Preventing volunteer burnout

Burnout session at AdaCamp Melbourne.

What do people want to get out of this session

• Prevention (some appear to handle it better than others, comes up in every organizations)
• Anti-patterns
• “self-sabotage”
• This is a structural

Why I’m here?

• “i am disabled” -- learning to be a better engineer, knowing own limits, self managing
• “I didn’t do what I needed to do at the time”
• How do we teach volunteers to handle themselves
• find out “who is responsible for volunteer burnout?” The organization (?)

How to fix burnout?

• task design
• organizational design
• leadership

Problems

• Feeling trapped by the fact that no one else can do X
• Controlling tasks :D
• “some projects are hero projects”

Types of burnout

• Life-happens, prioritization
• Unappreciated/unsafe
• Rage quitting
• People are attacking me from the outside
• over-commitment
• fade out - lack of positive feedback
• fade out - due to negative feedback
• idealism: not achieving the ideal, so quitting
• unrealistic expectations
• non-profit workers, not being paid and you shouldn’t ask for more money, work lots of overtime because “you believe”

Best practices

• create a culture where it’s acceptable to say no
  • What’s the role of leadership of an organization in setting policy?
  • Organizers need to say no (volunteer: you can’t do that)
  • Having backups for things
  • Succession planning (buddy people)
• Socializing: Volunteering needs to not just be work
  • sophisticated task design
  • every task is balanced with a reward
  • commitment is very clearly defined
• Planned obselecense
• Top-level direction on planning to quit
• having roles makes it much easier to move people out of them
• Learning how to delegate portions of things
• Co-founding: find someone with complementary skills
• Tasks go undone :D - Just ask individuals to do things
• Australian Associating for Rogaining is an example of awesome
  • long distance orienteering
  • 6 events a year