Workplace inclusion in higher education philanthropy

Abstract

Positive workplace inclusion is important for any business today, but especially so for higher education philanthropy. Higher education philanthropy suffers from high turnover and lack of diversity, making successful workplace inclusion urgent. Higher education philanthropy exacerbates low diversity and high turnover through education bias, compensation and opportunity imbalance, work culture expectations that favour in-group members, low task interdependency, isolation from co-workers, low support from leadership, and burnout. To address the primary challenge of turnover, this paper proposes unit-level measures that higher education philanthropy offices might use to increase inclusion, promote diversity and improve work group performance and morale.