Ensure success: Find the best job fit for volunteers
Ensure success: Find the best job fit for volunteers
It takes supervision and little managerial work
It takes a little time and work to find the best job fit for a volunteer, just as it does to find the best employee for a particular position. But the effort will pay off in the long run.
"We don’t give volunteers busy work, and we make sure they understand what the monetary value of their work is to our agency," says Mary Suther, president and chief executive officer of the Visiting Nurse Association (VNA) of Texas in Dallas.
Volunteers may not be aware of their best attributes, and a supervisor will need to point those out. In other cases, volunteers may have important job skills, but because they already use those skills in their careers, they want to do something else with their volunteer time.
Suther once recruited a woman who worked for a major manufacturer, doing analyses of the company’s efficiency and processes. "When she said she was retired, I said, Boy, do I have a job for you,’ and she said she didn’t want to sit at a desk," Suther recalls. She had the woman select a job that interested her. To encourage her to continue the work, Suther explained its value in terms of extra meals the agency could deliver or home care visits the agency could provide. Each dollar of volunteer labor saves money in another service, and those savings can be quantified as an incentive to volunteers.
Volunteers may have time constraints that make it difficult to find a suitable role. The VNA has some volunteers who work long hours in their careers but want to help in some capacity. One of those professionals rewrote the agency’s personnel policies on a computer while flying to a business meeting.
The agency’s elder care program provides a social outlet to homebound patients. This volunteer work particularly suits people who want patient contact, and the program enables nurses to perform their tasks without having to spend as much time socializing with patients.
"A lot of times, the nurses come into the home, and the patient wants to talk," Suther explains. "So we ask the nurses to say, Mrs. So and So, I’m here today to teach you how to do this and this. When we finish it, and you show me what you know, then if we have time left, you can show me your flowers.’"
If that approach is unsatisfying to the patient, the nurse also can suggest that he or she request the elder care program, in which a volunteer will come to the home once a week to visit. The volunteer might write letters for or read to the patient or engage in some other activity the patient enjoys.
The agency’s elder care program has 300 volunteers, who do everything from taking patients to their doctors to helping them pay the bills. Some volunteers even bring their own children to patient visits. Disabled volunteers call patients every day to offer reassurance over the telephone. "Some volunteers pick up their medications, some quilt with them, and some run errands for them," Suther explains. "We match the skill of the volunteer with what the patient wants done."
• Mary Suther, President, Chief Executive Officer, Visiting Nurse Association of Texas, 1440 W. Mockingbird Lane, Dallas, TX 75247. Telephone: (214) 689-0008.
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