The People Approach to Volunteer Work Design
In the 1970s, many in volunteer management were concerned with making the field more professional by adopting and adapting personnel practices from private business. Ivan Scheier believed this was not only wrong-headed but almost the opposite of what we should be doing. Instead, Ivan preferred and promoted a way to develop roles for volunteers that he called “The People Approach.” In this article, Rick Lynch explores the application of Ivan's People Approach to designing roles for volunteers in the present-day world.
Comments
Stephen Moreton, Head of Education and Development, Attend, London GB
April 15th, 2009, 7:52pm
The value of Ivan Scheier’s work is clearly evident in helping volunteer management to try to define itself as a discipline and as a profession. Rick Lynch’s comparison of the ‘paid work model’ and the volunteer work model, is also helpful - volunteer management can be understood more fully by considering how it relates to other fields of people management.
However, the world of people management is moving on. Back in 1985, Warren Bennis stated “the problem with most organisations (in the USA) is that they are over-managed and under-led”. Certainly the regimented approach to staff recruitment and selection as described by Rick Lynch in this article would fit with this concept. Modern writers and researchers are now concluding that great organisations are those that can encourage paid staff to offer discretionary effort and ‘go the extra mile’ and that organisations need to be fit for human beings (for example, Purcell 2003, Hamel 2008).
In this respect, the 'world class' organisation applies the principles of volunteer management to its paid staff. It encourages people to volunteer their talent, their time, their intellect and creativity, and their commitment and loyalty.
In this sense, many of the interview questions that Rick Lynch presents as examples for a volunteer interview apply just as well in a paid staff environment. These are the questions that allow the prospective job applicant to establish whether the organisation is a place where they will be able to ‘live, breath and have their being’.
For example, in the CIPD Podcast on Talent Management (2007), Adrian Moorhouse, former Olympic swimming champion and now Managing Director of lane 4 states:
“Matching the motivations, dreams and goals of an individual with the motivations, goals and dreams of an organisation – when you get those closely aligned then, I think, you've got a very motivated group of people because it's not work, it's life."
The selection interview for paid staff is crucial in preparing the ground for matching individual goals with organisational needs, and the organisation that has people management insight will include many of these ‘volunteering’ interview questions.
There is more than an element of truth in the hypothesis that: ‘Effective people management is volunteer management’.
Rick Lynch , author of this article
April 20th, 2009, 7:53pm
I absolutely agree with Stephen Moreton's comments about leadership. As Kouzes and Posner said in their book The Leadership Challenge, managers should treat their people as if they were volunteers. Some large organizations actually do take the People Approach to hiring paid people today (Microsoft for one). I can foresee a day when people with volunteer management experience are sought after to advise corporations on the people side of their businesses.
Colleen Kelly, Executive Director, Volunteer Vancouver, Vancouver BC Canada
February 3rd, 2009, 7:52pm
Sadly, I never had an opportunity to meet Ivan Scheier - and yet, for years, I have quoted this thought of his: "I believe volunteer administration unconsciously took the road most traveled." We now are finding we must take the road not traveled. Think he must have been a wonderful man and it was my loss to never meet him. In this lifetime anyway :-).
As Ivan said, we MUST focus on the people approach to community engagement! It is about what many people can do to further our organizational missions. Why do we overlook the people? Although we have for years tried to convince the paid-with-money people to build volunteer involvement into their programs, it absolutely is about the not-paid-with-money people working together with paid people that can achieve great results. As the Executive Director of a community organization I believe it is my role to focus on all the people we have available to deliver our mission. There truly are many - some we can pay with dollars and some we can pay in other very important and often intangible ways. It is about finding the right payment. It is about working with all the people to truly deliver our missions.