I just didn't want to leave without that getting to him I know Tim, I used to work for Fraction Atlas so call Tim, let Tim, he's got you thank you, yes please I'm just looking at this on this wall, it says paid family leave I was just curious, two fold questions, one we know that the money is an issue and paying people when they're not there and sometimes for very small organizations it's not possible at all, so I'm curious if there's any people who have some sort of paid material that isn't just like we pay you your full salary for three months which I don't personally know of organizations that are able to do that, so are there interim things that people have at their organizations and two, actually made this three goal so if you did institute that policy, how did you get there, how did you carve that out and third, if your organization doesn't have that and you'd like to advocate for that and you are one of those people that makes those decisions, what would be persuasive for you to make those changes, sorry, three questions I just did that, so I just said we want this process within my organization with our board and we have the starting benefit of the California Requires, the California Disability Pays 6 Weeks Disability and 60% of your salary, so we had that as a start, no I did not have that no it is for any parents, a new father could also get disability and that is through the state but we felt that that was not enough because no one in our staff is getting paid enough to be able to still live on that and it was, my artistic director and I were on very different places, I wanted to operate from a place of generosity because the staff retention issue is a bigger thing for me having to be the one replacing people and she was worried about who's going to do everyone's work while they're gone and we ended up presenting it to the board but what we came up with was our organization is willing to pay the additional 40% for the six weeks so that we have someone going to pay people we have a fairly generous sick end vacation leave so someone could be gone and get paid for up to 12 weeks if they use all of their leave at a time but it took a lot of internal debating about what's important, what's work doing but I've also worked at other organizations where we just did each other's work and it was like I was in an organization where our ED was out for 14 weeks, leading up to a fundraiser but we just had an agreement that it's like everyone's going to pitch in and cover it because you know one day it's going to be you but you have to have your entire staff be on board with that as a model and really talking about your staff first and then bringing what you come up with with your staff to the board is the biggest thing but you just have to figure out what works for you with the number of people that you have but you got to pay people something because otherwise you will just lose them is what I've found. We're nearing the end of the session and I just feel like we need to get a few more questions about whether you're responding to that. I think the idea at least for me personally of family leave is like approaching it from a more holistic vision of also just not parenting but like realizing that we are going through an incredible demographic shift in our country where the workforce is our parents are getting older and we're getting older and we're going to need to be taking care of them too. So having policies can be flexible to take care of your kids, your parents, you know a partner like we need to have an approach that can work for everything. It's sort of jumping on that though and I'm just curious really quickly because we try and do that. Our leave program is a leave program. It could be maternity, it could be parental care whatever it is is what it is. The problem that we're starting to encounter is by expanding it in that way all of a sudden I feel like I'm forced into a position where I've got to create some limitation because if we're covering all ends of the spectrum all of a sudden you have people who will have multiple things as I've had through periods and it's like right but when's the point that I can reasonably say I'm sorry I can't cover that one because you already had one that was over you had a child and now you have a parental issue. Does anybody have a sort of successful... I've never worked in a theater context. I currently work for a service organization so it's different but I'm just thinking there are some administrative tasks and we do have an unlimited leave policy. It was funny when we had an employee recently come and say wow get pregnant and then she was like well does that count too? It was unlimited vacations, unlimited leave. But we also have about half of our staff is remote at least two days a week and so I've managed people over the last years. Some women choose to come back part time a little bit more and some people want to take that full time and I think my most recent employee came back after two months and just worked remotely and so I think it's how do you, depending on the size of your organization, use all the tools in your toolbox as a manager to be able to take some of the burden off. So how are you having conversations with your colleagues about like what is it that you want? Can you come back a little bit earlier and work remote for two days a week which allows you to not have to pay for childcare and still spend time with your kid but there's at least some tasks that you can do to help. And so again how are you being creative and flexible thinking about everything you have as a manager in your full box to be able to get people, get the work done and create a great balance for your employees. Thank you. I think there's one person over here that I didn't see I think it was really great. So there's a lot of talk in the field about child programs, family forward programs, for guest artists. I'm wondering how many of us are offering those same benefits to our resident staff, right? So that's a no. Or is the assumption you live here, you've figured it out, you've got a lot of people in your neighborhood now. Does that work for you to make that program a bit? That's for all staff members? That's for staff and our visiting artists. That's for staff and visiting artists. What we're trying to just even get, this is like a good question. The data is just not out there as to who's doing what right? It's just like you know like let's just send, you know it's just that it's interesting we use the graph up here, it's the graph from that wonderful Google of the artistic and executive directors, because it's just so great to have this one massive crowd-funded, you know, crowd-source piece of data. We should be doing, I think one of the things that I'm just learning so much about the various processes here, doing something similar just to understand what, you know, different sized organizations are doing would be very useful for any of us. It would be amazing if like, you know, small organizations obviously it's super possible to do some of this, but like if people banded together to offer like child care for like the region and pooled resources or something, you know. There are advocates, we've learned there's advocates that in places you do not expect them to be, and one of the chief places is your insurance broker. Your insurance brokers are actually believe it or not really savvy, because they have to deal with so many other you know like other organizations, like a lot of theaters in New York, CNS does us, they were just purchased by A.J. Gallagher, who does the insurance for like the television show Survivor. So they've got the entire range of crazy A.J. Gallagher is covering, and if you, like, I believe that there's even a, you name it, they've made a product for it, including one that paces out a, you know, like is a alternative to the New York state insurance funds in, you know, comp policy and has built into it some form of paid leave coverage in that policy. So it paces out, you know, sort of the illness for the organization in a way that isn't a scary budget once. So we just have a few minutes left, I've already been given the five minute signal. I would love to just as a way to take us out, if a few people who haven't, whose voices we haven't heard yet, could actually just reflect on something you're taking away from this session. We can popcorn if we can keep it really brief, but just something that you're taking away that will help us think about the trajectory of the session, and it's hopefully practicality. I think that searching for resources, like hearing how many resources are out there to access which feels a little overwhelming right now, but probably doesn't really give something that happens. I just feel like we're still on the edge of figuring out childcare for the masses. We're right there. And it's possible. I just have to finish that. I wanted to share something that Erin Washington said in the session we were co-facilitating yesterday. She said when she first moved into an apartment and before she had sort of furniture and stuff like that, she put signs on the wall, she was like SOFA, TV, and sort of one by one those things sort of came in. I do sort of feel like also to quote Amelia Ketchaparo, I feel like it's kind of a penning for those of you who are for that story, that if enough minds are thinking in that direction, and if we hold the space for that thing, then I think you're right. I think that will really fill that void. Yes please. I think there are so many important issues that have come up in this, that I want to encourage TCG to do longer than an hour and a half, because you could have a whole day on some of these topics and there's just not enough time spent on important HR issues. Well if somebody wants to initiate this being put forth as an open, as one of the open topics, it would certainly be. Right, so tomorrow there's open space. So you can go on to the app, I believe it is, and actually hold a breakout session about that. Get it in by five. I just want to say that for me it has been and for colleagues, the conference itself, if it found a way to offer child care and pay would open it up to many more people being able to come into the conference. Absolutely, and I also just want to encourage folks to, in your notes and your reviewing the session on the app, please let us know about extended time, having more space. Yes, that is a thing also, please take a moment after the breakout. And rate the session. I think that would spend this much time thinking about basic life stuff. My heart country is so hostile. Just trying to be someone living in a regular household. One last takeaway, someone we haven't heard from yet? Yes, please. I think it's just really interesting. I'm so new in my career and I decided to come here and hear what everyone is doing and when you think about where you want your career to be and where you are in life. I don't have children, but I think a lot about where I would be and how that would be possible. So it's really nice to hear what everyone is doing in their respective theaters. Thank you so much. Again, thanks to our four people for sparking up. Before we go back to the fray of the conference out of this lovely intimate space, thank you. You're setting off the suggestion that we stay as a large group. Can we just take another breath together? It's such an exquisite moment when we all sit in silence like that. Thank you so much. Applause Guys, if anybody's interested in the umbrella program, I think it's great.