By Josh Clarkson and Meg Davis

This is part four of our manual on volunteer management

It’s not easy to keep up motivation among volunteers, that’s why positive management is essential to making effective use of your organization’s volunteers. Some of the steps detailed below can also help to avoid volunteer burnout.

Evaluation

Evaluation is critical to ensuring that a volunteer is working well in your organization and is an opportunity for both sides to offer constructive criticism, or ideally, praise.  In most situations you probably have a bit of both praise and criticism for the volunteer. Make sure to give the positive feedback first, and then move on to areas that could use some improvement. When giving constructive feedback try to focus on what the individual can improve, not what they did wrong in the past. Some questions you may want to ask include:

How’s it going so far?

Are you doing what you thought you would be doing?

What are you enjoying, what are you finding challenging?

Have a Policy to Deal With Conflict 

Conflict is simply a fact of life and your organization should have a policy for dealing with it before something happens. Below are some possible elements you may want to include in such a policy:

Encourage anyone involved in a conflict to discuss it with the other person face-to-face as soon as possible, so as to prevent procrastination and exacerbation of the problem.

Try to prevent any nasty emails or other non-productive behavior.

If a conversation isn’t enough to rectify the problem, a manager should step in to help negotiate a solution to the problem.

Ensure that all parties know that they are heard and are valued members of your organization but emphasize the need for collaboration and a healthy work environment.

Making Sure Volunteer’s Needs are Met

You need your volunteers, and your volunteers have needs! Making sure that these needs are met can go a long way in helping you to retain your volunteers and use them to their full potential. Some ways you can ensure their needs are met include:

Make sure your volunteers see the impact their work is having, e.g. meeting the beneficiaries of that work, photos or videos of the beneficial impact their work has had, etc.

Help to build connections among volunteers, and between volunteers and other organizations. This will help foster a collaborative, happy and productive group.

Give volunteers both recognition and a chance to build their skills. This allows the volunteer to get something out of the relationship and shows them that they are a valued member of the organization.

Give volunteers an opportunity to have input. One example of how to do this is to include your volunteers in your annual strategic planning meeting or similar events.

Avoiding Burnout

Burnout is a problem in any organization, and avoiding it can help yours operate at its full potential. Volunteers especially have a tendency to jump into a project with tons of enthusiasm but then burn themselves out by over-committing themselves to their projects. A few tips below can help avoid such situations.

Set realistic goals. Be sure that you quickly ascertain your volunteer’s strengths and weaknesses and set goals accordingly.

Human rights starts at the office. Make sure to include breaks for meals, coffee or just for the sake of a break throughout the day. Remember to take these breaks as well so that your volunteers don’t feel guilty when they do.

Strive to make the workplace as inclusive as possible and avoid cliques. Furthermore, try to make the work fun!

Help to set priorities and manage time effectively. Make sure your volunteers understand which projects need to get done as soon as possible and which can be put on the back burner so to speak.

Last but not least, make sure
your organizations needs are being met as well!

In the end, the volunteer’s work still needs to benefit your organization and the community it serves. While it is necessary to spend time training volunteers in the beginning, you may need to reconsider if someone is suited for their job if their tasks still take them much longer than it would take you to do it yourself.

 

For more on this topic we recommend reading:

Hands for Nature: A Volunteer Management Handbook, https://www.evergreen.ca/en/resources/hands-for-nature/index.html

 

Meg Davis is founder and executive director of Asia Catalyst; Joshua Clarkson is graduate intern at Asia Catalyst.