Volunteers are not an easy answer

There are many things which puzzle and perplex me about the current "we can replace paid staff with volunteers" agenda. Chief of them is the blithe sort of assumption around that it's easy enough to swap like for like: volunteers for paid staff. I suppose it's easy enough if you don't care one way or another about public services, and there's plenty enough evidence that much of the political classes and their financial backers don't really, but for the rest of us it's not so easy.

It's a huge mistake to see volunteers as a homogeneous mass. The only thing they have in common is that they're prepared to make their time, skills and effort available on a voluntary basis, for which we should be grateful and for which reason alone they shouldn't be taken for granted. And the reason why working with volunteers isn't as simple as working with paid employees. Let's look at some of the issues:

Motives — why do people volunteer?

• Because they can. They have the time, energy and will to be able to volunteer. 
• Because it's useful and/or important to them. People rarely volunteer their effort for things they think would be a waste of time.
• Because it offers something back to them. It could be the sense of a job well done or a useful contribution to a cause. It could be the acquisition of experience or a skill sets. It has to be something if the effort is to be sustained.

Constraints on your operation — availability

If you have paid staff you have the not-unreasonable expectation that during contracted hours you've got first priority on their time and you'll be able to timetable them accordingly (which is easier said than done, I know). This isn't necessarily the case with volunteers: they may perfectly reasonably have higher priorities such as work or family commitments. Even if they haven't, it's rare that somebody is able to commit enough time to cover or replace a full-time equivalent post so a few people would be required to do the necessary. And volunteers aren't available at a nice steady state over time either: availability tends to clump due to external factors such as public transport, school holidays or even market days. If it isn't critical what time/day the work needs doing this isn't an issue but most key front-line operations are defined by opening hours and for those you'll spend a lot of time working on schedules.

We're living in an increasingly high-pressure, time-poor world so people having both the time and energy to volunteer are at a premium. This pool is disproportionately made up of people getting experience before embarking on their careers; job-seekers and people returning to the jobs market; and retired people. These are also the people most likely to have a sudden change of circumstances, for good or ill, which would change their availability to you. So you could spend a lot of your time managing the churn of recruitment and induction, not to mention the potential impacts on your scheduling.

To complicate things further: are the right skill sets available at the right time? Is what's on offer what you need? (Do you actually know what you need?) Are your expectations reasonable? Is there capacity for development?

Constraints on your operation — motivation

We'll assume that initially enough people care about what you're trying to do for them to offer their services as volunteers. Will the reality of your operation confirm that judgement? Will what they get back keep them with you? Work involves at least some element of drudgery — if it was 100% guaranteed fun they wouldn't need to pay people to do it. In the absence of a salary the non-monetary rewards of work take primacy. Continuous positive feedback, a sense of worth, personal development, a sense of belonging, a job well done; these things are achingly important in the paid workplace, in the voluntary workplace they're the only things you have to offer. And offer them you must: it doesn't matter how busy you are or how much fire-fighting you're doing. Moreover, it has to be woven throughout the working experience, not offered as a periodic let's-get-it-over-with effort. In these circumstances being told casually and often that you're doing a good job and it's much appreciated is infinitely better than any formal appraisal. It takes time and effort to do, and all too often isn't. In a paid environment you can get away with neglecting the non-monetary reward of your staff in the short term because like as not the job'll still be done by your employees; it takes a while before loss of performance and increase in recruitment costs become obvious. In the voluntary environment the period where you can get away with neglect is very small; if the volunteer starts to feel that they, or the work they're doing, is unimportant then they'll vote with their feet and go and do something more rewarding instead. So you'll be spending more time recruiting and inducting new volunteers. And the pool will get smaller because word will get round that you take your volunteers for granted.

Conclusion

It is a wonderful thing that people are willing to do voluntary work and this mustn't be belittled or taken for granted. Volunteers are brilliant at helping bring added value to public services. Replacing paid staff with volunteers as a cost-cutting measure is more problematic. Aside from the very real moral issues involved (and the potential breaches of the voluntary codes), the saving may not be as easily realisable as assumed. Managing volunteers properly is a lot of work: just because there's no pay check at the end of the week doesn't mean there isn't a serious amount of personnel management involved, in many ways more so that with paid staff due to the number of volunteers required and the likely turnover involved. The savings you realise by getting rid of not very well-paid staff could be compromised by the cost of the management time required to keep the show on the road.

Library competencies

Webjunction has just compiled an update to their Competency Index For The Library Field. It's an interesting read, not least because the table of contents alone provides a challenging checklist: does your local library authority include all these high-level skill sets?

The latest DCMS review

I admit it, I missed the boat. By a long chalk. And so I didn't submit my views to the latest public consultation on public libraries. A combination of too many ideas, too little time and self-discipline and worrying overly-much as to how I'd make any of it fit to the three questions asked by the commissioned group.

I've no illusions that I would have made a ha'penny's difference but here are my workings out, in case anyone can use any of it:

At the outset I would like to wish you the best of luck with this latest review of the public library service in England and the hope that whatever your conclusions they are operationally practicable and support at least a decent-quality library service for our communities. You start with a serious handicap: DCMS announcements of reviews of the English public library service are a seasonal thing like the first cuckoo of Spring or the first M&S advert of Christmas. Each comes and goes and together their total operational impact in the real world has been the square root of jack all. This appalling legacy is going to colour too many of the views you are likely to hear. Including mine, unfortunately. I would love it if you could confound my cynicism.

• There is a crying need for national leadership.
  • Now the Olympic Games are over and done with, what is DCMS for? Over the past decade — aside from the occasional launch of an enquiry into the public library service — the department’s engagement with the service has been not so much arm’s length as running a mile from.
  • The public library service in England is undefined, at best weakly supported and subject to no performance management.
  • Regulatory guidance on the delivery of the service is virtually non-existent.
  • The potential for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the public library service by pooling resources and delivery channels across local geopolitical boundaries is being driven patchily at the local level at the same time as long-standing sharing mechanisms are being abandoned or left to wither on the vine.
  • The English public library service is not an integral part of a national literacy programme, a national digital literacy programme or a national information literacy programme despite the huge amount of good work being locally done in these areas by many, if not most library authorities.
    • DCMS is not demonstrating that it knows or much cares about:
      • How many public library buildings are currently still in use;
      • What other delivery channels are being made available for library services;
      • What services are being delivered by these delivery channels;
      • Whether or not these services adequately reflect the needs of the communities they serve;
      • What resources should be employed to provide these services.
• Nobody knows what the public library service is. Everybody has an opinion, nobody has an empirical measure and there is no bottom-line base level of service that can be expected nationwide.
  • The sad fig-leaf that is the 1964 Act provides a fine-sounding but practically-useless sound bite. The sole practical impact of the Act is that public libraries used to get listed under “Statutory” rather than “Discretionary” when the auditors came round to see how well the local council was doing.
  • There is a view that if a building has had the word “library” stuck on it some time in its lifetime and the doors are still open then all is well in the world.
  • There is another view that so long as a building is open to the public and has some books for loan that it is a public library.
  • There is yet another view that wonders why, so long after Erasmus talked about “libraries without walls” and after nearly two decades of public libraries’ beginning to deliver their services online, English public library services are so often defined by the buildings with the word “library” stuck on them not the services being provided and delivered, often outwith those library walls.
  • Ironically, while there is a long-standing UK standard specifying the base common denominator functions for a library management system there isn’t a similar baseline specification for the service such a system would be supporting.
  • There are no baseline metrics for the public library service. The old public library standards were limited in scope and flawed in definition but they at least required that some attempt at performance management and the accumulation of business intelligence was being made. One would not want the public library service to be defined only by what could be measured (worse still only what could be measured forty years ago!) but any credible argument that the service being delivered is anything more than “the doors are open, end of story” must be supported by robust data. CIPFA returns provide some useful data but this is limited, not always freely available and not at all concerned with outcomes. Benchmark data Should include:
    
    • Traditional transactional and visitor throughputs.
    • Outcomes of programmes of library activity.
    • Demographic engagement and outcomes — a demonstration that the service is serving its communities and not just providing services “for people like us by people like us.”
    • Stock analyses, including data on special collections, reserve stock and specifically-local elements (not just “local studies” collections). This would also include contextual age-related data — a collection of Victorian books in a special collection is a matter of interest, a collection of fifteen-year-old children’s picture books is a matter of concern.
    • Performance at each service point, including buildings, outreach and digital channels. Transactional data at library buildings normalised to numbers per staff hour so that variations from the norm can be readily identified; while there should be some variation in response to the needs of the local community other variations may be cause for concern.
    • Analyses of delivery channels both within and without the library buildings managed by the service.
  • Once benchmark data had been established, openly-reported trend analyses should include:
    • Patterns of change of use;
    • Patterns of replacement of use — this might be as simple as 78’s being replaced in stock by mp3’s or as complex as a community of use migrating from one library to another;
    • Contextual commentary — for instance a note of the impact of the school next door closing; a new motorway cutting off a community from its library; or the involvement in a new programme of activities.

There is a need for the availability and application of librarianship skills at a community level. (This is not a call for a quota of “professionals” in each library authority: this has been tried before and too many of us have experience of working alongside librarians who were doing nothing that the “unqualified” library assistants were doing at least as well.) The librarian is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

• The creation of local, parochial bibliographic metadata is culturally- and economically-beneficial to our communities. This is not limited to the traditional form of local studies collections — though these may be seen as an important component of the Arts Council’s commitment to the accessibility of the nation’s heritage.
  • Small-scale publication — especially self-publication — is easier than ever, particularly in e-book formats. There is a very real danger that much of this material will be permanently excluded from the national bibliography. Librarians, working with local authors and publishers should be tasked with the creation and publication of the appropriate metadata.
  • Many titles have a geolocational context that is not recorded or reflected in the commercially-available metadata. Making this local context available provides a hook for the recreational reader; resources for researchers and for teachers creating reading and learning materials; and support for literature-based community activities and tourism programmes.
• A national audit is urgently needed of those special collections not already dispersed, dissolved or disposed of as a result of austerity measures. In particular it is important to find out how much — or little — of these have been catalogued and published electronically so that a programme of work can be set up to address the oversights.
• Community knowledge bases.
• Grey literature.
• Information literacy.
• Local Freedom of Information libraries.

Engagement with the digital world

• Digital inclusion/digital literacy
• Digital libraries
• Integrating the virtual and physical worlds
• Crowdsourcing literary engagement
• Curating user-created content
• [All that stuff you’ve been arguing for fruitlessly for the past decade]

Staff development and continuous service improvement

• Essential — needs to be resourced and needs a proper framework for all staff
• Need to avoid replicating the errors and missed opportunities of the NOF-funded training programme for supporting the People’s Network — no “magic bullets” like ECDL
• Training needs dovetailing with service development needs
• Anticipating the support needs of communities and customers

Use and management of volunteers

• Complementary to paid staff
• Needs to be fair to the volunteer — what’s in it for them?
• Needs to be fair to the service — what’s in it for them?
• Needs to be fair to the community — what’s in it for them?
• Not an easy management win
  • Greater churn that paid staff — constant need for recruitment and training support
  • Too little good supervision of remote front-line staff at the moment — how would the same managers add supervision of volunteers to their portfolio?
  • Discipline and behaviour (this is true of all staff — not just volunteers — but fewer available sticks and carrots)
  • How to manage reputational damage when things go wrong?

Managing in a storm

The single worst thing a manager can say is: "I assumed..."

It isn't the job of managers to assume. It is their job to ensure.

• To ensure that the people who are tasked to do the work know what is expected of them.


• To ensure that the people who are tasked to do the work know how to do what is expected of them.


• To ensure that the resources required to deliver the work are available when they are needed.


• To ensure that there are ways of means of making sure that the work is being delivered.


• To ensure that there are ways of means of determining when the work has been done.


• To ensure that there is a review process so that if the work needs to be done again it can be done to at least the same standard, if not better and more efficiently.

No assumes there.

Every one of these points requires effective communication between the manager and the staff. Effective communication isn't just telling somebody something, or sending them an email, and then walking away expecting things to be done the way you want them. Communication is a game for more than one player. You need to listen. You need to ask. You need to check. Does the other person understand what you want? Do you understand what they mean when they're responding? Are you sure you know all the answers or have they got a better idea? Are you having an argument because they don't understand you, you don't understand them, or that you were talking out of the seat of your pants in the first place (oh come on, be honest, we all do sometimes).

Don't assume that questions and challenges are a bad thing: if your point of view doesn't stand up to internal scrutiny like as not it won't survive an outsider's inquisition. A tested proposition is a safer proposition.

So a good manager ensures that there is a conversation. And ensures a common goal. And ensures a fighting chance of success.

And a bad manager assumes that success will just come to them and that it's somebody else's fault if it doesn't happen.