Volunteer Management

[bjarvis]

My employer is starting a cycle of employee performance evaluations and it leads me to wonder about a similar process for square dance callers.

We do such evaluations at fly-ins & festivals but I can't recall ever seeing it done for our regular weekly club night performances, even on an annual basis. I get regular feedback & advice from caller friends/support group, but dancers frequently see things differently. I'm considering conducting a systematic survey of the dancers to whom I call regularly to see what they think I'm doing well --or not.

Has anyone done such a survey? I'd love to see any real-world surveys I could use as a template before I begin hacking one of our fly-in caller evaluation forms.

A friend & caller noted kindly that knowing how my mind work, this is of course the approach I would take to investigating work quality. He rightly points out too that volunteer boards are already loaded down with various projects and adding contractor evaluations to the lot is no small task, especially if remedial actions are required.

I'm interested in doing something like this so I can be more aware of what my dancers like about my work and what they hate. Should I spend more time on memorizing a bazillion more get-outs, or spend more money on different music? Should I stop offering the occasional joke or add a few more? Longer breaks between tips or shorter? I can ask casually on-mic if the floor would like faster/slower or louder/quieter, but larger structural topics --if any-- need a more careful approach.

Currently, the clubs I'm working with seem to default to the voting-with-one's-feet method of gauging the quality of what we do: people stop coming to club nights and we're left to speculate why. Even if we go get a root cause, it's difficult to demonstrate we've remedied an issue if they've already written us off and aren't regularly attending. I'd rather find out about problems before people silently give up in frustration and disappear forever.

Board members are evaluated regularly with elections: they can be voted out of office. Getting a caller to change their way of doing things is challenging, especially if they've been with the club many years, either as a staffer, volunteer, or member. It isn't easy to tell a friend they need to change the way they work, especially for volunteer board members.

It's a classic problem in every volunteer group in which I've been a member: how do volunteer managers tell their volunteer (or cheaply paid) staffers that some aspect of their work needs to be upgraded without causing offense or the complaint being dismissed as uninformed/irrelevant/whatever? Most people would prefer a friendly private discussion with a board rep, either on or off the record, to analyze the issue and develop a resolution plan. Sadly, how many board volunteers have that kind of HR/personnel management skill? How many of us callers or volunteers have the emotional self-awareness to understand this isn't about evaluating us as people, it's about evaluating the work we do?

Yup, I'm a bureaucrat and I think in systems. I like evidence-based discussions with an admittedly formal structure to filter as much of the personal & emotional aspects, keeping it as strictly a business-to-contractor discussion as possible. The human emotional component is unavoidable but the formal structure can give cover to each the board and the caller that this is business, just business, that all contractors goes through this evaluation for renewal, and that one isn't being singled out.


Is there a better way? Is there some means by which volunteers unskilled in this sort of human resources work can still do what is necessary to save their organization? How does one bring about change without turning away the key personnel needed for its success?

Any thoughts or feedback is helpful!