Volunteer vs paid staff tensions
One of the issues that I have seen, over and over again, in regard to the management of volunteers and volunteer organizations, is the division between paid and volunteer staff. This is likely an issue that you, as a volunteer manager, will encounter, since it is likely that you are a *paid* manager, of *unpaid* volunteers.
One of the main ways that this tension shows up is in regard to volunteers complaining about hours of work. Volunteers tend not to be very concerned about their hours of work. Volunteers, very often, are volunteering because they do not have many calls on their time. They want something to do with their time. So, very often they are not too concerned about a shift running longer than the expected, or overtime hours or rates. After all, they don't get paid, so they don't get paid overtime, either.
But paid staff *do* get paid. And, by and large, they get paid either by the hour, or they get paid a flat rate salary for a specific number of hours per week. And, very often, they have other calls upon their time. They have a home life. They may have a family. They have other things to do, and so they are very concerned if they are asked to do additional duties that would require them to stay beyond their regular hours at work.
This is only one of the issues that might create tension between paid staff and volunteers within the same organization. But it may begin to illustrate the problem.
Volunteers are volunteering motivated by the belief that the task that they are performing is important. They are doing important work, and they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart. If, therefore, the job is important, and they are doing this important work with no remuneration, very often they will assume that they can call on paid staff to assist them in this work, since the paid staff, after all, *are* being paid for pursuing the same objective. The paid staff, noting that they are paid for a certain number of hours, and that they are fulfilling their duties diligently, and to the best of their ability, may resent extra requests for extra work or tasks, tasks that may lie outside the scope of their job description, and extra work that may require hours beyond their usual hours of work.
Hours of work may not be the only issue. There is the aforementioned topic of job descriptions. Once again, volunteers are there because they think the organizations objective is important. If they are pursuing the objective, they generally don't worry too much about whether a particular task that they are doing, if it is in pursuit of the overall objective, is something that they were told about during volunteer training. They will, very frequently, take on additional tasks if they think they can possibly do them. (Indeed, one of the reasons that volunteers may take volunteer work, is so that they can learn new tasks that they haven't done before.) Paid staff, however, may be a bit fussier about taking on additional tasks that aren't listed in their job description. After all, they will be facing some kind of job review, at some point, and performing a task poorly may reflect negatively on their job review, and possibly on their future salary. Therefore, they may not wish to attempt a job that hasn't been described to them, or for which they have not been trained. So, paid staff may not wish to undertake new or novel tasks, and may object to requests to help out with them, and may have valid reasons for objecting to this work that is not part of their job description.
As noted, this tension may be particularly acute for you, as the manager of volunteers. You are probably being paid for this job of managing the volunteers. You are being paid for a certain number of hours of work per week, and the volunteers may well be performing work at times outside of your normal hours of work. So the volunteers, in regard to hours of work, may object to the fact that they are working, and you are not. In regard to the hours of work, very often shifts may either be going filled, or be difficult to accomplish with minimal staffing levels, and the volunteers may feel that you, as their manager, should step in to help out that times when not many volunteers are available. If you agree, you may end up working twenty-four hours a day, and seven days a week.
In regard to tasks, the situation may be even more complex. After all, you are the manager of the volunteers. You train the volunteers. You describe, to the volunteers, the tasks they are to perform. They should, and quite properly, expect you to be able to do anything that they do. However, there may be things that some of the volunteers do well, that you don't do *as* well. (I recall a time when I was training technicians to align fibre optic cable connections. They regularly got 97% transfer efficiency. I'm no good at manual dexterity. The best *I* ever did was 30%.) It may be better to let them do it.
You may not wish to address this issue up front with staff and volunteer training. It's something that people are apt to ignore in training, and talking about it can create problems where none existed before. However, keep an eye out for this type of tension between the two types of staff. Make sure that both paid and volunteer staff know what to expect from each other. Be sure to remind the volunteers that paid staff should not necessarily be burdened with tasks beyond a specific set.
Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents
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