Cultivating a Healthy Volunteer Team

Matching People and Positions Whether screening volunteers using an application or a leader has a personal relationship with a volunteer, a leader should take time to understand each person’s gifts, talents, and personality. A leader needs to do their due diligence to fit the right person to the right position. Questions a leader might want to know about a potential volunteer include the following: • Is the volunteer an introvert or an extrovert? • What is the person physically able to do? • Does the person have unique skills or education? • What life experiences does the person have? • How old is the person? • What is the person’s availability? • Have I had experience with this person’s past performance? There is nothing worse for both a leader and a volunteer than having a volunteer serve in a position that is diabolically opposed to their inherent nature. The experience will be miserable for the volunteer who is serving outside of their skillset, and it can negatively affect other volunteers’ experience. It can affect the organization as well. For example, if an event volunteer serving on the tech team is responsible for recording a speaker’s session but is uncomfortable with audiovisual equipment or is an introvert, the recording may not be captured. This volunteer may be too nervous to push the buttons for fear they will get it wrong, or they may be too shy to enter a crowded room of people. Now the organization has missed the opportunity to record the speaker while on-site. For those organizations implementing a volunteer program for the first time or if it is a leader’s first year building a team, this first one will be the most challenging. A leader should anticipate there will be an occasional mismatch between a volunteer and a task or position. Where possible, a leader might want to make changes on the fly during an in-person event and swap volunteers around. If a volunteer is serving at an organization’s office and this happens, a leader might offer additional training or redeploy a volunteer to a different department. Situations like these provide a leader with opportunities to develop their skills and grow in their ability to cultivate a healthy volunteer team. Listening to Them When speaking with volunteers while they serve, a leader needs to really listen to what they have to say. It is important for a leader to learn the volunteers’ names, what their hobbies are, and what special or unique gifts or talents they have. This is not only important for building relationships with the volunteers, but it will also help the leader when assigning a volunteer to a specific position in the future if they choose to serve again. Plus, volunteers have a great deal to contribute to the program, event, or organization. Besides having a casual conversation with a volunteer, there are intentional ways a leader can collect helpful information from them. One way would be to send each volunteer a post-serve survey. A leader can ask specific questions about a volunteer’s serving experience, their interactions with leaders they reported to, or other volunteer-program-specific questions. These are helpful to a leader when reviewing, refining, and improving the volunteer program. Volunteer feedback is a critical piece of the puzzle when cultivating a healthy volunteer team. A leader can also ask a volunteer general questions about observations made while they served, especially during an in-person event, for example. These are helpful to an organization as they review the goals and objectives of the event as a whole. A leader cannot always be everywhere, and volunteers can provide vital information and insight. Allowing a volunteer to share their experience also honors the commitment a volunteer made to the organization by serving.