Managing Volunteers Can Lead to a ‘Healthy’ Bottom Line

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Hospital administrators, and directors of other health care facilities, are taking a cue from personnel management theories taught in business schools. They’re finding that by effectively managing volunteers in their facilities, they can maintain many of the creature comforts their patients appreciate without becoming awash in red ink.

While the strength of any hospital or health care facility is its medical personnel, many of these facilities, faced with rising costs, have had to cut back on comfort services that made hospital stays a bit more pleasant for patients in years past. Administrators are now trying to make up for these paid-staff losses by seeking out dedicated volunteers to handle everything from non-emergency patient intake to food services, running the gift shop, taking patients to and from radiology, doing back-office clerical work, and even bringing a patient an extra blanket or a newspaper. Crucial to making a volunteer effort like this successful is keeping volunteers happy, and that means effective human-resource management.

Traditional, hospital-based volunteer programs have been run by a paid coordinator. More and more, however, administrators are calling on their business school-trained HR directors to give these coordinators of volunteers valuable pointers on how to make the volunteer program run smoothly and professionally. For instance, volunteers have to sign in and out, report on schedule, and can’t leave before their shift is over.

HR directors are acutely aware that the facility must have an assigned job for the volunteers as soon as they come in. There’s nothing that annoys volunteers more than standing around waiting for something to do when they show up at their appointed time.

Why is a structure like this so important? Many of today’s volunteers are retirees from the business world, and they don’t want to waste their time participating in a poorly run program.

Establishing the volunteer component as a structured program makes volunteers realize that they’re very much needed, that people are counting on them to be there on a regular basis, and that their volunteer commitment has to be honored. It’s better not to have a program like this at all than to offer a poorly run service that isn’t benefiting the patients and isn’t responding to the needs of the volunteers.

And, of course, every volunteer coordinator should realize that it is important to make sure the volunteers know how much they’re appreciated–how much their time and service are valued. A volunteer recognition program, like those used by HR directors to recognize exceptional work done by paid employees, is a great way to reenergize volunteers who otherwise might feel as if their efforts were being taken for granted.

Health care facility administrators see an added bonus in recruiting and retaining a dedicated corps of volunteers: This effort can put their health care facility in the forefront of patient care and lead to some excellent publicity opportunities. Volunteers gain special recognition in local newspapers; the health care facility is touted as a leader in human-resource management–it’s a real win-win scenario.

Working with volunteers and managing them properly is a serious and growing component in the health care industry today. That’s why business school-trained HR directors are being put in charge of overseeing these volunteer initiatives. What better way to show your people skills than to develop a volunteer program that offers superior patient comfort services, provided by a well-trained and well-managed corps of volunteers? Even better, you can parlay that into gaining recognition for your facility as a leader in patient services, while still maintaining a healthy bottom line.