stephen.moreton@attend.org.uk's blog

It was good to see some profile of volunteering on the BBC Business News this week, with VE's Chief Executive, Justin Davis-Smith being interviewed on the increase in use of 'professional volunteers'. The discussion was about people who have recently been made redundant offering their specialist experience to charitable organisations in order to keep their CV live and current, thus enhance their future employability prospects.

I was reading a book by Emma Brierley called 'Talent on Tap' dealing with how to manage freelance consultants, and a few concepts seemed ring true with this BBC interview. I've quoted them below, but instead of 'freelance consultants' I've inserted 'professional volunteers'. What do you think?

• "Most organisations really do not understand how to manage professional volunteers because they are no good at allowing creativity to happen ...(professional volunteers) don't want to be made into employees because it makes them feel trapped. ....Organisations that are able to live with this tension will grow rapidly. [quoted from Charles Handy]

• "Our relationship with our professional volunteers is based on trust. In fact we don't even ask them to sign formal contracts. Instead, we have a volunteers charter outlining what we expect from them - and what they can expect from us". [Fiona Dent, Ashbridge Management College]

• "When drawn up correctly, an agreement with a professional volunteer becomes a case study in honesty and partnership. Before signing, both parties are free to discuss any issues and concerns while establishing their expectations and requirements. Although the perfect agreement may take time to set up, once it is in place it should manage itself"

These are interesting concepts and this CIPD publication comes out at a time when the volunteer management profession is keen to establish itself. Currently the response of the VM profession appears to focus on 'separatism' and 'specialism'. In other words, volunteer managers re-stating that volunteer management is different to managing paid staff, and that no-one can manage volunteers effectively unless they have been specially trained.

The CIPD research quarterly update (August 2009) states:

"The role of the line manager is an increasingly important and challenging one in the modern workplace. It is the day-to-day behaviours of line managers that will, to a large extent, decide the extent to which employees will go the extra mile in their jobs and remain loyal to their organisation"

This gives me two areas for reflection:

(i) Quality people management is volunteer management

I remember John Ramsey reflecting in his speech at last year's AVM AGM, that people didn't really know how to define volunteer management. He did state however, that he did not view VM as a subset of HR.

This research paper certainly supports John's statement, but in fact provides a further interesting concept - that effective people management requires an organisation (and by inference its line managers) to encourages people to volunteer their talent, their time, their intellect and creativity, and their commitment and loyalty. So it appears that there is more than an element of truth in saying that quality people management is volunteer management!!

What therefore is there implication to us as a profession? It means we have something to offer the wider world of work. Within volunteer management practices and philosophies there are 'secrets' that organisations have not yet discovered for encouraging staff engagement.

It means that the volunteer management profession has a duty to engage with the wider world of world and share these lessons and philosophies - after all, which of us in our capacity as paid staff, do not want to be treated as a volunteer by those that manage us?!

With the promise of a £1m injection into volunteer management training and development, I found myself reflecting on what legacy this will leave on the VM profession.

The availability of this fund represents a significant stage in the journey that volunteer management has travelled to date. On the one hand it is a huge investment when compared to the era when the first paid VM was appointed (allegedly in 1963 at Fulbourne Hospital, where an unspecified number of cloak-clad senior managers huddled around a dimly lit NHS desk-lamp to develop a suitable job-description and recruitment advert). But on the other hand, £1m is not a lot of money. For example, with an estimated 100,000 paid VMs, and a further 100,000 unpaid VMs, it could be argued that ‘sharing the wealth' requires the OTS to give a fiver to each VM so they can purchase a booklet on managing volunteers (or one copy of ‘Essential Volunteer Management' by McCurley and Lynch, between two!). It's not that I'm belittling the impact Steve and Rick have made with this landmark publication, but in reality £1m represents £5 per VM, and as such it could be very easy for the ‘Strand C' investment to disappear into the volunteer management ether.

So what is the potential legacy for the OTS ‘Strand C' funding?

From my perspective, there could be 3 key differences that this fund could make:

1. It could help to create a cohort of volunteer managers who are able to both facilitate the contribution that volunteers can make to an organisation's core purpose, and also communicate this to the organisation's key decision-makers.

2. It could help to create a cohort of volunteer managers who are able to act as an example and as an inspiration to other VMs by demonstrating good practice and innovation.