Volunteer teams are the secret sauce to how churches can successfully achieve all that they do every week. With exiting volunteers being a huge roadblock for ministry leaders to overcome, the topic of retaining volunteers is necessary to have around the leadership table.
If we were to walk together onto a church campus and poll different team leaders, What will make your team and ministry more effective? I would bet there will be one answer repeated more often than any other.
MORE VOLUNTEERS.
It seems that in all of the conferences and networking meetings I have had, WE NEED MORE VOLUNTEERS is the most common request. How do we get more volunteers?
I remember attending a breakout of a huge next generation leadership conference a few years ago and one specific breakout was on the topic of growing volunteer teams. It was packed! The event organizers carried in additional chairs and there were still people lining the walls and sitting on the floor. Ministry leaders everywhere are looking for strategies to grow volunteer teams.
Consider this: How important is it to recruit volunteers if we aren’t retaining the volunteers currently on our team?
Exiting volunteers = the REVOLVING DOOR SYNDROME.
Volunteers exit the team just as fast, or worse, even faster than you can recruit and train them.
The team leader is left wondering, ‘what just happened?’ This syndrome seems to leave an especially hard impact when it comes to loosing high-capacity volunteers.
For the sake of this article, let me define what I mean by a high capacity volunteer.
A high capacity volunteer is a person who has caught the vision and culture of your organization. They are self-motivated, a positive influence on the team, they leave things better than they found them and they fill their role consistently and to a high level.
Why are they always the first to exit out the revolving door?
In my experience, there are five main reasons that high-capacity volunteers, exit a volunteer team.
1. Volunteers exit when they feel overwhelmed and under-equipped
- Is there dis-organization, lack of timely communication or lack of necessary resources causing volunteers to feel under-equipped?
- Have policies and procedures been explained PRIOR to a volunteer’s first day? High capacity volunteers want to have clearly defined expectations, so they know how to measure success. They do not want to be left guessing.
- Are there enough people serving so that one person is not left carrying a weight that feels overwhelming?
- Is what you ask, reasonable for that volunteer, week after week? Let’s imagine you have two adult volunteers serving together in one preschool environment with an average attendance of 16-20 kids each week. Asking these volunteers to teach a lesson, keep the kids safe, feed them all a snack, paint a craft, clean up AND change diapers for 16-20 kids is not reasonable. They are WAY outnumbered. In fact, it is making my heart race just thinking about it! If your volunteers get heart palpitations just thinking about showing up to serve on Sunday, you can be guaranteed it won’t be long before – they aren’t.
- Can they be confident that when they show up to serve, everything they need will be ready and waiting for them? NO ONE wants their time wasted, especially someone volunteering their time.
2. Volunteers exit when they feel like they are being USED to fill a spot and not like they actually matter as people.
- Are we intentional with our volunteers, to get them serving in roles that use their gifts, or are they in a random spot that needed to be filled so we could check off a box on our ‘emergency needs’ list?
- Do they feel prayed for, appreciated, valued? Does a leader on the team, know their family situation, their work situation, the specific thing they are most excited about in this season?
- Does someone miss them when they are not there? (And not because there is a spot to fill, but because THEY were missed.)
3. Volunteers exit when they do not see how they contribute to the overall vision
- Is the vision being kept out FRONT? Has the volunteer heard the WHY often enough that they understand it and can repeat it?
- Do they understand how their individual contribution fits in to the overall vision? Is it celebrated SPECIFICALLY and OFTEN how they are making a difference? (What are the WINS that happen because they show up to serve?)
4. Volunteers exit when there is no forward progress
- It does not take long for people, especially high-capacity people, to notice when things are ‘off.’ Just pay a short visit to YELP and you will notice how great society as a whole, is at observing flaws. What flaws exist on your team? If your volunteers can spot them, hopefully you do too!
- Most volunteers will extend grace and support as we work together to get better. They are often the ones who come with suggestions and offers link arms to help. While not everything can be fixed in a week, SOMETHING can be done this week. There needs to be consistent forward momentum. If a volunteer keeps mentioning the same issue or repeating the same request week after week, you can be assured it will not be long before they exit.
No one wants to be part of a dying team. Everyone wants to be part of a winning team. Winning teams are growing teams making forward progress.
5. Volunteers exit for personal reasons
- In many instances, these exits, if navigated well from a leadership standpoint, result in volunteers who eventually onboard back to the team when the situation or season changes. They are more of a temporary break, than an actual exit.
- Jobs change.
- Families have a new baby.
- Transportation challenges arise.
- Health reasons.
- Major life change.
How we support and encourage volunteers during a season of temporary absence communicates far more to them about how much we value them as people than anything we say or do while they are serving on our team.
If you find that you are not retaining volunteers;
“Ask yourself, Would you volunteer for you? If the answer is NO, you’ve put your finger on the problem.”
-Carey Nieuwhof
Want a team full of high-capacity volunteers? Be a high-capacity leader. If you see exiting volunteers impacting your team, evaluate what is causing it and begin to make changes. Even one single change, THIS WEEK, can begin to shift the health and culture of your team.
Coming soon: Ways to Retain Volunteers and Grow Your Team. Subscribe below, to Join the List, so you are notified and don’t risk missing any new content.
Also, you can find some ideas and strategies that you can use to evaluate the current health of your team, by checking out the post Success Gauges.