Ask a Manager: a higher-up is pushing an unwanted volunteer on us

[minoanmiss]

“I work in a cultural/academic/nonprofit institution, and am part of a professional community small enough that I don’t wish to identify it, lest one of my colleagues identify me.”

There’s a hierarchy within my institution, and someone (Martha) higher up than me and my boss, but outside of our department, has a disabled son (Edward). Edward is an adult in occupational therapy, and that’s about the extent of the details that I know. A while ago, Martha sent my boss an email asking if there was anything that Edward could do as volunteer work for his occupational therapy. Part of the mission of my department is to assist the people at Martha’s level in the hierarchy, so my boss didn’t feel that we could refuse Edward’s help as a volunteer.

I should note that our institution does not ordinarily accept volunteers and we have no volunteer program nor volunteer manager. My job is to receive a large number of valuable and occasionally rare items and make them available for everyone else in the institution to use — quickly. Normally I have a part-time employee who helps me with part of this process and does something that our department considers easy work. Because of pandemic-era budget cuts, we haven’t had someone consistently working in that position for a while. My boss decided that Edward’s volunteer time would be best spent doing the work of that position. We’ve had some problems though:

1. Edward doesn’t work on any set schedule, and Martha has ignored or steamrolled over all attempts I’ve made at creating one. I have busy and slow periods in my own work depending on what comes in for me. If he worked on a schedule, I’d plan out what he would do. As it is though, I must plan on him not being in, and I have to do the tasks I would normally assign to him so that they get done on time. We keep ending up in situations where either I have lots of work that Edward could do and I am told that he is not available to volunteer, or I have nothing for him to do because I have not heard from Martha that he will be working.

2. Martha treats me like a work-creation-machine for Edward. She will inform — not ask — me that he will be working with about two hours notice. She has gone so far as to track me down in other parts of the building when she couldn’t find me at my desk and interrupted my lunch break several times to tell me this. I can’t invent work for him out of thin air, and although my boss realizes that, she also worries that disappointing Martha will have negative consequences for our department.

3. Martha demands sometimes that Edward be able to work on days that no one in our department is at work. They are able to get into the department through a connecting door that is kept open by another department that needs access to ours. But as I said, the items I work with are valuable, and if something went missing while Martha and Edward were in our department, my boss and I would be accountable for it and suspected of stealing it because of the nature of our profession.

4. Edward is terrible at the work he’s assigned. The work requires good fine motor skills, and he doesn’t have them. I’ve had to reassign employees in the past because they had difficulty with it, and this isn’t a result of his disability or something we could have anticipated. I have had to train Martha and several other people who come in with Edward so that they can know how to help Edward while he works, but they aren’t concerned about the quality of his work. I end up having to redo about 30% of what he does. I’ve told Edward and whoever is with him that if something goes wrong they need to bring the item back to me so that I can fix it, but it doesn’t happen.

My boss and I keep trying to figure out how we can make this arrangement work for all of us, or if there’s really nothing we can do at this point. Right now, we’re at a point where Martha will walk in and demand work, but I’ll tell her that there’s really nothing to be done, because there isn’t. Do we just keep going and hope it eventually breaks down until they find some more consistent volunteer work somewhere else? Actually demand a schedule? Tell Martha this just isn’t working out? Is there some better way to work this out?

If you weren’t having to redo a third of Edward’s work, I’d say that your boss needs to insist on a schedule for Edward’s work. It’s entirely reasonable to say that your work isn’t set up to accommodate volunteers on short notice and that the only way to make this work is to agree on a schedule in advance. If that doesn’t suit Edward, then this isn’t the right volunteer opportunity for him.

But since you’re having to redo a third of his work — along with all the other issues, like having to scramble at the last minute to devise projects, his resistance to direction (like “bring this back to me if something goes wrong with it”), and not being able to count on him to show up when you’ve planned work for him — that’s not enough of a solution.

Really, the only thing that makes sense here is for your boss to talk to Martha and let her know you can no longer use Edward as a volunteer. (Or she could explain this to Edward himself if that would be appropriate, but it sounds like Martha would expect to hear this directly.) I get that she’s concerned about disappointing Martha, but this is so disruptive to your work that at this point it’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s one thing to try to accommodate a personal request from a higher-up when it only causes a little inconvenience — maybe not ideal, but sometimes the reality of hierarchy and politics is that it’s smart to do someone a personal favor anyway — but when the request is this disruptive to someone’s work, your boss really has a professional obligation to push back.

Speaking of which, if she hasn’t already, your boss should talk to her own manager about what’s going on. That way her manager won’t be blindsided if there’s blowback … and plus, she might have insight into how to deal with Martha or might even be willing to handle it herself.

Based on how pushy and unreasonable Martha has been so far, I know it might seem like she definitely won’t accept this! And that’s possible … but keep in mind that no one has tried telling Martha no yet. Everything she’s seen so far has indicated that you’re willing to keep trying (even if she should have read between the lines and seen the struggle her demands have been causing), and it really might go differently once she hears a firm and decided “we’ve tried what we can but we aren’t able to make this work.” Or not, of course — some people are just unreasonable and ridiculous no matter what. But your boss should try a clear no first! (And after that, if Martha keeps pushing past a point your boss feels she has the standing to handle on her own, that’s where her own boss should come in.)

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I feel terrible for Edward, crammed into a volunteer job unsuited for him, and LW, given an assignment unsuited for her that takes her from her actual workload. And everyone who's in the shadow of Martha, who is clearly ready and able to use every bit of her 800 Pound Gorillaness to crush everyone into compliance.

If LW's in the US, land of At Will employment, I can't see how LW can keep her job -- she'll tell Martha "this isn't working out" and Martha will have her fired. But I'm cynical. Does anyone have better ideas?

[jenett]

I work at a non-profit (that does accept volunteers, and with a volunteer coordinator who is great at dealing with this kind of thing) and also has volunteers with various disabilities.

The thing that strikes me here is seeing if they can arrange to talk to a contact related to Edward's occupational therapy, leaning heavily on the "We'd like to make sure we're aligning the tasks with the things he's focusing on or enjoys doing - just like we'd do if we had other volunteers." It may be that the OT (or whoever it is) would go "Oh, no, that's not a great fit" and would have leverage to suggest a change that is external to any of the employees under Martha.

One of the things we do is also keep a stash of non-time-sensitive things that are hard to mess up for when we have this kind of volunteer handy. Our workflow varies too, but I can often come up with something that is in fact useful, not high priority, and hard to mess up (or easy to fix, depending.)

[kshandra]

I thought of you almost as soon as I started reading this post, tbh...

[jadelennox]

yeah. the other thing, if that's not permitted, is for LW -- who knows better than anyone what Edward's limitations and strengths are -- to propose an alternate volunteer role for Edward. Martha might be resistant, but LW should have some sense by now of what Edward wants. Edward's clearly used to being steamrollered/enabled by his Disability Mum™, but does LW have a sense of what he likes? If he likes human interaction, could he be a greeter? If he likes crafting, could he make holiday cards the institution sends out to donors?

In a worst case scenario, LW needs to prepare some harmless, unimportant busywork for Edward. That's flat out insulting to Edward, but the person insulting him is not LW but Martha (by shoving him in to an inappropriate situation where he's unqualified).

And honestly, come on, LW. There is no way that your department has not had a backlog of a certain kind of tasks pending for years. Sure, you can't ask Edward to remove old staples from acidified paper, but you can ask him to detangle the rubber bands from the paperclips in the desk drawer, put them in separate boxes, and label them. That actually is important work, it's just not important work you've ever had time to do.

(Martha might respond to this either by saying she doesn't want him to have unimportant busywork, in which case you just need to honestly tell her that everyone is working faster now that they don't have to curse at the messy rubber band tangle, or by saying "no! I demand he remove old staples from acidified paper, and not any old paper, but specfically from the old paper on loan from the British Museum that's priceless and irreplacable" in which case your fucked unless management steps in.)

[gingicat]

Yes, this. We've had disabled paid interns by way of Jewish Vocational Services, and each one has a case manager who helps our staff design and supervise an appropriate project. You can't do this ad hoc.

[mommy]

Telling the boss's boss should be the first step. A manager from another department is messing with staffing hours by bringing in a volunteer, harassing the staff during their lunch break, and creating unnecessary work for the staff who have to redo the work that was attempted by that volunteer. Sometimes it's fine to escalate the issue up to someone with the authority to correct the problem.

[melannen]

As an occasional supervisor of volunteers, if Martha can not be reasoned with, and he can't be transferred somewhere else in the institution that's better-suited, the next step is to come up with some kind of completely irrelevant, not time-sensitive make-work. Is there an office supplies closet that needs inventoried coincidentally every time he comes in? Is there a file cabinet nobody has looked in for forty years that he can scan every paper in (and it doesn't matter if he does a good job because nobody will ever look at the scans anyway?) Can he make little decorated "Thinking of you!" notes to send to other departments for no reason whatsoever? You said your boss had decided that the assistant's position was what Edward should be doing. Do they still think that? Can they be talked out of it? Maybe Edward can help them with some other kind of completely irrelevant make-work admin task instead.

Coming up with unimportant work for Edward to do should not be your job, of course, and also Edward's OT people should be working on getting him to real work he can do, but if you can't get rid of him or fix the issues, it may be the simplest solution.

[jadelennox]

heh, we basically gave the same response.

[viggorlijah]

They are both much better practical strategies because while it’s nice to imagine you can set boundaries with power, sometimes you have to think of ways to accommodate the awful Marthas while getting stuff done. Connecting with Edward as a person and figuring out what he wants to actually do and can do would help too.