Interviewing and Screening
Engaging and Supporting Volunteers in Integrative Health Programs
An increasing number of hospitals and other healthcare environments are now beginning to incorporate integrative health interventions into their settings to meet the stress or symptom management needs of both patients and employees. These practices often include massage, canine visits, art, music, energy healing, guided imagery, essential oils, yoga, and Tai Chi, and work in tandem with mainstream medicine to address everything from patient boredom to emotional distress, physical symptoms of pain, anxiety, and nausea.
While interest in integrative health interventions in hospitals has grown over the last several years, the use of volunteers in these programs has grown, too. And as integrative care expert Cathrine Weaver writes in this issue of e-Volunteerism, there has also been an uptick in the unanticipated need for emotional support and more focused monitoring of volunteers in these programs. “The integrative interventions volunteer role makes great demands on the individual, and these demands can take an emotional toll,” writes Weaver. “Understanding this has helped us see the importance of supporting these volunteers in a different way.”
In this feature story, Weaver explores how to engage volunteers in integrative health programs and how to provide the monitoring behaviors and support they need to maintain their own wellbeing while helping others.
Behavior-Based Interviewing: An Effective Screening Tool for Highly-Skilled Volunteers
In this feature article, Elisa Kosarin introduces behavior-based interviewing as an extremely effective screening method for assessing highly-skilled volunteer applicants.
Kosarin’s article is based on the author’s extensive experience working for Fairfax Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) in Virginia, where highly specialized volunteers advocate for the best interests of abused or neglected children living under the court’s protection. Using behavior-based interviewing techniques, a reassessment of volunteer screening and interviewing processes produced dramatic and positive results for the program, including: a significant decrease in the number of volunteers dropping or not taking cases (from 25 percent to 2 percent in just two years); and a dramatic increase in volunteer retention (from 29 percent to 48 percent over five years). As Kosarin explains, the implementation of behavior-based interviewing played a major role in this turnaround.
In addition to providing a short narrative on Fairfax CASA’s shift to behavior-based interviewing, the article includes:
- A step-by-step guide for implementing the method in a volunteer program;
- Practical guidelines for conducting the interview;
- Examples of how the method is applied in various other programs.
Interviewing for Success: How to Conduct Effective Volunteer Interviews
Of the many challenges volunteer administrators face, the volunteer interview may seem to be the least worrisome. But the volunteer interview is arguable the most important step in an extensive process that matches a potential volunteer with appropriate tasks and duties. In this Along the Web, author Erick Lear presents a list of resources developed to aid volunteer managers and help them conduct effective interviews with prospective volunteers. In addition to helping managers interview for success, this information can help managers improve time management as well as cost effectiveness when they perform recruitment activities.
Emphasizing the Personal and Professional Benefits of Service: Encouraging Volunteers to Ask, "What’s in It for Me?"
As practitioners in the field of volunteer engagement, we all know the extraordinary impact volunteers have on creating real change in diverse communities. We are also familiar with the multitude of altruistic motivations that inspire individuals to step up and lend a hand. At the same time, we also know that volunteering can be a terrific way for individuals to gain benefits both personal and professional. We’ve seen volunteers translate their service into dynamic career paths and make new friends through shared volunteer experiences. Whether they are driven to engage primarily by a motivation to do good in the world or simply to stay busy while they look for paid employment, the end result can be a volunteer experience that is life-changing for both the volunteer and the community.
As volunteer managers, we know all of this. But do our volunteers?
This article by Erin L. Barnhart provides an overview of how volunteer management professionals can play a more active role in encouraging volunteers – both current and new – to explore and identify the multitude of motivations they might have for getting involved. Barnhart explores how leaders of volunteers can help individuals better understand a key element of service: because altruistic and personal motivations and goals are not mutually exclusive, both types of motivations can often lead to more satisfying, meaningful and effective volunteer placements.
The Volunteer’s Fantasies: A Challenge to the Volunteer Manager
When a volunteer walks through a manager’s door, each volunteer brings along a whole system of expectations, wishes and demands associated with the volunteer experience. Volunteer managers often recognize one category of expectations as the “fantasy world” of the volunteer. These expectations are frequently hidden from the volunteer manager and often only exist subconsciously for the volunteer. While the volunteer’s altruistic motives are most important in the first stages of recruiting and integrating the volunteer, the volunteer’s fantasies are most likely to surface during the actual volunteer experience. During this stage, if these additional hidden needs of the volunteer are not fulfilled, the altruistic motives that the volunteer previously declared will gradually erode, often causing the volunteer to drop out early on.
In this e-Volunteerism feature story, we review how these fantasy concepts challenge volunteer managers and discuss why it’s important to understand the nature of volunteer fantasies. Ultimately, volunteer managers who learn to manage these conditions help influence the management practices of the entire organization – for the better.
Clearing Hurdles on the Volunteer Obstacle Course
In this Points of View, the authors won’t argue for a return to the old and casual systems for volunteer involvement. After all, this is a different world with different problems – with criminal record checks serving as a perfect example of something that volunteer managers learned the hard way need to be done, as imperfect as they currently function. But a goal of volunteer resource managers should still be to extend a welcome to prospective volunteers, making the process go as well as it can in today’s more complex environment. This Points of View presents some ideas that will help more people clear the hurdles of the volunteer process and help them actually cross the finish line as accepted volunteers.
The Contradictions of Imposing 'Checks' on Volunteers: Questions We Need to Answer
Debbie Usiskin, an experienced volunteer programme manager in London, shares her personal exploration of how government requirements to ‘check’ (screen) volunteers provide contradictory and conflicting responsibilities and messages. She raises important questions about finding the right balance between protecting those who are served while supporting the widest range of volunteers.
Usiskin also introduces a provocative analysis of volunteer-involving organisations by influential business guru Charles Handy and applies his thinking to volunteer management.
Family Feud: Relatives, Co-Workers and Friends as Volunteers
We often think of well-functioning volunteer programs as happy little families, systems in which people get along so well that they resemble the idyllic picture of family relationships portrayed in U.S. television shows from the 1950s. And while this is often true, occasionally we run into situations where the family more resembles the Ozzy Osbournes.
The notion of families volunteering together is one that has a lot of intrinsic appeal and a lot of value. In this Points of View, however, we look at things from a slightly different perspective: the potential conflicts that arise when individuals with close outside relationships – spouses, siblings, relatives, close friends, co-workers, fellow church members – are volunteering “inside” the same organization but those “outside” relationships, either positive or negative, begin to affect volunteering behavior.
We examine what happens when volunteer programs actually involve those with family-like relationships in volunteering together, analyze what is likely to happen in these scenarios (and why), and offer some tips for what to do if you encounter problems or to prevent them in the first place.