Whether staff are volunteers, contract workers, or full time employees, they need to have explicit statements about job goals, performance standards, conflict resolution and assessment strategies and procedures. And staff need to know how they fit into a team.
Maintaining a balance between the needs of the programme and the needs of staff, especially volunteers, requires a management style that encourages team work and personal autonomy, keeping programme goals the priority. Following are some suggestions for ensuring team work and managing volunteers.
Voter and civic education programmes will want to encourage voluntarism. They also will have specialized staff, and amongst these the programme might find a range of contractors, consultants, seconded personnel, interns and researchers.
Managing this diverse group of people can be difficult, especially if it is done by a group of educators whose primary responsibility is the delivery of the programme and the use of their specialized expertize.
Teams with responsibility for a component of the programme, composed of a range of job definitions and personal skills, enable a programme to meet a variety of personal needs for significance, learning, and job fulfilment. Segregating people so that there is no contact between specialists and volunteers can create divisions. It is essential that there are additional supervisory staff to oversee and manage volunteers and more long-term staff.
Team Work
Teams members should be clear on programme goals (see Team Development). Then, staff members can add their experience and enthusiasm to the mix.
Volunteers, whether working in a team or not, require formal and explicit agreements about what can be expected from them and what they are likely to receive from the programme. Such agreements need to cover the following:
Volunteers
- the amount of work time that can be expected
- the particular days of the week that the volunteer will be present
- whether or not any remuneration is expected
- a set of performance standards
In addition, there should be an explicit statement about whether the contract can be ended, even if it is not a remunerated one.
Volunteers may have opinions about what they can or should be doing, and the explicit agreement is designed to ensure that their place in the programme is recognized without being undervalued (some volunteers are treated like slave labour) or overvalued (some volunteers demand the sort of care and attention that even senior staff cannot demand). At any rate, it will be important to keep volunteer staff motivated.
