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assume that volunteers know they are appreciated. Recognition
of their contributions should be part of the formal and informal
operations of the organisation. Volunteers who do not receive
frequent feedback and recognition begin to wonder if they
are doing a good job and if anyone cares about the work they
do. This often creates an unmotivating climate, and can result
in high volunteer attrition. Retention and Recognition Retaining your volunteers is the key to success. There is no point in being good at recruitment if you cannot keep volunteers coming back. Recruitment is a solution to the problem of not having enough volunteers; retention is a way to avoid the problem altogether. Motivation Volunteer programs are fuelled by the motivation of the volunteers and the staff of the organisation. Problems of volunteer retention can usually be traced to problems of motivation. A motivated volunteer is one who wants to do the job that needs to be done in the spirit and within the guidelines of the organisation. People behave in motivated ways when the work satisfies a need of theirs. Children, for example, are motivated to open birthday presents because doing so meets a psychological need. Starting here, you correctly see that volunteer motivation comes from inside the volunteer, stemming from a set of needs which are satisfied by doing things which are found to be productive. When you encounter volunteers who are not behaving as you would like, you may label them "unmotivated," but actually this is incorrect. So-called unmotivated people are actually just as motivated as a motivated person. Their behaviour meets their motivational needs. They behave in the way they do because doing so is more satisfying than the behaviour you would like them to choose. In other words, people behave the way they do for a particular reason. All Behaviour is Motivated Sometimes, "unmotivated" behaviour is caused by frustration. If a volunteer has a high need for achievement, for example, and he sees little to accomplish or "win" in his job, he may choose to set up a win-lose situation with those in authority. For example, a volunteer might go to the board of directors every time there was a disagreement, seeking to get the decision overturned. This so-called "unmotivated" behaviour meets the volunteer’s need for achievement. It provides a challenge. It creates an opportunity to win. When we talk about motivating volunteers, we are talking about creating a volunteer experience that allows an individual to meet their motivational needs in ways that are productive for the organisation and satisfying for the individual. You remove barriers to motivation by designing satisfying work experiences and create systems that allow the volunteer to meet her needs. You make sure, in other words, that volunteers receive their motivational paycheck for the valuable contributions they make to the work of our organisation. This is the essence of volunteer retention. Because each volunteer has a different combination of needs, each will do best in different working conditions. Some volunteers may be highly motivated by gaining job experience, whereas others may be highly motivated by the desire to meet new people. Still others may have a burning passion to do something to contribute to the cause. For the first type, you need to make sure that they have the opportunity to learn the skills they want to learn. The second must be placed in a work setting where they can work with others. The third needs a job that makes a meaningful contribution to the organisation’s mission. This is further complicated by the fact that a volunteer’s needs may change over time. For example, a volunteer may work well on an independent project. It satisfies her need to achieve something meaningful. Then her husband dies. Her need to be with others may suddenly become much more important than the need to achieve something meaningful. To satisfy this need and retain the volunteer, you might transfer her to a group project. To Each His Own Mix Volunteers have combinations of needs. The art of motivating volunteers lies not only in knowing how to tap a given motivator, but in being able to figure out what combination of needs a particular volunteer has. One way to do that is to ask the volunteers periodically. Discuss their rating of the relative importance of the following factors: • To gain knowledge of community problems • To maintain skills no longer used otherwise • To spend "quality time" with members of the family by volunteering together • To get out of the house • To make new friends • To be with old friends who volunteer here • To gain new skills • To pay back • To assuage guilt • To feel useful • To make business contacts • To be part of a prestigious group • To make a transition to a new life • To fulfil a moral or religious duty • To have fun • To help those less fortunate • To try out a new career • To have fun • To meet a challenge • To improve the community • To work with a certain client group • To be in charge of something • To be part of a group or a team • To gain work experience to help get a job • To meet important people in the community • To gain status with my employer • To get community recognition. The mix of responses will give you a better feeling for why they want to volunteer and what you need to give them in return as their "motivational paycheck". For example, if a volunteer ranks the last three above as her highest needs, you will need to make sure she has a job which does indeed enable her to meet important people and which is highly visible in the community. To make sure that her employer is aware of her contribution, you can send a letter of commendation for her contributions. Retaining Volunteers The key to retaining volunteers is to make sure they are getting their particular complex of motivational needs met through their volunteer experience. Another way to say this is that if the volunteer experience makes the volunteers feel good, then they will continue to want to volunteer. When this is occurring across the volunteer program, a positive, enthusiastic climate is created which, in turn, encourages people to continue to volunteer. An environment most likely to make a volunteer feel good is one which bolsters the volunteer’s self-esteem. When the work experience boosts a person’s self esteem, she feels good about her job, be it paid or volunteer work. She looks forward to going to the workplace. Creating an Esteem-Producing Climate for Volunteers Psychologists Harris Clemes and Reynold Bean have studied self-esteem for many years. They found that people with high self-esteem are people who simultaneously satisfy three particular motivational needs. They enjoy a sense of connectedness, a sense of uniqueness, and a sense of power. Connectedness When people feel connected, they feel a sense of belonging, a sense of being part of a relationship with others. In a highly mobile society, where friends and loved ones may live hundreds of miles away and the next door neighbour is sometimes a stranger, this need is often unmet, leaving people with a sense of isolation, dissatisfaction, and loneliness. The psychologist William Glasser points out that this need is often stronger even than the need to survive, in that most people who try to commit suicide do so out of loneliness. A sense of identification with a work group can meet this need, producing healthier, happier individuals. In our seminars over the past four years, we have surveyed more than 1500 individuals who at one time in their lives felt a positive sense of connectedness. The following factors are most often mentioned as producing this: • A common goal • Common values • Mutual respect • Mutual trust • A sense that one group member’s weaknesses are made up for by another group member’s strengths. Positive feelings of connectedness can be enhanced in volunteer programs by many leadership actions, some of which have been referred to previously: 1. The Volunteer Coordinator can work with staff to make sure that there is a common purpose or goal for the team. Nothing is as fundamental to a team’s effectiveness as a common sense of what they are trying to achieve together. Both staff and volunteers should see themselves as equal partners in pursuing this goal. 2. In developing jobs for volunteers (other than for one-shot volunteers whom you don’t expect to retain) you should avoid setting performance standards that are too low. If the expectations are too easy to meet, people will not feel special about their participation. Volunteers should not have lower standards than paid staff. 3. The Volunteer Coordinator should insure that staff and volunteers are treated equally. Be on the lookout for inadvertent behaviour that makes volunteers feel excluded. A common example is that volunteers are not invited to staff meetings, not because they are deliberately excluded but because no one thought to give them the option to attend. Such a situation can make volunteers feel like second-class citizens. 4. When working with staff to develop jobs for volunteers, the Volunteer Coordinator should make sure that volunteers (or teams of volunteers) have a sense of ownership of a client or project. Fragmentation of ownership generates blame and criticism – which is the enemy of connectedness. 5. The Volunteer Coordinator should encourage leaders to celebrate the accomplishments of volunteers in context of their contribution to the goals of the group. Recognition must be consistent so that people do not suspect favouritism. Team accomplishments can also be celebrated, giving equal credit to all team members. People with a sense of connectedness have a sense of "we" as well as a sense of "I." The more special the "we" is, the more special the individual feels as part of the group and the greater the self-esteem that is generated. This is why it is important to have high standards for becoming a group member. Leaders of volunteer programs should be on the look out for comments people make about the expectations they have of themselves and their co-workers. If people say things like "I’m just a volunteer," or "What do they expect for free?" it should cause alarm bells to ring. People’s self esteem drops when they regard themselves as part of a below average group. This negative sense of connectedness leads to high turnover of staff and volunteers. When they hear negative statements such as this, leaders should try to generate positive ideas for improving the situation. They might ask: "What makes you say that? What can you do to improve this situation? What kind of place would you want to work? What can you do to make this organisation more like the kind of place you want it to be?" Leaders should spread the word about positive accomplishments. They should talk about the values and standards of the organisation and what it means to be part of the group. Leaders should look for opportunities to promote interaction among group members. This is particularly important where there are few "natural" opportunities for people to share their common experiences. For example, in befriending schemes and literacy programs, volunteers will be working with the client on their own schedules. Volunteers work with little daily supervision and rarely appear in the office. Effective volunteer supervisors, knowing that "it’s lonely out there," take pains to bring their people together for training, pot lucks, and sharing of "war stories." Another way to promote interaction is to involve people in the decision-making process. When each group member feels she has a say in deciding the unit’s strategy, her feeling of connectedness is enhanced. In such meetings, it is important that you do not let your own biases and positions be known in advance. Group members who know what the person in authority wants will tend to support that position. If you already know the way you want to go, you might as well just tell them. People’s sense of connectedness is enhanced by engaging in new experiences together. By insisting passionately on constant improvement, leaders encourage people to try out new ways of doing things. If these are done by teams, the sense of connectedness grows. Uniqueness A second characteristic of people with high self-esteem is a feeling of uniqueness, a feeling that "there is no one in the world quite like me." This means that I have a sense that I am special in some way, that I have a unique combination of talents or personal qualities. Volunteer Co-Ordinators build feelings of uniqueness by recognizing the achievements of individual group members and by praising them for their individual qualities. They encourage individuals to express themselves and, by giving them the authority to think, explore alternative ways to achieve their results. People’s sense of uniqueness can also be enhanced by giving them challenging assignments that take advantage of their individual strengths. "This is a difficult responsibility requiring your special talents," a volunteer’s supervisor might say. Such a statement, of course, should be the supervisor’s sincere belief. This need to feel unique is sometimes in conflict with a person’s need to feel connected. All of us tend to make compromises in our uniqueness in order to be connected and sacrifice some connectedness in order to feel unique. Imagine, for example, a volunteer named Julie. Part of her feeling of uniqueness revolves around her image of herself as a free spirit. This manifests itself in a variety of ways, such as wearing unusual clothing and jewel. Her organisation’s values, however, are quite traditional, and it is an accepted group norm to dress conservatively. Julie is faced with a choice between dressing conservatively to gain a sense of connectedness, thus sacrificing some of her uniqueness, or to continue her unique style at the risk of becoming something of an outsider to the group. Neither of these courses of action is fully satisfactory to her. In a truly positive climate, people feel safe to be who they are. They can behave in an individual manner and yet feel supported by the group. People respect each other for their unique strengths and eccentricities. They support each other unconditionally. Creating such a situation is often difficult. It cannot be done without lots of interaction among group members. It cannot be done without shared values and a common purpose. It may require the services of an expert facilitator to lead a retreat in which people explore their differences and gain an understanding of each person’s unique point of view. It is always enhanced by leaders talking up the strengths of individual members and their contributions to the purpose of the group. It is maintained by leaders regarding as "wrong" behaviour one person making fun of another or disparaging another’s accomplishments or desires. It is also enhanced by encouraging the individual development of each volunteer. Provide people with maximum training. As they learn new skills, their sense of individual competence grows. A common way to do this is to send them to conferences and workshops to keep them up to date with the latest developments in their fields. One good idea is to have volunteers research a topic and present their findings to the others. This enhances the presenter’s feelings of uniqueness—the person’s special knowledge is beingimparted to others—while also creating connectedness. It creates a sense that each team member can be depended on. Power The word power has negative connotations for many people. We have searched for a better word but have found none which includes everything Clemes and Bean mean by power In part, power means a sense of effectiveness, a feeling that the volunteer is making a difference. This feeling is often throttled by traditional volunteer jobs. If people work in fragmented systems, doing menial tasks not connected to a final outcome, they are unlikely to feel they are making much of a difference. The self-esteem of people in such circumstances is thereby reduced. To feel effective, volunteers need to work on things that matter. If they are engaged in support activities, for example stuffing envelopes, they should be told the purpose of the mailing and the results that are achieved from it so they can feel they are having an effect on something worthwhile. Part of feeling effective is feeling in control of one’s life. Managers often take this away from people by trying to overly control their behaviour Rather than defining results and allowing people some say in figuring out how to achieve them, managers tell people exactly what to do. When one human being attempts to control the behaviour of another, the result is rarely top performance. You can produce feelings of effectiveness by making volunteers responsible for results. Volunteers then have the sense of being in charge of something meaningful. You can then allow people to control their own behaviour by giving them the authority to think. The need to feel in control is often in conflict with a person’s need for connectedness. People in teams sometimes yearn for more freedom of action. Their desire to influence others sometimes alienates other group members. If you can create a situation in which these conflicting motivational needs are met simultaneously, you will unleash a tremendous sense of well-being in your volunteers and enthusiasm for the job. Applying Retention Strategies to Short Term Volunteers For many reasons, short-term volunteering is not as rewarding as long-term — it doesn’t provide the emotional satisfaction of being an integral part of something. Short-term volunteering is to long-term as fast food is to a real meal: you can survive on it but you don’t call it dining. Many short-termers may be engaging in sporadic volunteering as a sampling technique until they find the volunteer position that is right for them, practicing "comparison shopping." To take advantage of this, a smart Volunteer Coordinator should develop a series of entry level, short-term jobs that provide volunteers with the opportunity to see how they like working with the organisation, its staff, and its clientele. Once volunteers are working in these "starter" jobs, the Volunteer Coordinator should work on retention, slowly grooming them for more work and ensuring that they truly enjoy the work they are doing. Volunteers are curiously rational: they won’t stay in jobs that aren’t enjoyable, and they will stay in those that are. From this perspective, emphasis on volunteer retention is much more important than emphasis on recruitment. Rather than focusing on constantly bringing new volunteers into the system, with the concomitant expenditure of energy required for recruitment, screening, orientation and training, concentrate on maintenance of the existing volunteer force through retention of the incumbents. Over time, the organisation will benefit from the increased experience levels of its volunteers and from the decreased costs of recruiting newcomers. There are three different ways of "improving" volunteer jobs to make them more interesting and involving. Give Them a Great Place to Work The process for strengthening involvement necessarily varies from job to job and from volunteer to volunteer, but some factors are probably common to all situations. One of these is providing for the volunteer a rewarding job, one in which working facilities are satisfactory and social relationships are positive. Some research has identified factors that might be important in this conversion process. A study of volunteer workers in three Israeli social service organisations found that organisational variables (such as adequate preparation for the task they were asked to do) and attitudinal variables (such as task achievement, relationships with other volunteers, and the nature of the work itself) were the best predictors of volunteer retention. Another study identified the following factors as important to volunteers in any volunteer job. The factors are ranked from 1 to 4, with 1 being "Not At All Important" and 4 being "Very Important." Colony, Chen, and Andrews Rank and Mean Scores of Individual Items for All Volunteers
Note that most of the top 10 items deal with the situation
in which the volunteer work is performed and the design of
the job itself: clear responsibilities, interesting work,
effective supervision.
Achievement-oriented
volunteers
By
Style of Volunteering
Long-term
volunteer
You
should note that an "ideal" recognition system might
require a mixture of different procedures in order to have
something for every type of volunteer. This is not unusual
and is quite appropriate. Many organisations fail to do this,
with interesting results. Consider, for example, an all-too-typical
organisation that gives its volunteer awards only according
to the amount of time donated, a "longevity" prize.
If you’re a short-term volunteer how do you feel about
this system? Or if your busy schedule limits the time you
can offer? Could you possibly ever "win" under these
rules? What would this type of award suggest to you about
the value that the organisation places upon your own contribution
of time?
Daily
means of providing recognition:
Rules
for Recognition
Recognition
can be categorized into four major types:
4.
Give it honestly. To develop a volunteer performance evaluation form, begin with the position description and rate the volunteer's performance in each area. Then proceed to the volunteer's individual goals, and determine jointly with the volunteer whether those goals were met completely, in part, or not at all. If the volunteer falls short of the goals, explain why. Next, review the volunteer's self-appraisal, and discuss any areas of concern. Finally, the performance appraisal should include a plan of action to address any training needed or desired during the next year.
Source Energize Inc... Used with Permission
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