Volunteer Management is Talent Management!
03:14, 5 December 2007
.. Posted in Volunteerism and Volunteer Management.. Link
The November 16, 2007 edition of the Bersin Associates WhatWorks Talent Management blog has some really interesting points that volunteer managers need to read. In addition to its brief discussion of the values and career goals of different generations -- the Millenia (20s), Generation X (30s & 40s), Baby-Boomers (50s) and Silent Generation (60s+) -- there's also a discussion of the need to build internal social network systems within organizations. Such a system would be more than an internal directory of employees -- it also should provide profiles of employees that encourage cross-department collaboration, including identifying people for projects and new roles and allowing people to collaborate to solve discipline and function-specific problems (e.g. technical support, project development, customer service, public relations, etc.). It also offers some suggestions for platforms for such a system. But what's really interesting to me about this blog entry is that it applies to volunteer management as well. Volunteer managers should see themselves as talent managers, they need to be concerned with and respond to these generational differences among volunteers and staff, and they need to be thinking about a way to create an internal social network for their volunteers, for all the same reasons!
