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Feedback and performance
Even though we’re within a workplace, ARG and DEIB project involvement is a form of volunteering, as it’s an optional role. That means that it can be challenging to deal with a situation where people are not engaging as much as you’d like.
The golden rules to drive healthy volunteer engagement are:
- They feel their work is valued, and makes a difference
- They are getting something out of it (experience, skills, community, personal fulfilment or meaning)
Key actions for an ARG lead trying to keep a team of volunteers engaged are:
- Giving them regular appreciation, feedback and recognition
- Listening and acting upon their feedback
- Regular proactive communication (be engaged yourself; stay connected, don’t assume)
- Making sure the expectation of what they’re supposed to contribute is clear – the commitment conversation technique may be useful
And if you’re co-leading, how do you collaborate? Who does what, when? Do you hold each other accountable? Be deliberate about how it works.
To get more comfortable with giving feedback, we highly recommend attending Feedback Conversations Workshop Series from Learn. You can also consult the P2 Feedback Conversations.
If you’re struggling with disengagement or poor performance from ARG co-leads or committee members, you can give feedback to them directly, or to their lead. You can also take a look at this FG section which offers suggestions of how a person’s lead could help you, in that they are involved in overseeing the person’s ARG work in the bigger picture as part of their contribution to A8C.
Recruitment
If you’re finding you need to expand your leadership team or committee, you can bear in mind some volunteer recruitment best practice:
- Define clear roles and responsibilities.
- Do you have specific roles on your committee (such as Events, or Research, or Outreach?) If not, maybe consider if this might attract more volunteers.
- Specify impact.
- For volunteering roles like this, which people will be picking up on top of their core responsibilities, they may need to understand “what’s in it for them”. Can you frame the role in terms of the personal impact the individual will be contributing to the ARG and the company goals? This page might help.
- Plan a communications strategy.
- Is your ARG generally visible? Are there places in the company you might not be reaching? Are you cross-posting to the right places?
- Can you get your message publicised somewhere like a town hall, or during a company event?
- Offer training and development.
- Emphasise what transferable skills they’ll learn in the role – project management, leadership, event wrangling…
- Can another ARG lead mentor the new person by way of onboarding? Do you know if they’re hoping to gain any specific experience?
- Recognise contributions from existing members.
- Provide feedback (you can do this directly to HR, if you think it’s sufficiently impactful!) and kudos regularly to ARG members, co-leads or committee members who are doing good or impactful work. This is a great way to make sure people feel valued and motivated to do more.
- Make it flexible.
- Encourage people to volunteer what time they have – consider offering a range of options for how much to be involved, how much commitment to make and how much time to spend, and/or make it explicit that this is flexible.
- Collect feedback and iterate.
- If you’re struggling to recruit new leadership or project leads, have you asked the community why this is? What is holding them back?
- Are you sure the ARG is representing the community’s needs? Perhaps things have changed? What would make the members feel more motivated and engaged? You can ask them directly, or track patterns to see what sort of offerings seem to drive the most engagement.
Remember that when you do recruit new committee members, they’ll need to check in with their team lead to be sure they’re in a good place to take on this new responsibility.
Example/suggested questions you could ask interested parties:
- Share three things that you want to gain from participating in this ARG
- How do you envision this ARG helping Automattic?
- What kind of programs would you like to participate in? (e.g. mentorship, webinars, learnups, etc.)
- How much time can you devote to the ARG per month?
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