Get volunteerism right in the workplace

Summary

Volunteerism is an important part of many successful projects and movements, but to ensure success organizations should do the following.

1. Staff projects with a proper team

2. Make it easy for volunteers to contribute

3. Make information about the project visible

4. Identify areas of work that are important but not on the project's critical path

5. Manage expectations of what volunteers can achieve

6. Ensure that volunteers do not bottleneck the core team

7. Account for the true cost of volunteerism

(A version of this post originally appeared on my LinkedIn feed)

Volunteerism is a beautiful thing. I’m never sure if it was Gen Dolittle (in the movie Pearl Harbor) or Kobi Yamada who said, 

“There’s nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer.” 

Well, whether it’s Hollywood or a war hero or an inspirational CEO or any combination of those, that quote rings true. Volunteers run some of the largest projects and movements across the world and we'd be silly to underestimate what they can achieve. In the world of work, though, we'd also be silly to think of the volunteer army as a panacea. 

I’d be the last person to tell you that there’s no room for passion projects at work. But if you want to get heaps done through volunteerism, you might set yourself up for disappointment. In today’s post, I want to outline three things you should do to make volunteerism succeed at your organisation.

1. Don’t hinge it all on volunteers

Volunteers won’t give your project magic wings

Volunteerism is not Red Bull. It won’t give your project wings. If you look around the world and examine popular movements and projects, you’ll notice that they almost always start with a serious investment of time and effort from a small group of people. Well before an initiative becomes large, some people need to set up the frameworks for others to contribute or to provide design oversight, and even to define what the collective effort is all about. We look at movements like Fridays for Future and even iconic open-source projects such as the Linux OS as paragons of volunteer effort and yet, none of these would have been possible without the full-time effort of the people who started them. Yes. Full. Time. Effort. 

So if your project is important, go about it this way.

1. Staff it with a proper team.

2. Use the full-time capacity to create the context for volunteers to come in and contribute in their spare time. This includes a few things.

• Make it easy for people to contribute in short bursts of free time. Dip in, dip out. Optimise tasks down to hourly or at least half-day chunks of work. Anything more complex, and you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

• Make everything about the project visible. The backlog. Background knowledge and documentation. How you’ll accept contributions. Without a shared reality, the cost of onboarding volunteers will be disproportionate to the value you get from them.

• Identify areas of work that are important but not on the project’s critical path. These are excellent volunteer opportunities. Think “valuable but not urgent” to identify what you can achieve through your volunteers.

Think chickens and pigs

If I had a penny for each time I’ve referenced this comic, I’d probably be a millionaire by now. And if you know me and are tired of this reference, I wouldn’t blame you. I’m going to use it all the same and make my point, anyway. 

• Your core team are the pigs - they are “committed” to the success of the project. You’re possibly reviewing their performance based on how well they execute these projects. 

• The volunteers are the chickens. They contribute through the pure goodness of their heart - and may whichever god you believe in bless them for that. All that said, they’re merely “involved” in the gig. 

The last thing you want is for chickens to bottleneck the pigs. Imagine someone whose job it is to execute a project, to be blocked by someone who takes part in their spare time. Not only is this counterproductive, but it’s also a dampener on people’s motivation. 

So what can you, as a leader, do? Well, for one, manage your expectations of what a volunteer army can achieve. If you see a project slowing down, the solution is rarely to just enlist volunteers. You either need to realign the priorities of your “committed” team or staff the team with more committed people; noting, of course, that there’s only so big a team can get. And just do less. Don’t worry, it's ok to do a few things well rather than many mediocre things.

“Everyone tries to do too much: solve too many problems, build products with too many features. We say ‘no’ to almost everything.” - Founders, 37signals

Account for all costs

In the workplace, people’s time is a zero-sum game. If they spent time on one activity, then they’re almost certainly taking time away from another activity. And please, don’t come at me with “You know, they can always stretch.” That’s just another way of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Someone always pays for the costs.

• Either the customer who directly or indirectly employs the person pays because the time this person would have spent delivering value for them, now goes into volunteering.

• Or the volunteer pays with their own time which they could have spent in different ways. 

And here lies the rub. There’s a cost to people’s time, and a problem with corporate volunteerism is that we have little discipline accounting for it. The side effect of this is that we externalise the costs of volunteerism and only cheerlead for the benefits. Consider the flip-side when you diligently account for the time (and consequent costs) of your volunteers. 

1. You learn the true cost of the initiative.

2. You learn who paid for the initiative - your employees, the organisation or your customers or some combination of those three.

3. You can use this information to fund the initiative in the future.

A true and transparent accounting of volunteer work is not just informative, it’s the ethical thing to do. Volunteer effort is anything but free and creating the illusion that initiatives get delivered at a cost exclusive of that effort stops you from being a data-driven organisation. 

---

As I come to the end of this article, I hope you don’t see me as opposed to the idea of volunteerism in the workplace. As someone who’s been a volunteer both at my organisation and often for initiatives at my clients’, I know the sense of autonomy it gives people to pick something that aligns with their passions. The only point I want to make is that harnessing this passion doesn’t and shouldn’t come for free. If I got that point across, I’m guessing this post was worth its while.