I had no experience at all of this kind of management when I came to the job, so I had to learn it by feel. It was obvious that our volunteers had been managed with poor sensitivity by dogmatic regional management, who prescribed a tedious and unfriendly security role that nobody in their right mind would sign up for, and local management had created a tense situation with factions at loggerheads. I was keen to smooth this over when the new season started, but had no idea how to do it. It would probably be unrealistic to assert that I ever achieved it fully, although, I must say, that after fifteen years, I don't think there was any longer a visible join between the two groups of volunteers I inherited. There were still some personal tensions between certain members of the crew, but those are inevitable. At least we no longer had two gangs, which is what it felt like I had taken on.
My strategy was to get to know everyone. It was a very simple plan. It seemed to me that volunteers get involved for various reasons, and these must be understood when catering for them. Generally they are looking for something to occupy their time, it should have a social element, they want to feel useful and valued, and want to feel their opinion counts. Now, indulging some of that can be quite difficult, particularly when it comes to taking on board strong opinions, especially those that come from left-field, due to different preoccupations. Nevertheless, we couldn't do without the help of our volunteers, and I had to find a way of accommodating all their needs.
In fact, it gradually crept up on me that the solution was really quite simple, so simple that I was amazed that no one had tried it before. It wasn't a case of selecting a few favourites who could be relied on. I was a matter of spending the time to get to know all of them, treating them each as people, as individuals in their own right. Getting a sense of their motivations, experience, interests and loves. These people were offering their help free of charge. The very least I could do was give them time.
For my entire fifteen years there, I made it my policy that wherever possible, if I was present on site, I would meet them all as they came in for duty, and I would spend the last ten minutes or quarter of an hour of each working day chatting to each of them individually. I like to think I made many friends like that, Even after we employed an admin assistant who became responsible for much of the day-to-day management of the voluntary contingent, allowing me more time in the garden, I still made a point of honouring the end-of-shift chats. By the time I moved on to my next job fifteen years later, we had a team of well over one hundred, and even now, eleven years on, I still exchange Christmas cards with thirty of them, and a number have been to visit us in our various new abodes since.
After a while, I introduced volunteer coffee mornings as a regular feature, which helped with integration and became a social event fulfilling the need for human contact for those whose motivation came from loneliness. An integral part of this was always an address which I gave, outlining our hopes for the next period. I always tried to make this as humorous as I could, because I felt it also ought to be fun for us all, and not a commitment we wished we had never subscribed to. Increasingly I found that it was difficult to find an opening in the hubbub in which to insert my speeches, so successful was the social aspect of the gatherings. To add a personal touch, I also used to bake the biscuits for these meetings myself, generally providing amaretti biscuits, chocolate Viennese fingers and ginger nuts. The only slight disappointment was that a few people complained about the ginger biscuits being too hard for their ageing teeth. It is a fact that most of the volunteers in these roles were no longer as young as they once had been. This is one of the sad reasons why my Christmas list has gradually dwindled to the thirty remaining.
One of the first briefings I gave them was in complete defiance of the regional management directive about the Room Steward's role being purely a security function. I encouraged them to bone up on the history of the property, to listen to my briefings on what we were doing in the garden, and to take on board the role of information provider. Not to harass visitors with knowledge they didn't require, but to respond willingly to questions with informed answers, while at the same time being mindful of the security implications of potential distractions. As a rule, this worked very well, although there will always be one or two who are so voluble as to overdo it on occasions. However, contrary to the expectations of the faceless ones at regional office, we never had a security incident resulting from our volunteers being too friendly or communicative. This early change was the beginning of my attempt to give the property under my control an individual character, and to preserve the essential different nature of a place which was so recent an acquisition that it had not yet grown a corporate identity. This extended later to such things as producing all our signage in the original estate colours rather than the generic colours of the organisation, and refusing to adopt a uniform of fleeces and polo shirts with embroidered logos.
Later still, when we had an admin assistant to organise it, we introduced annual end-of-season coach trips which were always well-attended, and I like to think the time we spent together on and off duty was happy and productive for us all.
Enough of that. A serious lump of blog, dealing with part of my work which was much more important in the achievement of our final goals than anybody would have realised.
But I was definitely in at the deep end, improvising frantically. I had no idea where it was going to go next.
But I do now. Tomorrow, I will get back in the garden, doing what I do best. But even that I am still learning at this stage.
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