Great Learning Experience - Summer Intern Material Innovation Initiative Employee Review

These allegations are serious and upsetting. We have spent the past few months trying to decide how to respond. It is always difficult for a company to publicly respond to anonymous allegations. First, our culture is extremely important to us as you can see here (https://materialinnovation.org/our-culture/) and here (https://materialinnovation.org/accountability/). Our CEO was once a whistleblower herself, having to report the executive director of an organization to the board of directors for significant legal and HR violations. She takes these issues very seriously which is why she has insisted on a structure where she is not on the board of directors, her annual review includes the board directly communicating with the staff, and she is not aware of when she is reviewed. We also have a very robust whistleblower policy (https://materialinnovation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/MII-Whistleblower-Policy.pdf) which encourages employees who have concerns to use whatever reporting methodology is the most comfortable to them. Second, as our culture is very important, we felt we couldn’t let these allegations go unaddressed. We hope you will consider our side of this story when considering these statements. Three employees left MII in 2023 for performance issues. We believe these comments are from two of those three employees and thus will explain the situation accordingly. We are making this assumption as the rest of the team seems happy at MII, per our most recent reviews (https://materialinnovation.org/wp-content/uploads/Copy-of-Staff-Satisfaction-Survey-0623-1.pdf) (you can see all previous reviews here: https://materialinnovation.org/our-culture/). We also have a robust whistleblower and reporting framework available to employees and we have not received any complaints through that system. In December, 2022, we started working with management and organizational behavior consultants to improve our internal operations. As part of that process, the consultants attended team meetings, viewed 1-on-1 meetings, reviewed all HR and work flow policies and procedures, and met with our CEO biweekly and head of HR multiple times. They helped identify a number of employees who were not meeting their performance objectives. After multiple discussions with the employees over a 3-6 month period, we clearly laid out the performance issues in documentation and asked for improvement. Two employees left after being asked to improve and one was terminated after not meeting objectives. We recognize that no relationship is one-sided and we also take accountability for the situation with these employees. First, we think our hiring process could have been better in matching candidates to the needs of the position within the organization. We had a very strong hiring process focused on fairness and diversity but not as strong in alignment of values. We worked with the management consultants to revamp the hiring process and will continue to improve on it. Second, as a small nonprofit, we didn’t prioritize a strong onboarding program to ensure new employees truly understood our values, systems, and expectations. We provided a self guided onboarding program with daily 1-2 hour meetings with the supervisor for the first two weeks but this was not sufficient to ensure all new employees understood the material. We have since developed a very robust 6 month onboarding program with multiple interactive materials, team member check-ins, a buddy system, and 1-on-1 training sessions. Finally, the management consultants worked with our CEO to help her understand she was giving new employees too much autonomy too early in their employment. She is now working more closely with all new employees to ensure they are aligned with our values and are on the same page with our standards and expectations. While we deeply regret the difficult position this puts these individuals in, we still stand by raising our performance concerns as being the best decision for the organization and will make us more effective in accomplishing our mission for animals and the environment. We hope you will consider our transparency, strong checks and balances, whistleblower policy and procedures, and significant and constant other positive reviews. If you are considering working with us or donating to us, we always welcome a conversation about these issues.