Food for Thought for Those Working Through the Lunch Hour:
Are We Having Fun Yet?
by Susan Moscareillo
editor, ManagingVolunteers.com
February 15th, 2006

Are the volunteers you manage having fun? Are you having fun doing your job?

Rule number one of volunteer management is that volunteering is supposed to be fun. Corollary: managing volunteers can be fun too!

Volunteering is one of the ways incredibly busy people use their discretionary time. They need your support and approval and smiles because you understand their motives and sometimes their employers and family do not. I know a volunteer who has been in her current assignment over a decade and her spouse, a perfectly nice man who doesn't volunteer, still questions why she gives so much of her free time to volunteering.

She stays around because she gets satisfaction from fulfilling the role she chose in our agency and helping us fulfill our mission.

And that is something you may not have thought about a lot: maybe the easiest, most simple way to make volunteering fun is give your potential volunteers the maximum amount of freedom in choosing their assignment from the beginning, so they feel the greatest amount of freedom of choice and sense of ownership. Really get to know them during the interviewing and orientation process and make the best match possible. Enable them to use their talents not only to serve your clients -- but to have fun.

Don't forget yourself too …As managers of our agency's volunteer program and staff, we set the "satisfaction tone" for the people who volunteer at our agency. Do we have to be so serious?

Maybe. Sometimes. We do bear a lot of responsibility in the jobs we do. We do difficult jobs in a work environment where our days are punched full of holes of time gobbling interruptions, unappeasable callers, and unfocused people making impossible demands.

But hopefully we are happy (most of the time) doing what we do and garner satisfaction from the opportunities we enable and the results. So smile -- it is contagious. It is a scientific fact that smiling releases endorphins, which makes you feel good (yup, even if you're having a crummy day, smile and those chemicals will make you feel better!)

If you are smiling, your volunteers will smile more often. If our agency's clients can smile and wrap our volunteers around their proverbial little finger, why can't we follow that example?

Please make the effort to make your job more fun too. There will always be parts of your job you don't like -- delegate some of it to a volunteer (who might enjoy it!) or get it off your desk by giving it to a committee of volunteers who will be flattered by the trust you conveyed to them by asking for their help. That way you can spend more time doing the parts of your job you enjoy the most -- and having fun!

Email me (susan@managingvolunteers.com) with the ways you find fun in your job, and help your volunteers have more fun -- we'll post your ideas at managing volunteers.com. and share them with our readers!