Monthly Archives: August 2013

Volunteer Management

A dour celebration of volunteering

A Third Sector article highlighted today that there has been an increase in volunteering this year of 7% amongst adults in Britain.
You would have thought we would have had a positive upbeat message for the actual article, but you can detect the aptly dour British spirit seeping through the paragraphs.

…and this stems from the interviews with charities (via NAVCA), where the findings found that 46 per cent of the organisations experienced no change in the public’s attitude towards volunteering and community engagement over the previous year.

The muffled strains of muted celebrations were captured with the quote: “However, while the trend for volunteering is travelling in the right direction, the type of volunteering is still predominantly focused on neighbourly goodwill gestures, even though charities are in greater need of more formal help.”

How can anyone put a negative spin on the 7% increase in volunteering this year being predominently focused on neighbourly goodwill gestures?

This increase might mean an extra 3 million people are taking the lead in their communities to help people out. If charities are unable to tap into this upsurge in community spirit, then they need to have a serious look to check how their volunteering strategy is failing to engage the spirit within the community.

An increase of hundreds of thousands of people helping their neighbours can only be good news! (for goodness sake!)

In 1948, AGL lves eloquently expressed the founding purpose, and prevailing culture of the voluntary hospitals as:
“ The desire to do something practical in relief of their fellow men and do it themselves, the readiness to accept responsibility rather than petition the King or corporation – this was the soil in which was to grow the voluntary hospital movement.”

I’m sure AGL Ives would be encouraged to hear that 65 years later, people up and down the land are ready to accept responsibility to help their neighbour, rather than petition the government to do it for them…(or petition the government to fund charities to do it for them).

Volunteer Management

Where now for training for volunteer managers?

No-one really knows where volunteer managers came from. Some cite the first volunteer manager being ‘born’ in Fulbourne Hospital in 1963 to co-ordinate the efforts of the hospital’s increasing number of volunteers…and a few years ago, Volunteering England suggested there were 200,000 volunteer managers in the UK.

Also, no-one really sets out to be a volunteer manager when they are young, and those that turn into a volunteer manager generally discover this happened by accident rather than design! So it’s hardly surprising that the training of volunteer managers has no universal agreement of methodology, and it is delivered and funded in an ad-hoc manner.

Volunteer management training has had a bit of a chequered history, and here are a few insights into what people think about the training provision for volunteer managers (VMs).

Steve McCurley and Susan Ellis have trained over ½ million volunteer managers in their combined 70 years of experience – that’s 20 VMs a day non-stop for 70 years! This qualifies them to highlight key problems in training for VMs. In 2011, they cited the ‘root causes’ as:

• Almost none of those who are responsible for managing volunteers know anything at all about that responsibility when they begin work.
• Most training in volunteer management becomes a kind of remedial education delivered to those already in that role but trying to catch up on the knowledge base.
• There is no agreement on what should be taught or what materials should be used. Most organisations develop their own ‘branded’ in-house offerings over generic volunteer management resources.

They conclude that there are 4 key errors about how volunteer management is taught:

1. Training ignores that most managers of volunteers are volunteers working in all-volunteer systems.
NB 84% of charities in the UK employ no paid staff whatsoever…(from NCVO UK Civil Society Almanac 2013) http://bit.ly/14Er3Ub

2. Training ignores that most paid managers of volunteers are part-time and non-career.

3. Training focuses on teaching volunteer managers to manage volunteers, not to manage the system that involves them.

4. Training is not offered to colleagues in other professions who work with volunteers, day in and day out.
NB McCurley cites, the biggest obstacle to successful volunteering is resistance from paid staff.

This picture becomes cloudier when we consider the findings from the Volunteer Management Training Needs Report, undertaken by the Volunteering Hub in 2006.

In rating existing training and learning opportunities in volunteer management provided by key national agencies, a worryingly large 49% of delegates rated them as ‘poor’, and only 20% rated them as ‘good’ or ‘very good’.

…and qualifications in volunteer management are often given short thrift. For example, a comment in ivo.org from blogger ‘uncollectiveconsciousness’ made the following points:

“Have I got relevant qualification/s in volunteer management? The answer – YES.
Does that make me a better volunteer manager? The answer – NO.”

The reasons backing up his answer were given as:
• Text book learning is often quickly out of date, and rarely matches the real world and environment. Qualifications are now often outpaced, and can no longer keep up with such a morphing environment.
• Qualifications alone, can never demonstrate that inner spark; and the quality that many desire to be demonstrated in a volunteer manager.
• The same tired and predictable corporate one size fits all clone approach to managing people, and appropriately cut and pasted in order to gain the qualification.

This third point is supported by research undertaken by the Institute of Volunteering Research in 2011. Hill and Stevens state that “In assessing the relevance of the ‘gold standard’ of volunteer management to ‘volunteer led-and-run’ organisations, researchers and policy makers have begun to wake up to the dangers of inappropriate levels of formalisation in volunteer management.”
Again, it is worth reflecting that ‘volunteer led-and-run’ organisations make up 17 out of every 20 charities in the UK…

So what does training for VMs need to be to add value to the journey of people who manage volunteers?

McCurley and Ellis suggest training needs to proactively engage with:
– Small, all volunteer-run groups.
– Organisational leaders.
– Staff who work with volunteers as part of their role.

The Volunteering Hub report found that when participants were asked to describe the best volunteer management training and learning opportunity, the following themes emerged:
– Work-based learning within own organisation or something that relates directly to own role.
– Interactive, focused, condensed training with information to take away.
– Training which focuses on dealing with specific, relevant issues
– Action learning sets and coaching.

NB The answer to the question of “What makes a better, more ‘qualified’ volunteer manager” is provided by our committed blogger as “experience, and plenty of it!”

One final important piece of work to include is the 2013 Review into Leadership and Skills in the Voluntary Sector, led by Dame Mary Marsh. One of the key themes coming out of this review was that everyone has an individual responsibility to contribute to our own continuous development, and concludes: “There are so many opportunities to provide peer to peer support and learn from each other. We can all use and create networks for sharing experience, skills and safe spaces for reflection.”

So, anyone who is involved in designing accredited training programmes for people who manage volunteers would be well advised to pay some heed to the following lessons:

1. To have less ‘good practice’ and more ‘right practice’. Encouraging participants to consider what works for their own situation.

2. To tap into the knowledge and experience of peers.

3. To encourage active reflection by helping participants to consider:
– What a great volunteering programme look like for them
– Where realistically they are now in the journey.
– The resources and options they have to move forwards.
NB this is where participants can consider ‘good practice’, and move towards the ‘right practice’, by:
A) Accepting good practice and others’ practice for what it is.
B) Blend it with their situation.
C) Create new tailor-made solutions that work for them.
– What might be the next steps be on the journey.

These points represents both an important and significant challenge to the designers of volunteer management training programmes, and those that rise to this challenge will be providing a valuable service to the people and organisations they engage with.

Stephen Moreton
http://www.attend.org.uk/academy

References
Hill, M & Stevens, D. Volunteers who manage other volunteers and the professionalisation of volunteer management: implications for practice. Voluntary Sector Review, 2 (1): 107-14. 2011.
Online, available: http://bit.ly/nT90AE

Jones S. Volunteer Management Training Needs Report. Volunteering Hub. 2006.
On-line available: http://bit.ly/1dhmrEN

Marsh, M. Review into Leadership and Skills in the Voluntary Sector. Cabinet Office. 2013
On-line available: http://leadingsocial.org.uk/about/

McCurley, S. What’s Wrong about the Way We Teach Volunteer Management
e-Volunteerism. Volume XII, Issue 1, October 2011.
On-line available: http://bit.ly/uiJNZg

Uncollective Consciousness. Wanted Bricklayer. Thoughts on VM Qualifications
On-line available: http://bit.ly/1dhp8Gh

Volunteer Management

Improving patient safety in England: Chess or Draughts…?

Don Berwick leads on the report to improve the safety of patients in England:

Roy Lilley leads on the criticism of its contents: Stating he “hates its lack of grit and traction, and failure to take on the real issues”, and that Berwick has “tried to be too clever by half and the result is a report that only half deals with the solutions”.

Roy Lilley has to be congratulated for adding to the stimulus to read Don Berwick’s report in detail – I’m sure I and many others wouldn’t have made this a priority task in a busy week.

His key criticisms amounted to what the report didn’t say. According to Lilley, it didn’t say:
– Protect the front line – fund it properly, protect it fiercely, mandate its staffing and make it fun to work there.
– Make all Board members apply and qualify for a license to hold public office.
– Regulate HCAs.
– Dump the lunacy of Monitor and the CQC.
– Be honest about the money thing and how to get more for no more.
– Reorganisation has got you into this mess and you won’t reorganise your way out of it but you can unpick it, carefully.

So what do the Berwick recommendations, say?

These can be summarised and grouped in key themes as follows:

Strategic priority
NHS healthcare leaders should place quality of care and patient safety, at the top of their priorities for everything.

Learning
The NHS leaders should create and support the capacity for learning and the NHS should embrace an ethic of learning. Mastery of quality and patient safety sciences and practices should permeate all education thinking and practice.

Community engagement
Patients and carers should have influence at all levels of healthcare organisations. All organisations should seek out the patient and carer voice to monitor the safety and quality of care.

Staffing
All parties should assure sufficient staff are available to meet the NHS’s needs now and in the future. Healthcare organisations should ensure appropriate numbers of well-supported staff are present to provide safe care at all times.

Monitoring and control Systems
Transparency should be unequivocal. All data on quality and safety should be shared in a timely fashion with all. Supervisory and regulatory systems should be simple and clear, and embrace the goodwill and sound intention of the vast majority of staff.
Regulation of organisations should be responsive and tailored. Recourse to criminal sanctions should only function as a deterrent to wilful or reckless neglect or mistreatment.

So, it if feels as if Berwick is focusing on changing culture, and Lilley is suggesting some key strategies or tactics.

In this vein, two quotes come to mind:
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” (Peter Drucker)
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat” – (attributed to Sun Tzu – an ancient Chinese military general, strategist, and philosopher)

It could therefore be argued that Berwick’s recommendations would have more impact in creating a lasting legacy on improving the safety of patients, than Lilley’s suggestions. Looking through a glass darkly, it could be represented as one playing a game of chess whilst the other plays draughts…

But, do the Berwick recommendations lack grit and traction, as Lilley asserts?
It all depends on whether those responsible for leading healthcare organisations have the ability, will and opportunity to grasp and act on the challenge to develop a culture of learning, engagement and transparency. If the ability, will or opportunity are lacking, then Berwick will have misjudged the wider context of healthcare in England, and his recommendations will indeed “only half deal with the solutions”.

But, if those responsible for leading healthcare organisations can rise, and have the opportunity to rise to this challenge, then history might show Berwick’s report as a significant line in the sand in for safety of patients in England.