What Makes Volunteer Workers Quit?

Worker quitting

Source: AdobeStock_Miljan Živković

This post was co-written with Dr. Vivien Forner from the University of Sydney.

There are over 862.4 million volunteers globally giving their time to a cause that matters to them. Volunteers are the heroes of our communities, saving lives and helping others. Emergency services in Australia are a good example. Without Surf Life Saving’s 24,500 volunteers, people on Australian beaches would be left manoeuvring strong waves, rip currents, and marine wildlife on their own. Without 193,000 volunteer firefighters and 44,000 state emergency volunteer workers, Australia’s frequent floods and fires would have significantly more devastating consequences.

Can you imagine managing and coordinating such high volunteer numbers with meagre resources? Given that volunteering has gradually declined over the past decade, how can volunteer organizations attract and retain volunteers? Of course, being attracted to a volunteer role and keeping on doing it has everything to do with your motivation to volunteer.

Recent research summed up what is currently known about why some volunteers continue their work while others step back. The researchers looked at 117 scientific studies of over 55,000 people who volunteer and mapped out the most important factors that influence volunteers’ decision to stay or leave their volunteering organisation or group.

What drives volunteers to stay or leave?

Attitudes volunteers have toward their role are closely linked to their turnover decisions. Volunteers are likely to stay when they feel satisfied with the volunteer job, emotionally committed to the organisation, and highly engaged. Like paid workers, volunteers also get burned out, and burnout was a key contributor to turnover. Burnout has been an important issue for firefighters in Australia.

What organisations do impacts turnover decisions. Good communication, receiving support from the organisation and its paid staff, and the availability of training are all strong influencers of whether volunteers stay or leave. Volunteering activities should also be designed to enable volunteers to contribute productively and voice their opinions on things that matter to them. These touch on the three psychological needs essential to motivation I’ve talked about in a previous post on volunteering, which include feeling that you are learning, feeling volitional, and feeling connected to others.

In addition, many of the factors that can forestall volunteer turnover uncovered in the review are things that can be influenced by volunteer leaders. Here’s a rundown of what leaders can do.

Five things volunteer managers can do to retain volunteers

1. Leaders, get to know your volunteers and build authentic and supportive relationships with them. One of the most rewarding parts of volunteering is the connections you make. Building trusting relationships also goes a long way to making people comfortable speaking up, giving suggestions, and generally being more engaged.
2. Provide volunteers with regular, clear, and relevant information on the “what, why, and how” of volunteer activities. Knowing what to do provides clarity. Knowing why you do it tells volunteers how they can impact the beneficiaries of their work. Knowing how to do it makes them feel more competent.

1. Empower volunteers: Give them the autonomy to make some decisions and contribute to crafting activities that are important to them. Not only does this engage them, but it also helps foster feelings of inclusion, which is especially important in increasingly diverse settings.

1. Promote collaboration between volunteers and create opportunities for volunteers to socialise and get to know one another. Peer support can take several forms, such as helping with tasks or just listening to each other when things are more difficult, and all of these forms of support contribute to volunteer engagement.

1. Volunteers’ time is valuable, so organize volunteering activities so that volunteers can contribute their time in a productive and meaningful way. Minimize volunteers waiting and sitting around. Also, make sure they have the resources they need (e.g., equipment) to be efficient with their time.

These five tricks can help fulfill those psychological needs to feel competent, autonomous, and related to others. By applying them, volunteer leaders can create less burned-out volunteers who will continue to contribute their time to creating more robust communities.