Various Voices Communications and Team Working

Things that often seem go wrong:

• A volunteer offers to do something important.  Great.  A month goes by, no news.  It’s now urgent.  The volunteer’s difficult to get hold of, then says “I haven’t found the time, I can’t do it”.  It’s now critical!
• An email requiring action is sent to a group of people.  All those people assume someone else will deal with it.  It doesn’t get done.
• A key email is received by a team member who deals with it on his own.  The manager, or another team member who needed to know, doesn’t find out until much later.
• I didn’t read your entire email because it was long and I was in a hurry.  I didn’t realise I had an action buried in the content.

Team Working

• We will encourage volunteers to work in pairs
• When appropriate volunteers will work together in teams
• Our main tool for project management will be web-based project management website for the Various Voices London 2009 team

Communication

• Keep the group informed about what you’re doing, at least at a summary level.
• Compile a document with all the details, for the record, for review, or for handing over to someone else.
• Keep the central task list, calendar etc updated.
• If you make contact with anyone external, e.g. a business or another chorus, add their details to the central contact list.
• Keep copies of your emails and your documents.  They may come in useful again later.  Make backups, don’t just have one copy.
• Email: Start every (long) email with a management summary.  Who’s it aimed at?  Do you need a reply or an action, or is it just FYI.  Is it urgent, or is there a deadline?
• When emailing individuals (rather than the whole YahooGroup ), think about who you need to CC, but avoid doing that for large numbers of emails.
• Whenever you receive an important email, check who else it went to.  Do you need to forward it on to anyone?

Volunteer recruitment and training can be quite diverse and specialised and can lead to career enhancement and NVQ qualifications