Helping people prepare for, find, and keep good jobs is what Goodwill is about.

Hi Everyone –

I sure would love a little snow to brighten things up a bit. The bleakness of the landscape reflects our feelings of uncertainty and exhaustion as the pandemic continues to take its toll. But here is something to celebrate in this moment – we have not had a single case of COVID at Goodwill in December – a whole week! Congratulations to all of you for being vigilant about your own safety and well-being, as well as that of your co-workers. We have to look out for one another, and you are doing that admirably.

Your leadership team has begun determining key performance indicators (KPIs) and annual goals for 2021. We met this past Thursday and will finish up this week. Our optimism and commitment for the coming year is inspiring, as is the progress we have made in understanding this process and making it work for us so that we may continually improve. We measure things like response times on tickets, reductions in safety recordables and expense, increases in persons served and sales, decreases in recidivism, and increases in job placement. If you don’t know what your KPIs are – for your location or department – ask your supervisor. Take action to find out what we are measuring and why. It matters because it keeps our eye on the ball and all of us moving forward.

We have added two KPIs this year to the things that HR is tracking: % minority representation in our workforce and % minority promotions. Historically, unintentional bias and the impact of systemic racism have resulted in fewer of both than one would expect given the makeup of our communities population. Measuring these two things helps to ensure that we are keeping our eye on our processes and procedures so that we can eliminate unintentional bias and unfairness at Goodwill. I applaud HR for adding these to their list of KPIs and I look forward to watching us move toward greater equity.

In case you haven’t heard, we have two exciting new employment and training offerings underway: GoodWorks, a work-experience program; and Ignite, a new re-entry program serving young adults. You will continue to hear more about these in the coming months. It has also been a long time since I have talked to you about our childcare initiative, and I am very happy to let you know that we are moving forward in partnership with the YMCA to open a new child care facility at Covenant Academy. We may still have one someday on our corporate footprint, but for now we needed a less expensive option that we could have up and running more quickly. We are looking to early spring to be able to provide additional excellent child care in the Muskegon community so that we can continue to remove barriers to employment.

Continue to be safe and vigilant! I am grateful, as ever, for your efforts –

Jeanette