Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Post History

90%
+16 −0
Q&A Voluntariness vs. Responsibility, which of them should be considered as a priority for the community team?

Working with volunteers is very different to working with paid staff, and if you try to bring the same expectations then you will cause problems. Paid staff have a contract: the hours and type of w...

posted 4y ago by Peter Taylor‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Peter Taylor‭ · 2020-09-28T13:59:20Z (about 4 years ago)
Working with volunteers is very different to working with paid staff, and if you try to bring the same expectations then you *will* cause problems.

Paid staff have a contract: the hours and type of work expected from them are explicitly stated, as is their compensation. If they don't see the point of a task that the boss sets them then they will do it, because (a) they still get paid for it, even if it turns out to be pointless; (b) they will cease to be paid if they refuse to do it.

Volunteers often don't have explicitly stated expectations, and derive the compensation for their work from the work itself: perhaps from internal satisfaction of a job well done, satisfaction from the result of doing it, or external satisfaction from pleasant interactions with others brought about by doing it. If they don't see the point of a task and someone above them in the organisation pushes them to do it anyway, they lose motivation and eventually withdraw their effort.

A comparison of the forms of compensation with Maslow's hierarchy of needs will clearly show that anyone who works for a living and also volunteers will necessarily prioritise the work over the volunteering. Some volunteers have plenty of time, but some may be using scraps here and there.

All this means that when working with volunteers, you have to prioritise and distribute tasks differently than when working with employees. You don't have a fixed amount of people-hours per week to do things, because not only might the availability of the people vary from week to week due to external factors, but if you ask them to do things they don't want to then their availability will suddenly go down.

In short, **you can expect volunteers to take responsibility for doing the tasks they accept well, but you can't expect them to accept tasks uncritically**.