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.

Volunteer Management

Work/life balance…

I came across a post today stating that employees will be more effective if managers are respecters of time – they ensure employees make time for rest, recovery and have fun in their day.

I couldn’t help thinking that focusing on ‘rest and recovery’ might encourage managers to treat the symptoms rather than the cause…?
Putting fun in your day sounds much more in the zone though.

In a CIPD Podcast on Talent Management (2007), Adrian Moorhouse, former Olympic swimming champion and now Managing Director of lane 4 comments on the work/life balance, and suggests we focus on making work feel like part of life(!):

“Matching the motivations, dreams and goals of an individual with the motivations, dreams and goals of an organisation – when you get those closely aligned then, I think, you’ve got a very motivated group of people because it’s not work, it’s life.”
http://www.cipd.co.uk/podcasts/_articles/article4.htm?view=transcript

If the whole of work is therefore also life, then the work/life balance for someone who works 40 hours a week is:
40/168 to 168, which equates to approx 1:4 (four times more life than work)

If work is not life and someone works 40 hours a week, then work/life balance is:
40:128, equating to approx 1:3 (three times more life than work).

So someone who can treat work as life, has approx 133% more life than someone who doesn’t, and throughout a 45 year career this equates to 15 years of extra life!!!

OK – So maths can’t really be applied in this context, but it’s an interesting thought… 😉

Volunteer Management

Volunteers replacing paid staff

There’s always a bit of a kerfuffle when the question ‘should volunteers replace paid staff’ is considered.

An interesting perspective that helps to get ‘outside’ of the issue arrived in my inbox this morning:

“The issue is about an internal question, and it’s an internal question for unionised organisations. And what happens when we cant afford to deliver services with paid staff…. they shut…. then what happens…. someone else opens up another service that is more economic…Dementia Friends is probably a great example of that…”

 ”So for me this “replacement” issue is so focusing on the wrong question…. It’s such a question of “who” when we need to focus on the what, when, where, and  how… on earth….do we sustain things at a point of challenging finances…one could probably change how to if….”

So, this perspective advocates focusing first on what we need to do, and when, where and how we can deliver this. The ‘who delivers it’ question would then have more clarity and be supported by a coherent rationale.

This perspective suggests that the Volunteering England and TUC Charter for Strengthening Relations Between paid Staff and Volunteers has things the wrong way around, with the cart leading the horse. The third principle of this  charter states:

“The involvement of volunteers should complement and supplement the work of paid staff, and should not be used to displace paid staff or undercut their pay and conditions of service.”

The perspective would arguably re-write this principle as:

“The extent of involving volunteers and paid staff in delivering a service will be considered, once a service model has been established. The respective roles of volunteers and paid staff will be monitored to ensure the service maintains its relevance and impact, and these roles will be developed accordingly”.

One thing that strikes me in all of this is the ‘volunteers or paid staff’ situation is far from clear cut, and we would be well advised in the current climate to maintain a perspective that enables us to recognise that a load of trees, do in fact make up a wood.

Volunteer Management

To discipline a volunteer, or to turn a blind eye?

…Sometimes just letting volunteers know you have noticed is enough.

I was a shop and transport manager for a local hospice (why I say ‘local’ I don’t know – they’re all local!).

We had this chap who’d been volunteering for yonks – let’s call him Bob…
Bob knew loads about furniture, and was my ‘go to’ man when I needed to price up something the guys brought in from a house collection that looked like it was worth more than the usual ‘£10 for a chest of draws’ price (I should mention that I was a furniture pricing novice and easy bewildered when the van offloaded its booty – or rather donations generously supplied by our caring community).

In came an Ercol dresser, and I said to Bob:
“That looks nice Bob – how much should we put on that”
“Forty quid” says Bob. “Ok” says I, and the price tag was appropriately placed.

The next day was my day off. I duly spent my time reading back copies of Third Sector, and researching the history of volunteering…(OK, maybe I just took it easy).

The day after, I noticed that the Ercol dresser had sold and said to one of the volunteers.
“Huzzah – the Ercol dresser sold! Forty quid in the takings!” or something of that nature. The volunteer replied: “Yes, Bob bought that – he only had to pay 28 quid as he had the volunteer 20% discount.”

“Well bugger me!”  ”Well, goodness gracious me!” thinks I…

So in mentioning this episode to our Head of HR (who was also an interior designer and knew a thing of two about the price of furniture), he implemented the first stage of the volunteer disciplinary procedure, which was to write to Bob, and ask him to a meeting to discuss the situation – just a chat so we could get the context around what happened.

Never saw Bob again.

One thing this anecdote highlights is that if there is the mere whiff that the volunteer disciplinary procedure is being enacted, the volunteering relationship is often such that the situation resolves itself.

All that happened in this instance is that the following message went to the volunteer “We noticed, and we don’t necessarily approve.” Quite often this is all you need to do.