Category: treatment of volunteers

photo:wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_passing

Crista is a volunteer coordinator for a local branch of a major charity. She covers several counties which means a great deal of travel during the week and the need to tightly organize her day. Now we all know how hard tightly organizaing is for a volunteer manager. “I’m exhausted,” she said recently, “literally exhausted. I’m not talking about being the kind of tired that makes you fall asleep at night, I’m talking about dead to the world sleep followed by a difficult waking and the desire to crawl under the covers by noon. Am I depressed? I mean I don’t do that much physical stuff, I carry boxes of manuals or help arrange tables at a fair, but nothing that would wear me out. I have time in the car to sit down, but at the end of the day, I just want to go home and vegetate. What’s wrong with me?”
I asked her what her day was like and she said, “you know, I arrive at work and the phone starts ringing. I’m checking emails and volunteers are coming into my office to ask for guidance. Sometimes their team leads aren’t there and sometimes they have a complaint about misdirections. I have to field all kinds of calls, personal visits, plan my day, check in with clients and set up recruiting and training. It’s pretty hectic I suppose.”

No doubt, Crista is volunteer manager busy. But I sensed more to her weariness. “How do you handle interruptions?”
She continued, “well, I really try to give everyone my full and undivided attention. I mean, there’s the client who is hurting or the volunteer that has a family emergency. I’m not able to get much done, at least not in my mind. It’s constant stopping and focusing on the person in front of me and their needs.”
She hesitated. “They deserve my full attention at the time they need it, not later during some appointment when the moment is lost. It can be difficult.”

Mmmm Hmmmm. Our conversation made me think of the times I was privileged to work with singers and actors on charity shows. It was amazing to see how they emotionally transformed themselves into their roles and to afterwards see, when the glow wore off, how exhausted they were. Getting into their character and experiencing the perceived emotions drained the life right out of them.

Being busy is one thing, but there is something called “emotional labor,” conceptualized by UC Berkley professor, Arlie Russell Hochschild. Emotional labor is often associated with service workers, such as the waitress who listens to a customer complain about the the too rare steak which she had no control over. She must hide her own stressful feelings and literally do some acting in order to understand and please the customer.

There is also something called compassion fatigue which is the burnout factor that results from so much emotional availability. Volunteer managers listen to clients and empathize. We listen to volunteers and genuinely care about them. We listen to administrators and search for ways to really make a difference. Then, we go home and look for solace, but, because we are so good at emotional connections, can we turn that off in our private lives? Probably not. There’s the call from Aunt Rheda who fell and broke her hip. The neighbor, Jack just lost his job and his wife, Karin has no idea how they are going to survive. The elderly woman in the aisle of the grocery store looks lost. Would we walk away? Not unless our hair was on fire.

It’s no wonder volunteer managers are exhausted. Emotionally we are “on” from the moment we wake up until we drop into bed. We’re on for our volunteers, for society and for our families and friends. It’s what we’ve come to expect of ourselves. Working with volunteers has taught us how to be focused and empathetic. It’s how we connect volunteers to the mission and to the clients. It is a great skill set, but it does take a huge amount of energy.

Do we experience compassion fatigue? Most likely. But do we also practice emotional labor? Are we acting? I’d say, most of the time, no, but there are instances in which circumstances out of our control go awry and we are the ones to smooth it over for our volunteers. That’s when we have to put aside the stress we feel from the giving of incomplete directions, or the event time change not being communicated. Although we might like to say, “yeah, it figures. That airhead Velma never told me that they changed the venue time! You know this is the third time she’s done something like this. Last month she asked for two volunteers to sit at a fair and she didn’t tell me that they had to bring their own chairs to sit on and that it would be outside! It was cold that day, the poor volunteers shivered and stood through the whole thing! You know, I’m just sick and tired of cleaning up after inconsiderate staff who waste your guys’ time! I don’t want you to quit, but heck, I wouldn’t blame you if you did, not that anyone here would realize why you quit, they’d probably blame me!” (did I just go on a wee bit too much there? Woo, I feel so much better!)

Instead, unlike my inappropriate rant, we assure the volunteer that their time is valuable, that they are valuable while taking in any problematic comments and finding ways to make situations better. We become the obsessive person who checks, double checks and triple checks details to keep these things from happening. But in spite of our efforts, when things do happen, we repress our own frustrations and absorb the volunteers’ feedback. We pass on the information in a professional manner, because the emotional buck stops with us.

So, like Crista, if you find yourself bone weary, exhausted, or death-gripping your covers in the morning, it could be signaling burn-out. Recognizing the emotional investment you make in your job, by your compassion, empathy and emotional labor is the first step to taking care of yourself. It is crucial that volunteer managers find ways to de-stress, wind down and practice self care. While we can’t control everything about our jobs, we can control our well being.
Be well out there.
-Meridian

So, 2015 is upon us and it is time to make some volunteer management New Year’s Resolutions. I can imagine what you’re thinking, because you too, have read how we all set ourselves up to fail each time we do this annual reinventing of ourselves in rituals much like throwing salt over your shoulder or knocking on wood.
Anyway, I’m thinking back to all the New Year’s resolutions I’ve made both personally and professionally and there isn’t one darn one that I’ve kept so maybe I should just laugh it off and resolve not to bother. However, there has to be some merit in all this, right? The new year always comes with a feeling of closure tinged with optimism and unless we live in a perfect world, we want life to improve for us and for our families, friends and the world in general.
I’m thinking back to the kind of resolutions I have made or witnessed friends make that pertain to volunteer management. There are the usual ones and then there might be some you’ve made that are unique to you.

1. Recruit more volunteers: In order to fulfill a resolution, we often go to ridiculous lengths to make it happen. By going into recruitment overdrive, you may end up with volunteers who quit after two weeks or you may get too many volunteers to manage well. Sitting at your neighbor’s son’s lemonade stand with brochures or handing out business cards at a funeral might be a tad too ambitious and end up netting more ill will than prospective volunteers.

2. Thank volunteers more: This one is a no-brainer until you take it to the extreme and thank volunteers constantly, which in turn renders any genuine gratitude meaningless. You might get clever with this one and try to do something outside the box like get a celebrity endorsement but that has only a short-term effect. When I first started working with volunteers, I asked various municipalities to proclaim volunteer day, which was lovely and meant a lot of time spent going to city council meetings and accepting the proclamations, but it really had no lasting effect. How do I know this? The twelfth time I pointed to the proclamations on the wall, volunteer Jorge said, “yes, I’ve seen it, it’s nice, can we move on?” And that was in February.

3. Engage staff in recognizing volunteers: Normally, you find begging to be unseemly but hey, you’ve made this resolution so you first try reasoning. You have this awesome speech and plan that you just know will sway every staff member to see volunteers in the most positive light. You can envision the wonderful teamwork that follows because you are the one to shatter the “us and them” mentality that permeates your organization. So, at every meeting you attend, you whip out parts of your speech and on the seventh heartfelt opine you see some yawns at the table and poof, your resolve begins to dissolve. Then you wonder if begging is perhaps a misunderstood concept.

4. Get more organized: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha ha. Ok, this just makes me laugh.

5. Make better use of the available tools: You have to love tracking software, it sounds so exotic, like a survivalist following a macaque to water until one day you have to track volunteer Paul, who left training midway through the session, is on vacation for several weeks and turned off his phone. Add to that mix volunteer Giselle who promises to bring in her initial paperwork, then after a couple of weeks, drops it off, but it is incomplete, meanwhile she has her background check finished and is in the process of moving, but signs in while you are out at a recruitment fair (see resolution #1) and leaves you a voicemail stating that you forgot to be there for her initial assignment. Then add in volunteer Peter, a senior manager’s son who needs community service hours and is volunteering in his mother’s office while not following any volunteer protocol ever set down in the history of volunteering.

6. Not let volunteer Mira push my buttons: This one’s mine from ten years ago and for some reason, Mira just rankled the heck out of me. The first Monday of January of 2005, Mira came in for her scheduled shift. I smiled brightly while repeating a mantra in my head, “she deserves the same treatment as other volunteers, she deserves the same treatment as other volunteers.” Mira looked at me and I swear said, “well, I see you haven’t gotten the cleaning people to put better toilet paper in the bathrooms.” BOOM! BUTTON PUSHED!!!!! RESOLUTION VAPORIZED!!!!

7. Dress for success: Yeah, I know, dress for the job you want, not the job you have. Ok, so wearing a big cowboy hat to work might not really get me on a horse in Montana, but hey, I tried wearing suits all the time, but the sweat from outdoor fairs in summer and from pitching in on the physical work volunteers do stopped that pretty quickly. Besides, I saw senior managers wearing all kinds of inappropriate and casual attire to work. One day, no lie, a senior manager came to work on casual Friday dressed in a t-shirt, grey rumpled baggy knit shorts and white knee socks-the kind with the green stripe at the top. Two weeks later casual Fridays were declared “unfit for this organization.”

So, my big fat New Year’s resolution is to put on warm socks: Bear with me on this, ok? One day, while getting dressed for work, and the temperature was below freezing, and I had a cold, I just wanted my feet to stay warm, so I put on my warmest, although bright red, socks, under my black dress pants. Immediately I felt good, enveloped in a warmth that spread throughout my core. At work, folks commented on my socks and I was kept warm all day, even though my cold tried to make me shiver.

The good work that our volunteers do daily is like a pair of warm red socks. The enrichment they provide is the bright red color that attracts attention and begs taking notice so that is when we can effectively comment on the worth of our volunteers. “Look at them, see how they stand out, how valuable they are, how wonderful they make us feel, how much they enhance the lives of our clients.” We can make sure we wear our bright red socks to every meeting and make sure that the red color catches staff’s attention by flashing our ankles and heck, sometimes putting our feet up on the table.
And sometimes even more importantly, the cuddliness of our volunteers’ good works can keep us volunteer managers warmed to the core while fending off the cold of feeling alone and misunderstood.

You know, it’s fairly cold out again today. I think I’m going to put on my red socks.
Happy New Year to all and keep warm!
-Meridian.