Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
Since we’re on a week of HR related topics, I wanted to circle back to a point from Part 2 of the Van Magazine article review. Specifically, the notion that good HR isn’t something that can be pointed at one stakeholder group, it must be top-down throughout the entire organization. For example, the Van Magazine article focuses exclusively on musician-musician troubles but there one example in particular I wish the article …
The folks at Capacity Interactive (CI) recently published the latest installment of their Performing Arts Ticket Buyer Media Usage Study. The previous installment was released right before COVID-19 so as I’m sure you can imagine, a lot has changed. I’m still reviewing the content but a few items that jumped out at me from the Key Findings include: 96% of ticket buyers plan to come back to your venues after the …
In Part 1, we started examining several points from Emma Quackenbush’s article in the 3/16/2022 edition of Van-Magainze.com about how the lack of adequate Human Resources (HR) practices has hobbled the internal culture inside professional orchestras. Today’s installment will continue where we left off as well as considering options for making things better. I was especially glad to see Quackenbush highlight how the large donor-driven revenue model impacts workplace culture and satisfaction. While I …
For the past two decades, I’ve written about how the lack of adequate Human Resources (HR) practices has hobbled the internal culture inside professional orchestras. As a result, workplace satisfaction, the one thing nonprofit organizations supposedly offer to offset competitive pay, is so bad it continues to be one of the few third-rail topic neither employers nor musicians’ unions want to touch. So you can imagine how gratifying it was to …
Just a short, but poignant, rant to round out the week. Recently, I hired a new contract worker and after their first onboard meeting with one of the software engineers they reached out in Slack with the following query: “I wanted to ask if meetings should also be recorded on my timesheet.” I get it. And at the same time just hearing the question is heartbreaking. What’s worse is contract workers …