“If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do.” - Frederick Herzberg

While Frederick Herzberg was referring to work that employees do, we can easily paraphrase his quote for volunteer engagement: If you want your volunteers to do good work, provide them with good volunteer work; or in other words, a good volunteer role!

What makes for a good volunteer role, opportunity or project? And how can you decide when a role should be a paid opportunity rather than a volunteer one?

Reciprocity?

To answer that question, we can start with the Canadian Code for Volunteer Involvement (CCVI) which defines the Canadian standards of practice for engaging volunteers. The CCVI’s guiding principles state that the relationship between organizations and their volunteers should be reciprocal. That is, volunteers have rights and at the same time, have responsibilities towards the organizations that engage them.

Further, the CCVI Standard of Practice which relates to Roles and Volunteer Recruitment specifies that “volunteer roles involve volunteers in meaningful ways that reflect their skills, needs, interests and backgrounds.” In other words, the relationship has to be mutual: not only does the organization benefit from the work of volunteers, but the volunteer also needs to benefit as well, preferably on a personal level.

So the first question to ask is: does this work benefit both the volunteer and the organization? If there is no clear benefit to the volunteer and only the organization benefits, then perhaps the work should be paid.

Scope of Work?

Another consideration is the scope of the work involved. Is the work assigned to a volunteer too big, in terms of responsibilities or time? Volunteer roles are typically much more focused in terms of their responsibilities and tasks than a typical employee role. In fact, this narrowness of focus is a benefit of engaging volunteers. According to A Matter of Design: Job design theory and application to the voluntary sector

"volunteers’ ability to focus exclusively on an assigned task for even a short time period ensures their effectiveness within the organization. By comparison, paid workers typically must balance a wide variety of duties and tasks, and often lack the opportunity to concentrate their efforts on one specific task at hand.”

As such, the Volunteer Canada guidebook referenced above provides a great task analysis tool for designing effective volunteer roles. Roles that are too big can be broken down into separate volunteer roles or alternatively, the work can be delegated to a team of volunteers.

Managing Risks?

Have you considered all the risks associated with the role and minimized them to the best of your ability? The Standard relating to Risk Management in the CCVI states that: “risk management procedures are in place to assess, manage and/or mitigate potential risks to the volunteers, the organization, its clients, staff, members and participants that may result from the delivery of a volunteer-led program or service.” No activity is without risk, whether it is run by staff or volunteers but consider what might go wrong and determine how to minimize the risk. Reducing risk for the volunteers makes the role more less onerous for the volunteer and therefore more appealing to them. This Charity Village article contains a great list of suggestions of how to reduce risk when working with volunteers.

Support and Supervision?

A related issue to risk management is that of support and supervision. Have you ensured that volunteers are connected with a staff partner or a volunteer team leader? Again the CCVI speaks to this requirement: one of the foundational values of volunteer involvement is that it is about building relationships and connecting volunteers in a personal way to the causes they care about. It isn’t just about getting a task done. Ensuring that volunteers feel connected and a sense of belonging makes them feel supported and valued, and will help increase retention in the long run.

Staff work vs volunteer work?

Although it shouldn’t need repeating, “the involvement of volunteers should add value to and support the work of paid staff, and should not be used to displace paid staff or undercut their hours and conditions of service.” (from Volunteers and Decent Work: What is the Connection?)

How does volunteer work differ from paid work? This How To Guide from Volunteer Ireland succinctly summarizes the key differences:

• Volunteering is always a matter of choice
• It takes place in or through not-for-profit projects or organizations.
• It is unpaid and is not job substitution
• It creates positive change for the volunteer, the organization and the community

Criteria for a valid volunteer role

This same guide also summarizes the two criteria that must be met to design a valid volunteer role:

1. The role must be philosophically sound: it must, in keeping with the definition and principles of volunteering, respect the rights of volunteers and add value to the organization in a way that paid roles do not.

2. The role must be viable: our expectations of prospective volunteers need to be realistic, given current trends in volunteering. We can reasonably expect that someone will want to take on the role, and can take on the role while still carrying out their family, work, leisure, and other activities.

How best to determine whether a role is both philosophically sound and viable? Consult your Subject Matter Experts: the volunteers themselves! If they perceive the role as adding value and can also potentially see themselves filling it, then you’ve got yourself a great role. The next step is to develop your position description using the Volunteer Success Template and then post your great opportunity on Volunteer Success!

For more tips on developing meaningful volunteer roles, check out another great article in the RLC!