Employee/Volunteer Relations

The expression “work-life balance” was first used in the UK in the late 1970s to help explain the unhealthy life choices that many people were making. According to one definition, people “were choosing to neglect other important areas of their lives such as family, friends, and hobbies in favour of work-related chores and goals.” In the 30 years since there has been research and discussion around the topic of work-life balance, taking on increased importance as the pace of life in developed countries becomes faster and faster.

As a volunteer manager, have you ever explored how volunteering fits into the balance of the lives of your team?  Many people talk about their lives as a ‘juggling act,’ in which they feel pulled in many directions by the demands of paid work, family care, community involvement, physical fitness and emotional health. Whether volunteers or employees, not all people have appropriate balance or clearly established boundaries in their lives. This Training Design is an opportunity to explore how the work-life balance of volunteers impacts your organisation.

 

When a volunteer walks through a manager’s door, each volunteer brings along a whole system of expectations, wishes and demands associated with the volunteer experience. Volunteer managers often recognize one category of expectations as the “fantasy world” of the volunteer. These expectations are frequently hidden from the volunteer manager and often only exist subconsciously for the volunteer.  While the volunteer’s altruistic motives are most important in the first stages of recruiting and integrating the volunteer, the volunteer’s fantasies are most likely to surface during the actual volunteer experience. During this stage, if these additional hidden needs of the volunteer are not fulfilled, the altruistic motives that the volunteer previously declared will gradually erode, often causing the volunteer to drop out early on.

In this e-Volunteerism feature story, we review how these fantasy concepts challenge volunteer managers and discuss why it’s important to understand the nature of volunteer fantasies. Ultimately, volunteer managers who learn to manage these conditions help influence the management practices of the entire organization – for the better.

In this discussion of research from the Netherlands, Research to Practice explores how volunteers are as committed as paid workers and provides examples of how organizations can deepen the attachment of their volunteers.  Editor Steven Howlett further explores how the issues discussed in this research “chime nicely with what we know, underlining other findings and suggesting that for commitment, at least, volunteers from different parts of the globe have a lot in common.”

In this Keyboard Roundtable, we’ll explore one of the perennial issues of volunteerism:  When should work be done by volunteers and when should it be done by paid staff?   Convening Editor Rob Jackson brings together a range of perspectives to explore this issue. Our participants will look at why we have differing views from each other on this important topic, and what common ground we can find between proponents of volunteering and those whose goal is to defend the rights of paid workers.

In this third e-Volunteerism article in our Sabotage series, the authors turn their focus to those not-for-profit organizations that engage and deploy millions of volunteers globally. They list 10 universal actions that not-for-profits engage in, and argue that these actions make their volunteer programs less effective, reduce volunteer commitment, and ultimately lead to costly mistakes, lost revenue and reduced scope. More importantly, in the context of a major demographic shift, the authors argue that these actions may cause hundreds of thousands of organizations to be faced with a service delivery crisis within a decade. The authors consider practical solutions for moving forward.

Nonprofit organizations are required to identify funding streams and raise a significant amount of financial resources to provide services to clientele, operate facilities, and to pay staff.  At the same time, organizations conduct capital campaigns to raise a large amount of money for endowments or to build or renovate a facility.  This article describes a capital campaign that the Ohio 4-H Youth Development organization undertook, a first in the history of the program.  The authors describe the challenges, opportunities, and lessons learned by this quasi-nonprofit organization that is a part of an institution of higher education and has funding partners at the county, state, and federal level.

The article is written from the perspective of paid staff members regarding their experience working with volunteers in a different capacity than what the organization and many of its paid staff have traditionally experienced. The original goal of raising $12 million was met and 97% of the revised goal of $14.2 million has been reached.