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What Am I Supposed To Do?
One church's solution to volunteers' confusion.
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"Donna, will you work on the mission program?" "Well, I guess so." "Good. It's all settled then." That's a conversation almost guaranteed to lead to disaster—unmet expectations, missed deadlines, overspent budgets, and angry, disappointed, or burned-out workers. Consider the questions not addressed: What does work on mean? Chair a committee? Serve on a committee? Do all the work? What does mission program include? A particular project now underway? A conference? The total mission effort for the church? When is this program to be done? On a continuing basis? For a year? By next Thursday? How much time will I need to put into the program in order to be effective? Will the fact I can attend only evening meetings be a problem? To whom will I be responsible? The minister? The board? The Sunday school superintendent? Are there volunteers lined up? Is there a budget to work within? Do I need special skills or information that I don't have yet? Where can I get those? When these questions aren't asked and answered, we start to hear, "I thought you were doing that," "You needed it today?" or "I didn't know I was supposed to check with you." Why we don't askMany of us active in churches, however, have some hang-ups about asking these questions or pinning down the details. If I'm doing the asking, I may not want to carry on the conversation so long that Donna has time to change her mind after she says yes! Or I may need to hurry to make other calls on my list. If I'm being recruited, especially if I've been trained to accommodate others, it takes a monumental effort not to say yes immediately to a request for help. That's where job descriptions come in. A few years ago, to shore up our volunteers and programs, our church applied a standard business practice. We developed job descriptions for our standing committees and certain individual tasks. Not everyone was immediately enthusiastic about writing up job descriptions for church work. After all, it is time consuming and, to some people, too cut-and-dried for church activities. But we have learned that good procedures, drawn up and understood by the people involved, make for smoother operations and more energetic volunteers. As our chairman reported after the first job descriptions were written, "People want to know what's expected of them. When they understand a job, they are more willing to say yes." The descriptions also go on helping long after people have been recruited. Recently, while chairing a steering committee budget session, I realized that I did not know - and neither did anyone else on the committee - whether the steering committee was simply to collect the individual committees' budget requests or to edit those requests and submit a total recommended budget to the Session. We wandered aimlessly during the meeting, all feeling at sea. |             |
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