Building a Behavior Team: Best Practices for Hiring, Training, & Retention
If you’ve worked in animal shelter operations, you’ll know that staffing is one of the most significant struggles facing shelters today. Between constant intake, budgetary constraints, and day-to-day operations, it can be hard to prioritize intentional hiring. With that in mind, you’re probably thinking that you can’t spare the resources to build a behavior team, but the truth is that you can’t afford not to build one. Let’s talk about why.
Building a dedicated behavior team is an important part of centering animal behavior in your animal shelter operations. With a behavior team, you’ll have the ability to better serve the animals in your care and take the load off of existing staff. Building a behavior team requires strategic hiring, comprehensive training, and robust retention practices, but this effort is well worth the long-term benefits. Let’s talk about best practices, from hiring and training to retention.
What is an Animal Shelter Behavior Team?
A behavior team is a dedicated group of animal shelter staff members who are responsible for assessing, managing, and improving behavioral health among your shelter population. In contrast with other staff and volunteers, who might have less training or hands-on animal behavior experience, this team should be made up of trained professionals with robust and varying backgrounds in animal behavior, training, and shelter management practices. Some common duties of an animal shelter behavior team include:
Conducting behavioral evaluations
Developing enrichment programs
Implementing training programs
Developing rehabilitation programs
Providing support to adopters and fosters
Hiring Your Behavior Team
It might seem like you don’t have the time or resources to hire a dedicated behavior team, and it’s true that hiring an animal shelter behavior team can take diligence and patience. However, taking the time to find the right fit is worth it to reap the benefits of a robust team that fits seamlessly into your shelter and helps you to center animal behavior in the work you do. Here are some of our best practices for hiring an animal shelter behavior team:
Seek Diverse Candidates
When hiring an animal shelter behavior team, you’ll want to avoid the common mistake of putting all of your eggs in one basket. Too often, shelters will hire just one or two animal behavior specialists, dropping the lion’s share of duties and responsibilities on their shoulders. This often creates staff who are overworked and underpaid, leading to high rates of burnout and overturn.
Instead, you should aim to hire 3-5 staff members with a variety of complementary skills and specialties. You may also consider contracting independent trainers to assist with your behavior team. Some common job titles you might see on an animal shelter behavior team include:
Behavior manager
Animal trainer
Enrichment coordinator
Playgroup specialist
2. Define Roles Clearly and Concisely
Job postings should be clear and concise, giving a clear definition of the distinct roles you’d like to fill and a comprehensive understanding of the background and values that you’d like to see candidates reflect. That said, be careful to be concise and avoid long, overwhelming lists of qualifications that could scare off prospective applicants with less traditional backgrounds.
3. Involve Current Staff
Hiring staff for an animal shelter is more personal than hiring for a big tech company. More often than not, animal shelters have small teams who work closely together, so it’s important to make sure that your staff works well together. Engaging your existing team in the hiring process will ensure that your prospective candidates fit into the culture at your shelter.
Training Your Behavior Team
Your animal shelter behavior team will likely have a variety of unique backgrounds, experience, expertise, and ideally certifications in learning theory and applied positive reinforcement skills. Further training is a way to ensure that your staff is on the same page, giving them a foundation of knowledge to fulfill their duties in ways that align with your shelter’s culture and best practices. Staff should undergo a standardized on-boarding process that includes training on topics like:
Shelter history and culture: Background on your shelter’s history, culture, and values.
Foundational knowledge: Animal behavior, stress signals, and safe handling practices utilized in your shelter.
Health and safety protocols: First aid, recognizing common illnesses, and understanding vaccination requirements to maintain a healthy animal shelter.
Behavior modification techniques: Humane training methods that are consistent with your shelter’s best practices to address behavior issues and improve adaptability.
Reduce Burnout in Your Behavior Team
Helping professions experience higher than average turnover rates, and animal shelters are no exception. Compassion fatigue, burnout, and low compensation are rampant in animal shelters, making it hard to maintain a consistent team.
Unfortunately, the effects of high turnover often trickle down to the animals we serve, leading to inconsistent care, lack of socialization, delayed medical attention, and increased stress levels from constantly changing routines. Utilize these retention strategies to maintain a robust behavior team:
Be Intentional About Your Culture
An OfficeTeam survey found that 66% of employees would quit their job if they felt unappreciated. Culture has a huge impact on staff and their likelihood to stay at a position long-term, so consider these best practices to build an intentional shelter culture:
Foster a Sense of Purpose and Autonomy
While it’s important to provide adequate support and supervision for your staff, don’t be that boss who’s breathing down their necks. Within reason, trust that you hired staff with the knowledge and expertise to make important decisions about how to complete their job duties and try to avoid micromanaging day-to-day tasks.
Regular check-ins can help to ensure that you and your team are on the same page. Be sure to ask your staff about what they find meaningful in their work, then delegate tasks accordingly wherever possible.
Prioritize Communication and Transparency
Be clear about your expectations and be transparent with your staff wherever possible. This can include sharing information about budgets, shelter data, and organizational direction and giving staff insight into the rationale behind any decisions you make in your shelter.
However, this isn’t just a one-way street. You should also encourage your staff to communicate openly and honestly with you. Avoid placing blame or enforcing strict consequences for small mistakes, making yourself a safe place for staff to open up when they’ve misstepped. By prioritizing communication and transparency, your staff will feel safer, respected, and more fulfilled.
Make Good Leadership a Priority
A Gallup poll of over 1 million U.S. workers found that 75% of respondents left their jobs because of their boss and not because of the job itself. Management can make or break a job, so it’s important to ensure that your shelter prioritizes strong leadership.
You should prioritize regular leadership and management training for leadership-level staff and ensure that management is open and accessible to listen to your staff’s concerns and ideas. You should also ensure that your shelter has access to a Human Resources (HR) department–or some other similar oversight team–to report issues like sexual harassment, discrimination, or safety concerns.
Encourage Work-Life Balance
Compassion fatigue and burnout are almost unavoidable in a career where you’re constantly exposed to abuse and neglect, making impossible decisions, and working with a shoestring budget. That’s why it’s so important to encourage staff to have a life outside of work by:
Providing generous paid time off and encouraging staff to take it regularly.
Avoiding unnecessary contact with staff outside of working hours.
Connecting staff with mental health care where possible.
Respecting staff privacy about life outside of work.
2. Provide Professional Development
A Global Talent Monitor survey revealed that 40% of employees left their position due to a lack of future career development. Be sure to prioritize staff development with regular continuing education, certification courses, and promotions.
3. Ensure Competitive Competition
Estimates place the cost of replacing employees at $40,000. Between advertising, recruitment fees, training, and lost productivity, turnover is costly and time consuming.
It’s easy to feel like you don’t have the budget to provide your employees with adequate compensation, but it’s worth it to find a way when you compare a simple pay raise with the overwhelming cost of constant overturn. Consider prioritizing staff pay in fundraising efforts and getting creative with employee benefits.
Laurie Lawless has 17 years of experience working in shelters, and she created Shelter Behavior Integrations to empower shelters to center animal behavior in their practices.
Support Your Behavior Team With SBI
Laurie Lawless, founder of Shelter Behavior Integrations, has the knowledge and experience to see the big picture. In addition to behavioral services, like her playgroup intensive, Laurie offers macro-level services aimed at addressing system-level issues that might be plaguing your shelter.
Whether you’re looking for help completing a one-off project, support for your behavior team, or a complete operational overhaul, Laurie’s got you covered. Check out our website to learn more about Laurie’s services, access educational resources, and read our blog.
