If you have internet access, you’ve seen the hubbub over independent contractors. Reading about it all made me think about another big exposure lurking: heavy use of volunteers.
We know nonprofit organization rely heavily on volunteers, but startups often follow suit: companies like Reddit use volunteers heavily, even relying on them for managing the most important parts of the site. Every startup also has its share of interns, all rarely if ever paid. The thing with free labor, however, is it can still come with a cost. One of the biggest risks: "mutant volunteers," or volunteers who later morph into an employee or who operate under the guise of being a volunteer but actually handle full-time level work. I’ll talk about why this is a problem and how to help manage it below.
What’s the Worst that Can Happen?
Think your volunteers love you too much to stir the pot? Look at a few recent complaints and lawsuits, like the debacle at Conde Nast where unpaid interns claimed to be employees or Major League Baseball volunteers who claimed the same.
Worst case, the losing end of a complaint could come with back salary, back benefit and back tax payments. Worse yet, these would be costs for which you had not accounted for, and may demand changing your total budget for the year, impacting future growth or product development strategies. Even in the best case, you are guaranteed a PR nightmare. Best of luck on that recruiting campaign going forward.
It’s All In the Treatment
Similar to independent contractors, typical mistakes are misclassifying a volunteer or treating volunteers like employees.
An example of misclassifying volunteers might be marking a role as "volunteer work” when it really isn’t. Channeling my inner Yoda, that one calls a position “volunteer” does not make it so. What you ask volunteers to do, how you recruit them and how you treat them determines whether a role is “volunteer” or more of an employment situation. A big red flag is where volunteers do work similar to staff you pay to do the same work in similar conditions.
Which leads into my second point:
Giving volunteers business cards, titles, personal work stations, personal email-addresses, salary, and perks could each (or as a whole) appear to create an employment relationship. These things involve a lot of control and appear more long term and contractual than ad hoc and voluntary. This is why it’s so important to be careful with volunteers who've been with the organization for a while. Those are the ones most susceptible to “mutating."
What to Do, What to Do
Monitoring is the key. Double check volunteer recruiting and management to see if anything could create an expectation of employment. If your recruiting program consists of a Facebook post and promise of Chipotle then you might consider something a tad more formal. Nothing complicated, just enough to help with monitoring.
A few things to think about with volunteer recruitment and management are:
Clear volunteer contracts and waiver forms. Constant reminders of what the role is and expectations will be important.
Be careful with payments. These could be looked at as a salary. Typically, experts suggest limiting volunteer payments to reimbursement under a strict policy. This is really important for exempt organizations because a salary might snatch a volunteer out of the "volunteer category," making a lot of the laws protecting organizations from volunteer liability inapplicable.
Put volunteer management systems in place to monitor working hours, scope, types of projects, and more. Before you ask, no -- a sign in sheet is not the same. You want someone watching to help stop or mitigate “mutation."
Train volunteers. The responsibility shouldn’t rest solely on the organization. Volunteers should be made aware of what to avoid, what to look for, what their capacity is and what their capacity isn’t.
If you plan to use volunteers for unique roles, or heavily, do yourself a favor and run this by a labor attorney. You might also run your volunteer program by them every couple of years regardless of how you plan to use volunteers to make sure you're in line with federal and local laws.