All of you will have policies for your volunteers. You probably have policy manuals for your volunteers. (Probably buried somewhere in a desk.) You will have policy and procedures manuals. Disregarded behind the mops.
This tends to be the attitude towards policy. It's something that you are supposed to have. Managers tend to like policies more than the volunteers do. According to the managers, policy is a way that you can get back at the volunteers, or possibly discipline them, or make their life difficult if they aren't doing what you want. According to the volunteers, policies are pointless exercises imposed on them for no particular reason, probably made up by someone who has absolutely no idea what goes on in the organization.
Policies are important. Policies are, in fact, vital. It's just that the policies that are really used by the organization tend not to be the policies that are actually written down in the policy manual.
The policies are, in fact, the rules governing the organization. They should, and all too often do not, derive from the mission statement of the organization. The policies should outline what you must do, what you should do, and what you can't do. That is the way the policies should be written.
Unfortunately, even for the managers, the actual writing down of the policy is given short shrift, and the policies are not well thought out. If you are new to volunteer management, you should pull the policy manual out, and go through it with a very heavy red pen. If you have the opportunity to be the first manager in a volunteer organization, you should be giving significant thought to writing down your policies. Write down, as I have noted, what has to be done, what should be done, and what can't be done. And be very careful when you are thinking about them.
Absolutely crucial to crafting your policies is: never create a policy with which the volunteers cannot comply.
Your policies should be, as I have noted, the rules for work and behavior in the organization. This should give your volunteers guidance on what they are to do, and what they aren't to do. The policies, therefore, have to be possible. If you write down a policy which the volunteers either cannot accomplish, or cannot comply with, or a policy that actually impedes them performing the actual objectives of the organization, you are doing something that is worse than useless. It is one thing to write up a policy which doesn't give guidance, or failing to write a policy that gives guidance. If you fail to write a policy, that means that the volunteers don't get the help that they should really be expecting from you in performing their tasks and objectives. But if you write a policy that they can't comply with, that means that, in the normal operation and work for the organization, they are continually breaking that policy. The reason that that policy is worse than useless is that it requires the volunteers to break policy. If they are required to break one policy, they start to build an attitude that the policies are of no importance. Not only are they useless, but they actually get in the way of pursuing the objectives of the organization. Therefore, in the volunteer's minds, the policies become pointless. If you have to break one policy, you are much more likely to break other policies, because policy becomes what people all too often seem to assume that they are; not something to help, but something that actually gets in the way of doing your job.
So don't do that. Never create a policy with which the volunteers cannot comply.
And this should guide your creation of any and all policies. When you craft a policy, make sure that the volunteers can always comply with it. Make sure that the volunteers are never going to be put in the situation of deciding whether or not to comply with the policy. The policy should be there for a reason, and it should be there to protect the organization, to further the tasks and objectives of the organization , to protect the safety of your volunteers, or to protect other assets of the organization. But, when writing down the policy, make sure that the way that the policy is written doesn't unnecessarily interfere with the actual tasks and objectives that the volunteers are going to be pursuing.
I have had a fair amount of practice in writing policies and procedures. And it's not easy. It can get pretty complicated, when you have something that you know should be forbidden or prevented, but, if you fail to word the policy properly, you can write yourself into a corner, and set up a situation where the workers in the organization can't do their jobs, and still work within the restriction that the policy creates. You may have to think of a lot of different scenarios, and try to think of reasons that someone might want to break your policy, as it is written, which means that you need to rewrite the policy, protecting the real reason for the prohibition, but allowing real work to continue.
I well recall one situation where a policy, in the organization that I was a part of, came down stating that we were not to use software in our office, and in our organization, that had not been paid for. This is, one would think, a relatively good idea. We do not want people bringing in pirated software, and possibly getting us into legal trouble. Depending on the type of organization that we're working in, we may want not want to have unauthorized software in our organization, because of the danger of insecure software operating within our systems. However, my position in the organization one of my tasks was to review software, in order to determine suitable software to purchase.
So, how was I supposed to obtain review software? Normally, software companies were only too happy to provide us free software for review. After all, I was working for a very large entity, and they knew that, if I was happy with the software, they were going to get enormous numbers of orders for that software. But, if we were not to use software that had not been purchased, I couldn't ask for free review software anymore.
The project of reviewing software had no budget. And, given the size of the entity I was working for, and the various other policies in regard to budgeting and purchasing, the ability to temporarily purchase software, for review, and then return the software having done the review, would have required an absolutely enormous budget, even with the fact that the software was being returned, and the purchase price refunded back. The purchasing policies for this particular enterprise were not intended to cover this kind of activity, and, in fact, the fact that purchases were not final would, because of other policies, have a negative effect on my office's overall budget. It was a real mess. And, basically, we had to stop the review project. Which probably didn't do the enterprise any good.
So, be very careful about the unintended consequences of your policies. You may have to discuss projected policies, and the specifics, and wording, of the proposed policy, in order to make sure that it doesn't create a problem for someone, or some activities, within your organization. Policy is important. It provides the direction, for the objectives and tasks for your organization. Policy needs to be followed. So make sure that you don't create policies that your people cannot follow.
Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents
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