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!

Comments

it's complicated

[(Anonymous)]

In some jurisdictions, you actually can't do an employee evaluation on a contractor, because that makes them an employee and eligible for employee benefits. But I doubt that's an issue here.

However, if you want to find out for yourself, I don't see any reason why you can't collect the information. If you want to keep it to behavioural stuff, I might suggest you do a start/stop/continue kind of exercise. This would best be done live (while you are not present), but could also conceivably be done by anonymous survey. This is where you ask what things people would like to see you stop doing, what things they'd like to see you start doing, and what things they like that should continue. This gets away from personality issues and more to addressable outcomes.

Done as a group exercise, people can write their STOP/START/CONTINUE items on a board, and others can vote 'agree' or 'disagree' with each item. Done privately, you just get a stack of papers and have to analyze the data for themes.

Because you are looking at your own performance, you might add something like "Brian could improve at..." and "Brian is great at..."

-jkins

Re: it's complicated

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of a start/stop/continue methodology... it really gets to the heart of what I'm trying to determine.

It just occurred to me that I might be able to use some online survey site to help collect info from the widest range of dancers without impacting their dance/social time at club nights. Having the results readily compiled for me is another pleasant feature.

I also need to include some open-ended questions as my greatest hope & fear is that dancers will have something to say which will be a total surprise to me, some aspect which I had never previously considered.

Thanks!

Re: it's complicated

[ctgstr8.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of an online survey. I was going to suggest an old-fashioned suggestion box. People could be anonymous, if they wished, or not. An on-line survey would be much better.

Re: it's complicated

[kent4str.livejournal.com]

Actually, you're correct - if they do anything that smacks of an employee evaluation it'll raise red flags with the IRS, and they'll start demanding tax withholding and such. We ran into that with the Lesbian & Gay Chorus of Washington.

However, the board can poll the dancers and present the results without any sort of slant, and they can always use that at contract renewal time to "change their expectations" or tell the contractor how they failed to meet the preexisting expectations. Which is not to be confused with "recommendations for improvement" (although they're really the same, just technically different enough to work around the issue), which would be an employee thing. All they can do with contractors is tell them whether or not they met expectations, and why or why not.

Damned IRS - it's all their fault. And thanks for pointing it out, John - I'd totally forgotten the contractor v. employee issue.