The simplest form of instruction in managing volunteers in a community service organisation is the verbal order – ‘please do this’. In instructing volunteers, the manager must take care that what they ask is lawful, decent, socially acceptable and within the volunteers' competencies. Provided that the instruction is within the scope of what the volunteers signed up to do, the manager of volunteers can pretty much expect their instruction to be complied with to the best of the volunteers' abilities.

This supposes that the manager has plans, and that verbal instruction is simply verbalising the actions set out in those.

Broadly, instructing falls under the term leadership. We discuss leadership of volunteers in various blogs. How instructions are issued is a bit of an art.

Work instruction documents

We argue elsewhere too that voluntary work is work. It’s not leisure. It’s not servitude. And work must be defined in line with the CSO’s strategy.

Most CSOs develop beyond the manager of volunteers issuing verbal instructions throughout the day. Most move to a document-based operating system. The adjacent figure illustrates the sort of approach. Let’s look at what this might comprise.

Typically, the manager of volunteers, as agent for the visionaries and trustees, and hence for the CSO, leads beneficiaries to believe that they will receive some service or provision. Often the beneficiaries are represented by other interested parties – proxies - like parents of the children the CSO has been set up to serve. An exchange usually begins by making an open or closed promise, however general. An ‘If you need us, we’ll be there’ type statement, perhaps. Or a slogan like, ‘We’ll teach you skills for life’.

Making promises

The beneficiary accepts the implied offer by placing a request. A good example of a CSO engaged in such an exchange might be an ambulance car service. The beneficiary needs to get to the hospital on time. The volunteer ambulance car service makes an implied promise that this will happen. There is then exchange of expectation, request, and promise. In terms of quality, the beneficiary would be quite upset if the promise was not met, resulting in CSO reputational damage.

We’ve assumed here that the CSO is not involved with direct or indirect pay for service. If payment is made by way of consideration for service or provision, there may be a binding contract between the manager of volunteers and commissioning body. As an example, this contract may be between local council and manager (as proxy for the CSO), with penalties for non-compliance with contract terms and for not meeting agreed service levels. If this is the case, our diagram would need to be modified to include agreements with others. The diagram could become quite complex, with pressure on the manager to ensure that the volunteer performs.

In any case, the CSO must organise to ensure that the intended service or provision works.

Let’s look now at the documents or statements and beliefs existing between the manager of volunteers and their volunteers.

Agreements

CSOs should have written volunteer agreements. That might sound like a contract of employment. It’s not. But expectations must be communicated to the volunteer, and the volunteer must respond with their agreement. It’s not an economic agreement – work for pay. It’s a psychological contract – work for non-financial benefit. We discuss the nature of this non-financial benefit in other blogs. And it’s not legally binding. We discuss the nature of volunteer agreements in several web pages.

But whether verbal or written, formal or implied, a volunteer agreement should be in place.

The manager of volunteers must then translate the expectations, requests, and promises into something actionable by the volunteer – shown by the dark arrow in the figure. Often this is done through documents like a statement of work, method statement or standard operating procedure. These centre on a common understanding of a requirement and the volunteer agreement should point to those documents as a source of action.

In a national trust with aims to protect the environment, for example, these might be replaced by drawings showing the building to be constructed, the path to be laid, or the exhibition to be curated. Such documentation is important where method is the essence. In a café whose aim is fund raising, there might be few documents, and instruction might be given through on-the-job training with the manager translating what’s needed for the volunteer. One way or another the manager of volunteers must communicate what’s needed to the volunteers, soliciting their agreement to complete the tasks.

Acceptance

We’ve included in the figure the notion that the beneficiaries would signal their acceptance of the service or provision. The parallel there in the commercial word would be acceptance triggering payment. Unless payment is involved, in CSOs there’s no such legal acceptance, but there is a notion that the beneficiaries might be happy. There’s the notion that they accept that the service or provision met their needs set out in their expectations, and as balled up in the promise made.

This ‘acceptance’ links to our need to see results. Validation and verification are concepts that aim to compare the results to be realised versus the results that are achieved. Assessing if the beneficiaries are happy is one simple way of verifying that the CSO operations function works.

Modelling

As with all modelling, you will need to think through your own model showing all the relationships between parties, and specifically how you will instruct your volunteers.