Relations in organisations are complex. There are the day-to-day activities, with the manager asking of the employee or volunteer and them expecting of the manager. Then there’s the more formal. With employees, there’s an economic part to the employment contract, moderating the employee commitment – they need to make relations with their manager work so they can fund their lifestyle. Employees will tolerate the formal as part of the deal. But there’s no economic aspect to volunteer relations. That lack changes everything in that relationship.

There are many different roles in CSOs. In principle one person should do one job, with a small number of roles in that job, and they should do it well. Doing many jobs, or packing many roles in one job, is acceptable in small CSOs where there just aren’t enough people to neatly divide responsibilities. But once a CSO grows, job differentiation is essential.

Here’s a fictional CSO. The CSO perhaps has groups in towns, shops on high streets, activity centres in uplands, and suppliers contracted to do work. The visionaries may be present, but more likely are long gone, though their legacies live on. It’s a mash of many visions just to explore how a manager might think about the relationships in the CSO.

Entity relationship diagram (ERD) as a case to describe relationships

First a note about how to read the diagram. The CSO system is delineated by the big black boundary rectangle. Anything inside this is the purview of the visionaries, trustees and managers. Anything outwith is beyond the remit of those three groups. Rectangles describe entities – the manager, volunteers, trustees and all others identifiable as unique and having a role to play. The ‘relationship’ lines between the entities say something about numbers of each entity in the relationship. The key on the left describes this. For example, the line between visionary and manager with the crow’s foot and bar on one end and nothing on the other suggests that there’s one (manager) with relationship to one or many visionaries. And finally, the nature of the relationship is described by a verb mid-line – saying what the relationship transfers.

One must always remember that ERDs as models can be drawn in many ways, focussing on many different aspects of the CSO. The model is built to tell a story and to be useful to the parties constructing it. It may not be fact and may be simplified.

So, what of the relationships within our fictitious CSO?

The visionaries set up the CSO. In so doing they created the CSO to deliver to the beneficiaries. When they realised that they could not do everything themselves, they hired or appointed trustees and one or more managers. The relationships in the top of the diagram focus on strategy. The visionaries direct the trustees and managers and typically the CSO operates in the classic dual-headed management structure: managers are the executive and make the strategy happen; trustees oversee the managers’ activities on behalf of the visionaries. By hiring or appointing trustees and managers, this illustrates the arms’ length visionary-trustee and visionary-manager relationships. The visionaries delegate their activities though they may indeed also be trustees or managers.

We don’t intend here to discuss the legal or fiscal connotations of these relationships. Suffice for us that a single entity, the single government agency in our diagram, has interest in the visionary and trustee activities from taxation and regulation viewpoints.

Our aim is to expand on the relationship between volunteers, and between the manager and each volunteer, and we’ll get to that point shortly.

The relationship with the funders is manifold and complex. Funders may be individuals who make payments to the trustees for disbursement to the managers to fund activities. Or the funders may be polled by fundraisers – volunteers, employees or suppliers (who may in turn be professional fundraising organisations) – to generate the funds. We’ve simplified things here to show that each funder has relationships with the trustees. We’ve also simplified the relationship between individual shop customers to show that funds would arrive with the trustees, as a result perhaps of a volunteer in a shop serving a customer. Just as we have steered clear of discussions about law and fiscal affairs, we also avoid discussions about accounting separation. Accounting separation might be necessary between a for-profit fund-raising firm and a not-for-profit CSO serving beneficiaries where the two exist under the same roof.

That brings us now to where we need to be.

A manager manages one or many employees and one or many volunteers. An example might be a manager responsible for both volunteers and paid staff at an activity centre. Alternatively, there may be a matrix arrangement whereby the manager (as a volunteer) manages the volunteers, while the employees report to a different manager (who is an employee). Despite this complexity, volunteers will need to cooperate with one another and with the employees.

It’s interesting to note that the CSO as an entity is absent in the diagram, represented instead by its trustees. The board of trustees in turn delegates its responsibilities to the manager in return for regular updates and discussions. Typically, several managers form an executive committee headed by a national lead volunteer, for example. This committee is the CSO’s operational centre.

When discussing employment, it’s customary to say that the employee is employed by a firm. That’s a legal arrangement that is defined in statute and recognised by the national tax authority. There is no such equivalent legal standing for volunteers – unless that is, their volunteer status moves toward employment. We discuss this issue elsewhere, looking at how confusion occurs.

And finally, there are the beneficiaries. One volunteer (or perhaps one employee) delivers to one or many beneficiaries.

Now, all CSOs are different. Some readers will see similarities in our ERD with their own state. Others will need to re-draw the ERD to better represent theirs’. For all, our diagram is a simplification, done for the purpose of illustrating the nature of relationships within the CSO for discussion later. For all but the simplest, real CSO ERDs will need a bigger page.

In this discussion, we’ve presented two distinct entities – the employee and the volunteer. Both are members of the CSO. Both are in the CSO to do work. Both are people – humans with competencies, motives, and aspirations. And it is imperative that managers understand the differences and the similarities between them. Many would say that managers must not try to manage volunteers, for they are gods who must be cherished. And yet managers must regard both employees and volunteers as partner groups in achieving the CSO’s strategy. For that strategy to be realised, both employees and volunteers must be managed.

The differences and similarities between employees and volunteers coexisting in the CSO make it essential that we build an understanding of the two. To avoid duplication and confusion, managers must also design CSO systems recognising this coexistence.