The Volunteer Ceiling: When Your Best Volunteers Can't Become Staff

This episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, hosted by Todd Rhoades, addresses the challenges of hiring long-serving volunteers onto church staff. It highlights the often problematic transition from volunteer to paid staff and offers guidance on how to navigate these situations with wisdom and care.• Volunteers and staff roles operate under different expectations, accountability, and skills requirements.• Faithful volunteers may not always possess the competence required for staff positions.• It's important not to mistake volunteer excellence for staff competence.• The transition from volunteer to staff can create awkward hiring situations.• Hiring should be based on fit and competence rather than loyalty and faithfulness alone.• Consider part-time or project-based roles as intermediate steps before full employment.• Have honest conversations, discussing both the merits and potential pitfalls of moving from volunteer to staff.• Acknowledge the risks of affecting team health and dynamics with a poor hire.• Leaders must be willing to have difficult conversations to protect team integrity.

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Transcript

Why Volunteer Excellence Can Mislead<br>

Pressure To Hire The Obvious Choice<br>

Safer Pathways Into Paid Roles<br>

The Hard Fit Conversation Script<br>

Protect Team Health And Standards<br>

Bottom Line And Leadership Cost

SPEAKER_00 0:08

You're staring at a resume from your most faithful volunteer. This person has been Stella. They've served for eight years. They've never missed a Sunday. Everybody loves them. And deep down that they're not the right heart. But how do you say no to somebody who's been giving everything? Sound familiar? We're going to talk about that today here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. My name is Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffing.com. Hope you'll check us out at chemistrystaffing.com. Today we're going to be talking about the volunteer ceiling reality. Volunteers, and you know this, they operate in just a different, it's almost like a different universe than paid staff do. There's different expectations, there's definitely different accountability, there's different skill requirements. Volunteer excellence doesn't automatically equal staff competence. And really great volunteers can be, honestly, really horrible paid staff members. There may be some of you listening to this that can say, I can account to that and I can give you an amen on that. This creates probably one of the most awkward highlight hiring situations that you'll face. So here's what goes wrong. You hire based on heart instead of fit. You confuse faithfulness with competency. You assume that they understand the staff role because they've been around volunteering. You underestimate the learning curve from volunteer to employee, and the church just expects you to take care of them. Now listen, their faithful service matters. That's not the question. The question is whether faithful service equals effective employment. And many times it just doesn't. So how do you recenter this? How do you work through this if you've got kind of some pressure? Okay, and this happens from time to time. When you've got something, a volunteer is just hitting it out of the park, or you've got an opening on your staff in this area, and people are coming to you and they're just thinking, this is the obvious choice. And sometimes you've got a volunteer that's been bucket for to be paid to come on staff because this is a whole other topic for another podcast. But a lot of people think the coolest job of the world would be to work at a church. What better job is there in the world? And a lot of times it's great. Other times it's not nearly as glamorous as people think it is. But so how do you kind of recenter from this? Let me give you some ideas here. Okay. First of all, create clear volunteer to staff pathways with some really honest assessment. Separate that hiring conversation from the appreciation conversation, right? Those are two different beasts, right? The hiring conversation and the appreciation conversation. And you really just need to name the difference. Being an amazing volunteer requires a really different skill set than being a staff member. Here's another idea. Consider maybe a part-time or a project-based, almost like a contractor type of a role first. This kind of gives them a little bit more, it moves them from a volunteer role to a paid role. And you're going to see how they make that transition in a lot less risky way. Right? Part-time or project-based roles give you an opportunity to do that. And before you hire anybody, I always recommend, matter of fact, I not just with volunteers. I think this is a great practice for when you're hiring somebody anyway. Almost try and talk them out of it. Have the why this might not work conversation right at the very front end. That will allow you to be an open book about the risks of moving this person from a volunteer to a staff position. You need to honor their service while protecting your team's health. Here's the conversation that nobody wants to have. It goes something like this Your heart for ministry is incredible. And that's exactly why we need to be honest about fit. Staff roles require skills that we haven't developed volunteers to develop. And we want to set you up for success, not frustration. That might be a hard conversation to have for somebody that's that you really would love to have on your team and somebody that would really love to be on your team. But it's an honest conversation, and you need to have those types of discussions because hiring a volunteer, even a home run volunteer, I'm telling you, I've seen it over and over, things change when people get paid, things change when there's a paycheck, things change when people come on staff. It's sometimes they lose their excitement, sometimes they lose their passion, sometimes they just don't operate as well as a staff person as they did as a volunteer. Your staff, your current staff, your current paid staff is watching how you handle these types of situations. And they need to know that you hire based on competence, not just loyalty. Bad hires, even good people, will hurt everybody. All right, so here's your bottom line for today. When it comes to the potentiality of hiring volunteers on your team, you can honor faithful service and make wise hiring decisions, but only if you're willing to have the hard conversations and not just look at the good things that can happen, but also have those conversations about how things might go awry. All right, that's it for today. Leading well sometimes means disappointing good people for the sake of the whole team. And that's, let me tell you, that's not mean, that's just wise. All right, thanks so much for listening. We'll be right back here tomorrow on the Healthy Church Death Podcast. I hope you'll join me.