I spent a lot of time with volunteer-based teams and leaders this year learning how to build and manage successful teams.
Nobody I worked with claimed to have it all figured out - operating on donated time and money brings surprises and pressures traditional teamwork doesn’t. I wanted to learn what makes some teams tick more effectively than others.
Although every team was different, some common threads emerged that every leader grappled with differently - some fared better than others. Teams and leaders come in many shapes, sizes, and colors but I’ve tried to capture some parts of the recipe for working well together to help anyone on or leading a team of volunteers.
Here are five ways excellent volunteer teams can operate more efficiently.
Keep everyone accountable
Accountability lives inside these four questions:
- What has to be done?
- Who has to do the work?
- Why does it need to be done?
- When is it due, or how important is it?
When any of the answers aren’t clear, your efficiency slips, volunteers disengage, and your team suffers. Successful leaders make “work clarity” a priority. Spend time talking about the answers, but stay away from telling people “how” to do the job.
When you constantly tell people how to do their job, you’re removing their ability to creatively solve the problem, which limits innovation and eventually makes you a micro manager.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said it well:
If you wish to build a ship do not divide the men into teams and send them into the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.
Volunteers are usually there because they vibe with the mission. Trust them to do the work, and build that trust by trusting them to do the work. Clearly defining the answers to the four questions makes it easier for them to dream for the sea and return with a solution.
Accountability builds trust, and trust is everything to a volunteer team.
Write down the systems
Some volunteers stick around for years, others months, and some stints are measured in days or even hours. Several studies and citations around the internet say nonprofits have a turnover rate of around 19%.
Other industries average 12%.
Your team is far less effective when you’re constantly plugging the same leaks left when people cycle through your group. When people stick around it’s easier to build long-term relationships with donors and vendors, plus you don’t need to spend your limited time re-training people on mission-critical skills.
Turnover is impossible to avoid, but you can lower the bad side effects by writing things down.
A team’s “systems” are the processes they follow like a checklist. Pilots and surgeons use checklists to provide consistent service. Volunteer teams can do the same thing.
When you write your systems down, turnover won’t force you to reinvent the wheel to keep your organization on track - just follow your processes.
Here are a few critical systems to design and scribble onto a Miro, spreadsheet, or doc:
- Recruitment process
- Onboarding new members to various roles
- Weekly meeting agendas
- Content creation publishing
- Fundraising pipelines and processes
- Project management and assignments
- Strategy planning and goal setting
Building standard processes forces you to think about the individual steps and can help you see what might be missing. A recent study identified that strong onboarding processes are an effective way to reduce turnover.
Systems aren’t sexy, but they’re critical for improving your team’s impact.
Give constant feedback
If the Boston Marathon stopped recording runner times and placements, how many people would still participate?
Very few. Most would leave for a traditional marathon environment because people desire feedback.
Runners are to the Boston Marathon as volunteers are to nonprofits. Participants want to know how effective they are, especially because they’re volunteering to support a mission they vibe with.
Strong teams provide feedback to their members in three places:
- Assignments
- Shared progress
- Shared purpose
Assignments
Most people get their tasks done more effectively when they understand why they’re important. Think about the difference between an assignment to “Write a speech.” If the speech was for a school assignment worth only 1% of your team’s grade, how different would the effort be if instead, the speech was going to be delivered to the President of the United States to advocate for a war to end?
Feedback for assignments is less about how well it went, and more about what the expected results are.
Shared progress
Like the marathon, volunteers should know the numbers that define how impactful their effort is on the team’s short-term goals. These are typically measurable KPIs directly impacted by work, like “Ticket Sales”, “Social Media Subscribers” or even, “Fundraising Total”.
Regularly report on the data or make it easily accessible.
Shared purpose
If your overall mission is specific enough, you can measure this. Missions and purposes are usually pretty squishy, so instead talk frequently about, “is anything we’re doing actually helping us succeed?”
Feedback is the game of communicating data to your team. Figure out what the meaningful data is to share and frequently broadcast it to everyone.
Make the experience rewarding
Strong leaders know how to motivate others. People aren’t all motivated by the same thing, no matter how interesting your volunteer team’s mission is.
Positive experiences keep people around.
Leaders that build a rewarding environment for their volunteers will be far more successful in the long term for so many reasons. Recognize that people may be motivated by:
- Networking with other volunteers
- Recognition for their role on the team
- An internal desire to see progress toward the mission
- Mentorship and growth opportunities
- Donating their time and money to a cause
- Totally selfish reasons
Discover what motivates each volunteer, then play to their strengths and improve efficiency.
Balance your team’s capacity
Volunteers are not employees. Their donation of human capital is severely limited.
Successful groups balance the capacity of their time and resources. Human capital is a scarce resource, so leaders should make managing it well a key priority.
There are a few ways to look at an overflowing cup:
- The cup has too much water in it
- The cup is too small
Your organization’s “cup” is the total capacity of your volunteers to get work done, and the water represents the capacity required to work on the mission. If you want to build a sustainable, healthy workload, find ways to match the capacity (size of the cup) with the workload (water). You can tackle this one a few different ways.
- Simplify your strategy (use less water). The more complexity you add to a project, the more time and resources it will require to pull it off.
- Expand your team or spread the work out more (build a bigger cup). Spreading work out helps engage more of your volunteer workforce with opportunities and invites creative problem solving since more perspectives are available.
When your cup overflows your team risks:
- Burnout. People give more time than they want to offer.
- Delays. Work that requires twice as many volunteers as you have will take longer if the quality remains the same.
- Mediocrity. If the work doesn’t get delayed, it gets pushed through by sacrificing quality.
Employees don’t like fire drills - volunteers like them even less. Strong capacity management leads to longer volunteer stints and incubates the experience levels of your members.
And everyone is much happier with what they’re getting from their time commitment.