Volunteer Appreciation and Accountability #2

Now comes the second part of volunteer management and accountability. This is a little easier to write than last one. Besides holding your volunteers accountable to the excellence of the ministry you also need to hold them accountable to themselves. What do I mean by this? You have to show them appreciation so that they know that you value what they do. When they know you value their time and efforts they will value what they do as well. You need to give them a time of rest.

Appreciation

I know you appreciate your volunteers. We all do. I appreciate what they do that I see and I appreciate what they do that I don’t see. But how often do I show that appreciation. We tend to thank volunteers in groups: we thank all the new volunteers but neglect the old

standbys that rely on or we thank are most reliable core volunteers and forget to thank the novice volunteers who need the encouragement. That is why you need to develop a system of thanking your volunteers. That system could look like several things. What it should not look like is a mass-produced thank you letter once a year right around the time of volunteer recruiting. That’s not really an appreciation that’s a recruiting tool and is seen as such by the volunteers. One technique that I like is to write three short handwritten thank you notes to three different volunteers every Monday. It takes less than five minutes and costs less than two dollars. I keep a list of whom I send these to and double check that against the volunteer list every quarter. This lets me know that I’m thanking everybody but I’m not mass-producing something impersonal.

Giving time Away

This is hard, because we don’t want to say to volunteer “you’re not needed“ or “take a rest” the reality is that we have healthier volunteers when we provide them Sabbath: a time of rest. I find that this time makes our best volunteers eager to come back. They miss the kids and colleagues they volunteer with. The time of rest provides them the opportunity to reconnect to the church that they’re serving. The risk of burnout is ever-present in our culture and can be detrimental to spiritual life of your volunteer. It can be harmful to your ministry to not provide and encourage rest. I know some of you might be thinking you can’t survive one week without your core volunteers. This is a lie we tell ourselves. The truth is the Lord will provide the right person to step in and help fulfill His requirement of Sabbath.