Helps employees and volunteers work together successfully by exploring the reasons for conflict between volunteers and employees. Scheier eases the all-too-common stresses of this relationship with a step-by-step process for analyzing tasks and work preferences for both paid and unpaid staff. Offers a great number of creative and practical solutions. Contains lots of useful planning guides.

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Excerpted from "Satisfy Staff First"
How can we expect staff to carve out meaningful roles for volunteers when staff doesn't even adequately understand their own role?

Yes, most employees have a formal job description. But often what a person actively does is far from identical to the job description as written. At the specific, concrete level, what one does daily is more or other than what may have been articulated at the beginning. Not incidentally, the same is true for volunteer job descriptions. They're neat, comforting to our sense of orderliness, and often substantially mythical in detailed practice.

Once we've absorbed the need to go beyond job descriptions to actual descriptions of the job, we're ready to face a seeming paradox: you can't develop clear and meaningful volunteer jobs without first analyzing in detail what staff are doing and how they feel about it. Similarly, to involve members more meaningfully you must first scrutinize very carefully what elected officers or other group leaders are doing.

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