The Blurred Lines of Volunteer Work: Balancing Expectations in Non-Profit Organizations

Have you ever volunteered in an organization and were asked to do a lot of work that was eerily similar to the load of a full-time paid employee on the team? Chances are, you have. Non-profit organizations face labour, resources and financial shortages at any given turn.

Oftentimes, one of the unexpected consequences of these shortages is an additional load of responsibility being put on volunteers. The additional load often leads to a blurry division of labour between paid staff and volunteers. If it goes unnoticed for too long volunteers tend to burn out or leave the organization. The question is how do we set a boundary to ensure that additional loads of responsibility aren’t put on to volunteers by default? How do we distinguish what can be done as a volunteer versus someone who is paid? Let’s find out.

Understanding the Volunteer-Paid Staff Dynamic

First, it’s important to understand that the line between paid and unpaid work in the volunteer sector has always been ambiguous. In many cases, as mentioned above, volunteers are assigned that tasks that are supposed to be taken care of by paid staff. However, because of non-profit limited resources, time and staff available, a lot of those tasks get offloaded to their volunteers.

The Impact of Blurred Lines on Volunteers and Organizations

While the organization is utilizing volunteers to fill in gaps that their paid staff would normally handle, it is unknowingly putting a certain set of expectations or demands on the volunteer. The issue is that volunteers do not necessarily have the same institutional knowledge or know-how that paid staff might have to complete a task. This mismatch of expectations can lead to increased stress and burnout for volunteers, ultimately ending with them choosing to take a step back from volunteering.

Breaking the Cycle: Setting Boundaries

I have witnessed this cycle time and time again, and you have also probably witnessed it.

So how do we stop this cycle? Your organization has to set boundaries to make sure that the work and tasks being handed to volunteers are appropriate and in line with the expectation that they are volunteers, not paid staff. It’s about finding a balance – volunteers should be given responsibilities that help further your organization’s mission and help them develop new or existing skills, but with a boundary in place to ensure they do not turn into full-time unpaid employees.

 

Setting Boundaries: Key Considerations

How do you come up with boundaries? Here are a few questions to consider when you’re trying to map out tasks to assign to your volunteers:

• How much time will this task take?

• What level of complexity or additional knowledge about the organization is needed to accomplish this task?

• What additional resources would be needed? Would any be needed at all?

• Is this a task that was meant to be given to a paid staff member?

• Can someone with limited institutional or organizational knowledge be able to take these instructions and complete the task?

In sum, there has to be a significant difference between the type of work and workload that volunteers do compared to paid staff members within your organization.