Problem: Staffing open shop requires extra training and orientation, and extra responsibility that other volunteer tasks don’t require. Yet, there are no extra incentives to encourage people to volunteer as staffers versus volunteering in any other role. Thus, staffing rates have been hard to manage over the years, with the “status quo” being kind of a constant, desperate state of last-minute soliciting people to sign up to staff each open shop.
My idea about increasing the incentives members have to staff is: having staffing hours count as double, or time and a half, in terms of volunteer hours.
Eg. 4 hours of regular volunteer tasks = 4 hours on your log sheet
4 hours of staffing = 6 hours or 8 hours on your log sheet
I know that historically, Free Ride has maintained a STRICT “one hour = one hour, no matter WHAT you’re doing!” I think this policy is a good when we’re talking about spending an hour of time returning voicemails, doing legal work, or cleaning out a sink versus doing bike-y stuff, but I think that the demands on staffers have increased—meanwhile, we don’t do anything to make staffing any more appealing than other volunteer work. In fact, since general volunteer work can be personalized to your skill set and interests (e.g. working on bikes if you’re into that, sorting and reorganizing if you’re into that, etc.) then it’s even more appealing to earn hours that way, not through staffing.
Thus, I propose that we modify our policy such that ONLY STAFFING HOURS may be considered at a rate of 1.5 to 2 hours for every 1. NO exceptions would be made to this regarding the difficulty of any other work done while volunteering for Free Ride. Staffing only. I think this is reasonable because staffing kind of crosses the line into being a “job” that requires considerable orientation and training, much like the “jobs” we actually pay for, like teaching youth and adult classes and commissioned bike building. Unless we’re willing to pay money for shop staffers (some other collectives do this, some don’t, but regardless this would require a MAJOR shift in the way we currently do business), we should think of something that would incentivize people to want to take on that extra responsibility & training required of staffers. My suggestion is to increase their “rate of (volunteer hour) pay,” but I’m sure there’s other ideas…
