The Realities of Volunteering

mismatch

Source: Pixabay/CC0 Creative Commons

Imagine you are interested in becoming an emergency worker, like a paramedic, a firefighter or a lifesaver. You sign up with your local emergency service to volunteer for them. You come in with some expectations. Maybe you expect that it’s going to be like in the movies: Action packed with heroic feats. You start the work with the emergency service and discover you need to spend three to four hours a week in training and after a year you had the chance to participate in only two real emergency events. Now imagine you want to volunteer for an animal shelter and expect that you will spend your weekends playing with cats and walking dogs, only to discover when you start that you spend 75% of your time cleaning cages, picking up poo, and can’t approach many of the emotionally damaged pets. Would you continue your volunteering work or quit? Nothing is stopping you, it’s not like this volunteer job is helping you pay your mortgage or rent.

As it turns out, how closely our expectations match reality can have quite an impact on how happy we are at work and how likely we are to either stay or quit. This applies to both paid works and volunteering. We recently found this out for ourselves when we were looking at the results of a survey of 539 emergency service volunteers in Western Australia after their first year of service. We found that they fell into three distinct categories based on why they joined and their expectations when they started.

1) Focused volunteers had clear expectations about what the job would involve and had clear reasons for joining the emergency service. Luckily they made up over 50% of this sample.

2) Over-enthusiastic volunteers initially expected to be involved in many more activities than the other two groups and were the only ones to mention status and reputation in their reasons for joining. They also tended to be the youngest group.

3) Disengaged or lost volunteers didn’t really have a clear reason for joining the emergency services and expected to be involved in few activities. They also tended to be older and from regional areas.

We found that in the latter two groups, there was a mismatch between the expectations and reality, and when there was a mismatch, people were thinking of quitting. This might be because this mismatch resulted in a breach of psychological contract. A psychological contract is essentially the unspoken, implicit understanding between an employee and organization about what they can expect from each other. Research has shown that psychological contract breach can affect job satisfaction, commitment to an organization, and lead to intentions to leave. Our over-enthusiastic volunteers may have found only a small number of their expectations were met, leaving them in limbo, while our disengaged volunteers may have been asked to do more than they expected and things they didn’t expect to do. In both cases, their psychological contract may have been breached.

It can be very tempting for organizations who are desperate for volunteers to make their volunteering opportunities as appealing as possible. As one volunteer organization put it, "we'll take anyone with a heartbeat... oh, and the heartbeat is optional." But getting volunteers in the door is only half of the battle. Attracting volunteers with unrealistic job descriptions is likely to lead to dissatisfaction. And in addition to costing the organization money to train them for only a short tenure, dissatisfied volunteers who stay can create a toxic climate that can lead previously happy volunteers to become unhappy.

One way to deal with this is to make volunteering opportunities appealing but realistic. You want to attract people who will be happy doing the work. For example, some people may not crave a job where they have to climb ladders while others seek out jobs that involve climbing. Realistic job previews can help organizations ensure they have people with the right skills, knowledge, and expectations coming into volunteer roles. So if the volunteer work involves many regular hours of training, people must know that. If the work involves dealing directly with the community, people must know that too. If volunteers need to work in cramped, hot or cold environments, they must know that before they sign up. When organizations use realistic job previews, employees are more satisfied, committed and more likely to stay. The same goes for volunteers.

So if you are looking for volunteer opportunities, ask the organization to provide you with a realistic job preview. If you are involved in recruiting volunteers, provide them with a realistic job preview.

This post was co-authored with Courtenay McGill.