According to the Corporation for
National and Community Service, the
volunteer rate in the United States
declined by 2 percent in 2010 — the
fourth consecutive annual decline. At
the same time, staffing firm Hudson
recently surveyed employers and found
that nearly half of American workers
fail to use all their vacation days. Thirty
percent say they use less than half of
their allotted time and 42 percent say
that they regularly have to cancel vacation plans. Americans are even taking
less vacation than the Japanese, who
coined the term karoshi — the phenomenon of being worked to death.
So, what’s an overworked association
executive to do? In the face of shrinking
resources, consider the following strategies for maximizing your and volunteers’
limited time:
1. Critically evaluate
whether a job needs to be
done by a volunteer.
“It forces us to utilize the scarce time
our volunteers have to focus on the
unique contributions they — and only
they — can provide,” says Tom Stautzenbach, CAE, executive director of the
American Academy of Physical Medicine
and Rehabilitation. “We are complementing this with more staff to do the
tasks that don’t really require the mem-ber/industry skills and experience. This
is also helping to build harmony between
the role of staff and the unique and valued role of our member volunteers.”
2. Create an array of jobs
with varying time commit-
ments.
Redesign jobs to provide a greater spectrum of time commitments from which
to match volunteers’ availability.
“We continuously evaluate our volunteer positions and the commitment that
is necessary for the volunteers to be
successful,” says Dale West, CAE, executive director of the Society for Gastroenterology Nurses and Associates. “We
have added new volunteer opportunities
that focus on very specific projects that
allow for shorter time commitments.”
3. Re-deploy staff to lever-
age volunteer expertise.
To maximize the contributions that only
volunteers can make, tasks that have
traditionally been performed by volunteers should be given to staff.
“A key volunteer recently told me
that he was about at the end of his
resources; the time and money being
devoted to the organization as a volunteer was both rewarding and exhausting,” says Tom Nicholson, executive
director of the Organization Development Network. “He was asking me to
take more of the administrative, planning and organizing responsibility so
he could get back to equilibrium and
enjoyment of all that the organization
offered him. So, we did. It wasn’t like
my staff wasn’t busy, but reducing the
load on the volunteer was critical to
retaining his leadership.”
4. Communicate time ex-
pectations prior to making
assignments.
Volunteers who fail to perform according
to the organization’s expectations often
don’t know what they are getting into
from the beginning.
“We clearly communicate the time
commitment to potential volunteers
before making assignments,” West says.
“I’ve had potential volunteers thank me
for taking the time to explain what’s
expected and then decline our invitation. But that door is still open for a
job that is less demanding instead of
a volunteer who feels he or she has let
the organization down and is ‘damaged’
from a future volunteer standpoint.”
5. Create new opportunities
to appeal to new volun-
teers.
Although it may seem contradictory,
consider creating more opportunities
of shorter duration that are focused on
using the expertise of the volunteer.
“Our goals and strategies are to
increase the number of overall volunteers involved, which also gives us
much broader perspective but requires
us to do a better job of matching the
volunteers’ passions, expertise and time
availability to the most valuable and
appropriate need,” Stautzenbach says.
