For many years, in promoting virtual volunteering, I’ve talked about how it’s very hard to fake it when you volunteer online: if you say you have web design skills, and I get you started on a project, I find out very quickly if you really do have web design skills or not. If you say that you can translate something from English to Spanish because of your language fluency, I find out very quickly if that’s true or not. With online volunteers, I’m experiencing people based on their work and productivity almost immediately.

By contrast, I have been fooled many times by onsite volunteers: they come in on time, they are oh-so-nice, I see them onsite, walking in the halls or sitting at a desk, we chat here and there, and I just assume they are doing what they are supposed to be doing. I mean, they are THERE, right? I can see them and, therefore, they are volunteering, right? And later, I find out they haven’t done most, or any, of what they signed up to do, or they haven’t been doing it well.

That isn’t to say that I prefer online volunteers to onsite volunteers, but it certainly has changed how I manage people, volunteer and employee alike, onsite or online: I require onsite staff I am managing to check-in and report on what they are doing as often as online volunteers, and in the same way: in writing, via email or an online system I’ve set up. I want to know very quickly if a volunteer or employee is doing what they’ve signed up to do, what I NEED them to do. Weekly or bi-weekly check-ins are a must – it can be as simple as an email, but I have to have an update, something more than “I’m working on that.” And I do the same: my direct reports know what I’m working on as well, what is challenging me, what my priorities are, what my deadlines are, etc.

I’ve also said many times that organizations that start employing virtual volunteering – using the Internet to support and engage volunteers – may find out, as a result, that their manager of volunteers isn’t a very good manager. That person may have also have been judged by being seen walking in the halls, talking to volunteers and sitting at a desk, and always having a smile for everyone, rather than on abilities to create tasks and roles for volunteers, guiding staff who work with volunteers, tracking successes with volunteers, identifying challenges and addressing them, etc.

Similar thoughts can be found in this essay in The Atlantic by Ed Zitron. He’s writing about how companies need to let go of the idea that employees and consultants need to always be onsite:

Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line… I have known so many people within my industry (and in others) who have built careers on “playing nice” rather than on producing something. I have seen examples within companies I’ve worked with of people who have clearly stuck around because they’re well liked versus productive…Remote work makes who does and doesn’t actually do work way more obvious.

How nice to see the corporate world once again catching up with the nonprofit world (grin).

I’m never going to want to entirely stop working with people in same place, at the same time. I do think there are some things that can happen in an office that just cannot happen remotely. An example: at a nonprofit that produced an event with more than 150 online volunteers in an eight-week period, the night before the launch, myself and another staff member sat at the same table, in the same place and time in Austin, Texas, with our laptops, a massive whiteboard and some yummy snacks, rapidly putting together all of the things that had to be in place. It was hours of frantic, at-times stressful, incredibly energizing work, and there’s an efficiency and clarity in having the person right there, at the table across from you, reacting in real-time, that can never be matched by Slack or Zoom. By the time we were finished from this marathon work session, we were mentally spent but oh-so-celebratory, and we broke out our favorite live musical moments on YouTube and all sang along at the top of our lungs. That wouldn’t have been at all the same at home. It wouldn’t have been as productive or as fun. But I carried that experience, and the onsite event launch, back with me when I returned to my home office in Oregon, and it fueled my remote work for the next several weeks. I felt oh-so-close to co-workers I’d spent those intense days with. Our incredible productivity and teamwork continued for the eight weeks of the project when we all went back to working remotely, and we were a stronger team for that onsite, face-to-face experience, no question – but working remotely after that was not just fine, but much more appropriate for the bulk of the project.

I was the chair of a board of directors last year, for a program that gives away small grants to nonprofits. We asked the county government agency a few times three years ago if we could have at least some meetings remotely, and were told, absolutely, NO. When the pandemic came along, suddenly, that thing we were not allowed to do, that could not be done, was permissible and possible. And I think our board meetings have been much more efficient as a result, with much better attendance, and much more productive. Do I want to get together face-to-face eventually? Sometimes, yes. But there’s no question: the norm for these board meetings should be online.

If you are a manager of volunteers and you want a better way to support and engage all of your volunteers, even if all of their service is onsite at your organization, The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is worth your time. And if you want to create more tasks and roles for volunteers online – and you should, no matter the focus of your organization, even if your volunteers do things that must be done onsite, like care for animals in a shelter, repair roofs on homes where elderly people live, plant trees, whatever – this is the book for you. It’s available both as a traditional print publication and as a digital book.

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