Changing the Hole to Fit the Peg: Part 3 - The Tick-Tock Thing

21st century volunteers prefer short waits for choice roles, short terms of office, short duration work assignments, short pre-meeting preparation materials and short meetings.  Minimal time commitments are big volunteer satisfiers and raise-your-hand motivators.  Apparently today's volunteers want us to understand that, although we may not, they have another life.  Deep down we do know that, but perhaps we aren’t sufficiently moved by that knowledge.  Over time, especially with dedicated volunteers who give much, it is easy to lose sensitivity to the time we take from them.

As I watch the evolution of volunteerism I’m convinced that we will continue to see shrinkage in available volunteer time regardless of what we do, leaving us two possible strategies.  One option is to rely less on volunteers; a viable choice for some, but impractical or cost prohibitive for many associations.  A better bet might be to attract a many players in more but smaller, less time-intensive roles. There's a push-back against that because it requires major changes to deploy and manage larger numbers of people in continuously fluxing roles.  So the question becomes this: is the need strong enough to justify the effort?

I recently worked with an national association that had a huge governance system with several hundred volunteer roles.  Filling a large number of vacancies was becoming difficult to achieve.  The first year they offered ad hoc roles like consulting expert called on as needed, their annual call for volunteers produced a 200% increase in new applicants.  And the vast majority of those opted for the ad hoc roles.  Few wanted standing or long term ones.  The increase in available volunteer resources certainly justified the enormous effort.  Getting there, though, was cause for not a little angst in having to rethink and reinvent their volunteer workforce deployment.  The members loved it.  But here's the rub…the staff, who thought they would love it, actually hated it.  Turns out they'd had to rethink and relearn much of what they knew about structuring volunteer efforts.  For some that meant changing a lifetime of work habits in ways they never imagined at the start of the change they had so strongly supported.  It was an uphill slog, and took a couple of years, but they were ultimately successful.  They now have not only enough volunteers each year, but they are developing a huge back-bench of people they can bring in for short stints, testing for fit and preparing them for succession to bigger roles.

It'd certainly be a game changer, and if your association governance or program execution is volunteer dependent, retooling volunteer deployment and management may become a necessity.  For all its difficulties, the effort itself will be temporary and we'll all grow professionally as we get used to managing differently.

In Part 4 next week I'll talk about dealing with the dull work we sometimes ask of our volunteers. 

Changing the Hole to Fit the Peg: Part 2 - Eliminate The YUCK Element

When it comes to assessing satisfaction with the way volunteer units operate, volunteers express themselves from an inverse view.  Instead of what they find satisfying, they tend to talk about what turns them off and diminishes their enthusiasm for the work.  Most of their negative input is operationally and behaviorally focused, citing these examples:

·      Tilting at windmills syndrome – where the association has the same issues on the agenda year in and year out with little or no real progress or resolution.

·      Fuzzy bottom lines – No clear understanding of desired outcomes or value to be gained from the work.

·       Skilled incompetence – everybody workes hard, executes well, little is accomplished. (Often a symptom of windmill tilting and fuzzy bottom lines)

·      Buck-passing and second-guessing hierarchies.  Being on a committee is seen as a waste of time when a higher level governing unit ignores, expresses dissatisfaction with or even redoes the work themselves.

·      Snail’s pace crawl from idea to end result.  As one volunteer told me, "Most of us would like to see our ideas come to fruition in our own lifetimes."

·      Senior/junior inequity – new participants are sidelined; expected to keep quiet and follow their seniors’ more experienced lead.  The volunteer experiences for those new to the game (not to mention depth of discussion) are diminished when 'watch and learn' is valued more than 'think and contribute'.

·      Be/think like us attitudes – incumbent leaders exhibit condescension or intolerance of new player viewpoints.  Even more frequent is a failure by experienced volunteers to accommodate work style, work tool and communication preferences of new players.

·      Newbie lockout – veteran volunteers hang together socially; newcomers feel ignored or excluded.

Not all associations suffer all of these operational ills, but for those that do it will likely take more than a passing effort to affect a cure.  While the cures are fairly obvious - eliminate the negative behaviors - for some associations that may mean reinventing the entire operating culture.  Would it be worth all the effort and upheaval?  If you depend on volunteers, and expect to keep up a steady flow of new ones, I'd think so.

Next week:  Part 3 - The Tick Tock Thing.  And a reader comment suggested a Part 4 to follow - Dealing With The Dull Bits.

Changing The Hole to Fit The Peg

For ages it worked great.  We had volunteers…happy, productive and in pretty good supply.  The pegs fit the hole just fine, and for long enough to really solidify the shape of that hole.  That solid form is now showing its age as slowly the pegs have begun to change shape and the fit tighten.  Pushing those pegs into that too-tight hole now frustrates many of us and, I suspect, annoys the pegs.

Listening closely to feedback from volunteers in dozens of associations, I've concluded that the way we conduct business may be turning off new volunteers, or at least failing to turn them on.  Even long-time volunteers are feeling a little impatient with the fact that we've not kept pace with the doing-business shifts they've experienced in every other facet of their careers.  We’ve been very slow to do anything substantive about it because redesigning the hole to fit the peg cuts deep into our governance psyche. 

So how do we redesign the association to fit these reshaped volunteers?  I took the issue to a group of member volunteers from a variety of professional societies and trade associations.  What they told me validated what I found from an array of association polls, surveys and other volunteer feedback loops.  It all boils down to four things: 

1.     Guarantee the WOW Factor

2.     Avoid the YUCK Element

3.     Accommodate the Tick Tock Thing
4.  Deal With the Dull Bits

In this post I'll talk about wow, with future posts on the yuck, tick tock and dull factors.

Changing the Hole to Fit the Peg: Part 1 - The WOW Factor

The top satisfier for volunteers (like pretty much everything else in this world today) is a compelling volunteer experience.  In this post I'm focused on the fact that, volunteers increasingly want experiences that make a difference.  I talked with some young dental professionals, for example, who told me that they'd much rather donate their time to patients at a free clinic or the dental society's Mission of Mercy program than sit on a committee talking about access to care.  That's the kind of thinking that has shifted associations' ranking when compared to other volunteer opportunities.  National statistics clearly demonstrate that social/community oriented volunteerism is by far the preferred choice, while business and professional associations are experiencing a shrinking share of the nation's volunteer pool.  For a more comprehensive view of WOW factors, see my previous blog post http://www.associationmusings.com/2011/10/volunteerism-is-all-about-experience.html.

Next week I'll cover avoiding the Yuck factor.

The long and the short of it.

Is shorter, faster communication always better?  I'm a big fan of instant messaging.  I use it a lot with family and friends.  But (there's always a But, isn't there) I'm starting to get texts from clients and find myself torn over reply options since a quick text reply isn't usually enough to convey my full-thought response.  Will they value text-reply brevity over a longer but more thorough email?  And I'm just a tad worried about thought undercurrents that are likely to be lost in short-burst messaging.  Perhaps I'm just missing the mental stimulation and confidence in the communication outcome that language-rich communication provides.

The language of icons and pictograms are taking on more of our quick communication chores.  Works for me - until I have to stop and figure one out because I hadn't yet seen it.  If you travel, especially outside the U.S., you know what I mean.  And all those icons on my smartphone!  Some are easily recognized, but for others the designers certainly went for artsy over meaningful.  It's one thing when your brand is well known; quite another when searching through a bunch of unfamiliar images.

Then there's the process of shifting from language to acronyms as a means of thought conveyance.  There are definite advantages to acronym communication.  It is faster to send and, assuming the reader doesn't need an extra minute or two to translate the mishmash of text, faster to read.  WRUD?  ROTFL, but not always; sometimes more like ROTFM (mourning) the lost richness of thought that only full words can convey.  And there are days when the electrons form themselves into something that takes me actual time to translate before I get it.  Occasionally my reply has to be "WTHDTM?"  ("What The Hell Does That Mean").

There's another side of the coin though.  Longer isn't always better as anyone who has read background material for a board meeting will testify.  Much of the effort preparing long, wordy reports and page after page of numbers is wasted.  Many board and committee members skim, scan or skip them entirely.  They come unprepared because it would take them too much time to sift through it all.  Shorter and condensed bullet points, charts and graphs for fast intake get more attention than long narrative reports and pages of numbers.

Then there's the matter of big versus small words.  For example, why 'utilize'; why not just 'use'?  What's with that extra 'ta' people insist on adding to the word preventive?  What does preventative convey that preventive doesn't?  I wonder, in a world where we now tweet and condense thought into minimal characters for texting, will people go back to 'using' for clarity instead of 'utilizing' for erudition?  Will the shorter 'me' and 'I' come back into fashion instead of the longer grammar-lazy copout 'myself'?

I'm ready to use any and all means to get through to people and they to me.  I'd just like to be sure and hold on to enough language and grammar to stimulate the little gray cells so we don't entirely lose our capacity for deeper thought.