Under the syndrome we call ‘stress’, a volunteer finds themselves exhibiting either psychological effects (thoughts and beliefs that cause undesirable behaviours in the person) or physiological effects (physical conditions that debilitate the person) because of one or more stressors. Stressors are things like high workload or high responsibility. Stress is normal. Everyone is stressed. It’s just that in many cases, the stressors are balanced by beneficial characteristics of the person and the job, thereby allowing each person to cope.
In a person in whom stress manifests psychologically or physiologically, there is an imbalance. Their coping strategies are not strong enough to balance the strain. This imbalance may be extreme for a short while or may be moderate but sustained over a long time.
When things come to a head, it’s normally because something has happened. The person was coping but now they are not. It could be that a team member has left, and everyone is having to pick up the slack. It could be that a new system has been installed without training.
That gives a clue about the approach to stress management. Managers must act to regain the balance – to recover a state of coping. The only issue then is, by doing what?

Not all strain is harmful. One research thread suggests that in fact, everyone needs a modicum of pressure to perform at their peak. The graph below gives the idea.

The concept is that everyone needs just enough pressure. The Cub leader needs the buzz of 30 kids in a room, the café worker needs customers, and even the mountain rescue volunteer needs a few real rescues. Too little and the volunteer switches off. Too much, and they are stressed. The difficulty with this simplistic approach to volunteering life is that the manager must simply control the pressure. The single big pressure is workload. This ignores concepts like coping and resilience. For many volunteers, they can’t reduce workload.
This idea of workload control is used by general medical practitioners in treating stress – they sign the sufferer off sick for four weeks, thereby removing the work-related strain but the stress re-occurs on their return to work and the cycle repeats.

In trying to advise managers about stress, the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has a neat framework comprising a set of stress Management Standards. Each gives a centre for analysis and action. Each suggests cause and solution. These Management Standards reflect all current research on the stressors that contribute to strain (and ultimately stress) and the positive aspects of jobs that reduce the effect of those stressors. The problem is that the HSE approach assumes that the manager is the only entity that must act to recover the balance in the volunteer. Both manager and volunteer must both be prepared to work at a solution. The HSE model is shown below.

The essence of the HSE model is that, given stressors like workload, beneficiary expectations and responsibility, psychological and/or physiological stress results. This is exacerbated by poor management intervention in each of the management ‘standards’. If for example, the manager does not support the volunteer, stress is heightened. On the other hand, if the volunteer enjoys good manager support, stress will be reduced.
The six management standards are therefore moderators of the relationship between stressors and stress outcomes. The management standards are demands, control, support, relationships, role, and change.

Like many management activities, management of stress demands that the manager assesses the stress from the various stressors suffered by the volunteers. The HSE model also includes a 35-question inventory in which each of the six management standards featured have between three and nine questions to help characterise them.
Managers have two approaches. First, the questionnaire can be given to each volunteer to be completed. Anonymous response allows the quality of operation of the management standards to be compared across groups of volunteers. Second, the questionnaire can be used to talk through the management standards with individuals. Either way, the manager can talk about stress and the effectiveness of their management. Clearly this second approach needs a very open manager who is prepared to listen, even if the story is critical of them.