{"id":560,"date":"2013-10-17T04:16:31","date_gmt":"2013-10-17T11:16:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/?p=560"},"modified":"2019-08-28T15:16:30","modified_gmt":"2019-08-28T22:16:30","slug":"complaints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2013\/10\/complaints\/","title":{"rendered":"No complaints means success?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1765 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/socialcohesion-300x256.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"256\" srcset=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/socialcohesion-300x256.jpg 300w, https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/socialcohesion.jpg 371w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>Back in April 2010, I published the following blog. It became one of my most popular entries. Later that year, my blog home moved &#8211; and then, just two years later, it moved again. I managed to recover this via <a href=\"http:\/\/www\/archive.org\">archive.org<\/a>, and am republishing it here on what I hope will be my blog home for a long, long time:<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;-<\/p>\n<p>During <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotecommunications.com\/me\/speak.html\"><b>my workshops<\/b><\/a> in Australia last month, I asked managers of volunteers\u00a0<b>how their executive leadership at their organizations define success regarding volunteer involvement<\/b>. And one of the answers really disturbed me:<\/p>\n<p><b>&#8220;It&#8217;s successful if no one complains.&#8221;<\/b><\/p>\n<p>The person who made this statement didn&#8217;t think this was a good measure of volunteer involvement at her organization; she was acknowledging a reality at her organization, but did not like it. And at least two other people said similar things about their organizations &#8212; that senior management did not want to hear about any problems with volunteers and, if they did, it meant the volunteer manager wasn&#8217;t doing her (or his) job.<\/p>\n<p>It means that just one volunteer complaint &#8212; including complaints about being reprimanded for not following policy &#8212;\u00a0 would result in senior leadership displeasure with the volunteer manager. One person said that her supervisor, in regards to complaints by a long-time volunteer who did not want to follow policy, &#8220;I just don&#8217;t want to hear it. Make her happy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I heard this theme a few times, in fact: that senior management was more displeased about getting a complaint from a volunteer than they were that the volunteer had violated a policy and been given a verbal or written reprimand.<\/p>\n<p>If you are facing this, confront it head on:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Consider meeting one-on-one with the senior leader who thinks this way, to discuss why a complaint from a volunteer isn&#8217;t a sign of a failure in the program, why it&#8217;s often necessary to do something that upsets a volunteer (just as it&#8217;s sometimes necessary to do something that upsets an employee), etc. Talk about the consequences of <i>not<\/i> addressing problems with volunteers. Even if you walk away thinking you haven&#8217;t changed his or her mind, you&#8217;ve at least planted a seed of doubt in the senior manager&#8217;s mind about his or her thinking about volunteer management.<\/li>\n<li>While <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ozvpm.com\/2010\/04\/01\/an-interview-with-jayne-cravens\/\"><b>volunteer management is not exactly the same as HR management<\/b><\/a>, volunteer management does involve HR management, and reprimanding volunteers because of policy violations is an example of that. Meet with the HR manager to make sure your policies and procedures &#8212; and enforcement &#8212; are in line with each other, and that he or she endorse your practices at a staff meeting or a meeting with senior management.<\/li>\n<li>Consider conducting a brief workshop for staff (over lunch is a great time) about how and why volunteers may be disciplined, why following policies and procedures is vitally important for the organization&#8217;s credibility and for staff and volunteer safety, the consequences of not addressing policy violations, how complaints from volunteers are handled, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Include information about problems you face as the volunteer manager in your regular reporting and how you systematically, dispassionately address such.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And on a related note, here is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ozvpm.com\/2010\/04\/01\/an-interview-with-jayne-cravens\/\"><b>my interview with OzVPM Director Andy Fryar<\/b><\/a>, talking about the trainings in Australia last month.<\/p>\n<p>Also see<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2012\/04\/24\/the-volunteer-as-bully-the-toxic-volunteer\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The volunteer as bully = the toxic volunteer<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2011\/05\/10\/with-volunteers-see-no-evil\/\">With Volunteers, See No Evil?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in April 2010, I published the following blog. It became one of my most popular entries. Later that year, my blog home moved &#8211; and then, just two years later, it moved again. I managed to recover this via archive.org, and am republishing it here on what I hope will be my blog home [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[661,660,662,464,530,532],"class_list":["post-560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-volunteer-engagement","tag-complaining","tag-complaints","tag-performance","tag-success","tag-volunteering","tag-volunteers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3fFJB-92","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5139,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions\/5139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}