Yes - Legal logs their hours because that's a legal-tax-etc requirement (they are donating hours to a nonprofit); there is no other formal logging of time/activities. There is not, afaik, even informal-casual records, although that may not be true across all committees.
Changing that is going to be a real hurdle, because if there were an easy, simple, non-intrusive way to track the work being done (whether or not we tracked who was doing what), we'd be using it, because yes, it really would be useful to know how many hours are needed in each committee, what counts as a busy vs slow month, and so on.
One of the (many) problems with implementing time-tracking is that a lot of people do their work as a little bit here, a little bit there. Sometimes it's "I've been spending all weekend looking at the tag wrangulator" or "what do you mean it's 3am? I'm not done editing this Fanlore page and I need to fix six categories now." And sometimes it's "I'm on a 10-minute break at work so I will go check for double-redirects and fix one." (Or fix none, because there aren't any... do we count that time?)
It's not impossible and we really do need to figure out the logistics, but it'll mean a big shift for some committees, and there'll be fallout and very likely some resignations - some because they don't want extra admin hassles, and some likely because of accessibility, because there is no such thing as a perfect tool or system that isn't a barrier for anyone. So with all that in mind... I can see why nobody's pushed for time-tracking so far. It's hard to be the one saying "Let's add MORE BUREAUCRACY and make some of the work LESS FUN and also DRIVE AWAY SOME PEOPLE and I promise that, in two years once we're all used to the new system, it will be better!"
(We kinda need it. But wow I do understand why that hasn't been anyone's high-priority agenda.)
All of these questions about time tracking could and should be resolved in a half hour meeting, and that's allowing fifteen minutes for participants to chitchat. None of the details you describe are unique or even unusual, and there are many off-the-shelf solutions that could be adopted at little to no dollar cost.
I'm doubtful about that. I don't disagree in theory, but I also don't know of anything that would work. Among the needed features: - Cross-platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile - No monthly cost per user (with nearly a thousand volunteers, the OTW cannot afford even a nominal per-user cost. This might be avoidable by self-hosting, which the OTW can afford.) - Accessibility features - text-to-speech, adjustable windows sizes, etc. - Unlimited projects/keywords (or close enough to unlimited; 300 might work; 50 won't be enough) - Easy learning curve, including for EAL speakers - Ideally, multiple language settings - Easy to integrate into piecemeal, occasional work - No data-gathering besides login & time on project(s) (might be covered by self-hosting)
I don't doubt that it's possible, but googling and looking at various "best time tracking apps" lists doesn't bring any one or small group of them that jump out as, "THIS is the one with the features we'd need." All of them, of course, are designed for businesses with a payroll and projects that are supposed to bring in income. (In some cases, that's a bonus - the payroll-integration features sometimes cost more.) The open source ones look better than the cloud-service ones, but they come with the additional complexity that the OTW would have to install & maintain the software. I have no idea which ones choke if you clock in and out fifteen times in an hour instead of doing multi-hour stretches like they expect for employees. No idea which ones allow projects as keywords instead of long dropdown lists. No idea which have clunky interfaces where it's easy to hit the wrong thing. No idea which allow the user to edit time instead of having to contact a "manager" to say "I accidentally left this running overnight." None of those details are on the feature lists.
...I've spent more than half an hour looking at time-tracking software with this window open, have mostly established that I'd need a few hours building a spreadsheet with a feature list to even get a list of "these are the 10 we should actually research; these others definitely won't work," and I have professional experience researching business software. Not everyone on the board does (or will), and that means either a complex presentation of "these are the potentials and why" - or it means "trust me, I'm an expert," but we'd like to avoid that being the basis of more Board decisions.
I agree this is a fixable problem; I think "this could be covered in a half-hour meeting and half of that is discussion" is an extreme exaggeration. Especially since none of the software options come with any discussion of "how many people will quit if we require this?" or "how do we convince people to actually use this as intended, and not just lie about it because that's easier than wading through the project menus?"
I repeat: I think this is doable. I just don't think it's a matter of "Just grab something, install it, and start using it; if it doesn't work for us, we'll just switch to something else." And that's what a short meeting with a decision would mean.
I think a lot of the administrative problems are like this - countless businesses have faced similar issues, and resolved them effectively, and the OTW just needs to grab & adapt one of those solutions. But every one of them needs to be recognized, analyzed, have solutions researched, results adapted for the OTW (not because "the OTW is so weird that nothing could possibly work out of the box" but 900+ person all-volunteer all-online orgs are rare, so almost none of any pre-set solutions fit without alterations), and then implemented, which includes "and then communicated to all the affected volunteers."
I'm not trying to say "it's all hard so it's justified that it hasn't been done." I'm saying I understand why a lot of the problems have been shoved aside for so long, because nobody wants to be The Ogre who pesters everyone to clock in and out for "I wrangled tags for six minutes on my lunch break." (I have been The Ogre who pushed for accuracy in fan projects. It's not fun; it cost me friends; I don't want to be in that position again.)
I quit as a tag wrangler very early in the history of AO3, and one of the reasons, frankly, was that I was exhausted with the perfect being made the enemy of the good. "There's no perfect solution, so we'll do nothing." And lo and behold, AO3 and OTW are still doing this now. You just said it yourself, "countless businesses have faced similar issues, and resolved them effectively." Does the all-volunteer nature of the OTW make it unusual? Sure, but just about every nonprofit is unusual in some way. Not everything has to be invented out of whole cloth every time.
Every state in the US has a council or nonprofits or other similar organization that provides technical assistance for best practice in governance and often tricky little things like time tracking. The NY Council of Nonprofits seems to be the one where OTW is registered. (They're doing a webinar on volunteer engagement and retention next month.)
I've done telework, volunteer, and irregular work hours before. For one volunteer place, we just had to enter our hours in an Excel spreadsheet to take a shift. Other work experiences had other solutions. It's not too difficult, especially if the goal is a rough estimate of data to help get a general idea of who does what for how long. We don't have to be down-to-the-minute accurate because OTW isn't paying people hourly. Time tracking wouldn't be used for payroll but for diagnosis of the overwork problem so the org can do triage from an informed position.
Thank you for this info; it's great to know there are resources out there waiting ti be used should OTW ask. T The martyr lone wolf DIY style of running things only exhausts people tbh
Or cut most of the complexity by only enforcing a weekly or biweekly form: let the volunteers choose how they track their hours, and just have them enter their totals.
Trust them to be accurate! The org doesn't need to know every time stamp when vol123 checks their email or vol567 spends a few minutes wrangling, just the total time spent; frankly, that level of granularity would be invasive & lend itself to abusive & controlling behaviour from other volunteers.
I appreciate that you're being thorough, Elf. But, Jesus, this is the kind of exhausting learned helplessness that gets brought out every time the Org is faced with making a simple change. You don't actually have to plan out a basic administrative function like you're going to war.
Here is a solution that is compatible with all devices, covers all use cases, and costs zero dollars: a form with one question, "How many hours did you work for the OTW this week? Round to the nearest hour."
If you want to get fancy, you can add a second question! "What committee(s) did you do work for this week?"
Weeks in which you don't submit hours are assumed to be zero hours. The people who have access to your personal records are nobody, this is not a disciplinary tool, it does not record the identity of the person submitting work hours.
Does socializing in Slack while you research something count as work? Yes, that obviously counts as work, if we were running payroll you would be paid for that time. Do a hundred other examples of what people do for the OTW count as work? We're going to assume that everyone working for the OTW is an adult capable of basic judgment and let them decide that for themselves, but the rule of thumb is "If you're wondering if it's work, it's work." The people who over-estimate and the people who under-estimate will balance each other out, and if they don't, it's not a big deal.
There. That is a workable solution. It is not the only solution the OTW could adopt, but it does have the virtue of taking less time to implement than it took me to type this comment describing it. If it turns out to be inadequate, which it probably will, the OTW can iterate on it, a process that, again, is not that hard and does not take that long, which is the point of an iterative approach.
Now, for the observers, imagine this discussion every single time any organizational change whatsoever is suggested, but five hundred other people also need to have THEIR say. You will understand more about why the OTW is what it is.
I was thinking of an app for privacy and to compile data; something like a google form would work. Someone would have to clean up the incoming data (some people would typo an extra zero or two into their answers, etc.) and sort it. All fixable, just takes someone whose job it is to deal with it, and someone else would have to remind people to send in hours.
I agree that the main issue with time tracking is "the Board must decide that the org should track hours"; the rest is logistics. And they are not big logistics issues; I was only pushing back on the idea they could be resolved in a short meeting. I have no idea if I've considered accessibility or other issues that might require a different approach.
(And yes: observers, this is pretty much how decision making works on the inside--and this is a simple topic that isn't fraught with complex personal history or fandom community dynamics. Multiply this by every topic you've ever thought, "The OTW should just...")
A big part of the value of hiring an HR/administrative person would be that they could say "we're doing X; this change starts in two weeks; address questions to Person Y over here who understands the thing." There are a swarm of administrative functions where nobody is in agreement on whether we need this change or not - we all know we need changes; nobody is sure which ones would fix problems and which would just add hassles. (...Some people are probably sure. Those people are not "a working majority of the Board," and there is no current way to get that knowledge to the Board, and that is one of the things that needs fixing.)
The current Board is two people. If two people cannot sort out something less complicated than a pizza order between them, they have no business being on the Board.
Hi, I just wanted to say I've really appreciated your input on this stuff, it's been really interesting to read. I get the feeling some people want OTW to be both small and casual and a perfectly organized business depending on the situation, and I feel like that's where a lot of the pushback to what you're saying is coming from. I do get their annoyance, it's always annoying to remember how much buocracy exists, but such is life
I would like to point out that my original suggestion for tracking time was not so that the OTW could pay its volunteers hourly or keep ultra-detailed records of when someone logged in for 5 minutes to do work. I think reframing the purpose of time tracking would resolve a lot of your concerns. If they were tracking time to PAY people, then of course yes, they would need a highly accurate record of timekeeping to assure any hourly employees were paid fairly. But they're not. I proposed time tracking as a way to get more information about the actual work required to run the org by volunteers. This lets you know which volunteers and committees spend 40+ hours a week and which people spend like 5 hours. Where to delegate more resources. How to accurately describe workload to incoming people. How to describe the job requirements and hours of the paid positions they plan to eventually implement. Part of researching for paid staff SHOULD include time tracking imo. And just for example, if volunteers are handling sensitive material, like on the PAC committee, maybe their workable hours dealing with tickets should be capped to help their mental health -- but we need to know what to cap it to. We just don't know even a rough estimate of the average volunteer work being done. To me this is baffling and untenable, and leaves a big opening to further volunteer mistreatment and exploitation.
So anyway. The point of time tracking as I suggested was to get a rough estimate of who does what where for how long, which is information to then use to accomplish other things and identify problem areas. Precision isn't the goal at this stage.
Hi. You want Clockify. It does 70% of what you cover in this comment and the other 30% is useless problem-inventing bullshit. This took me less than 30 seconds of searching. Hope this helps.
And yes, this is absolutely emblematic of the ongoing organizational dysfunction OTW is mired in. You know what happens if it turns out you spend 30 minutes setting up a demo instance of the first time tracking system that comes up when you Google "free nonprofit volunteer time tracker" and nobody uses it or it doesn't give useful data or it turns out there are crucial features it's lacking or more than a few volunteers can't use it or whatever? You evaluate how many people can't use it, see what percentage of your volunteers can't or won't, and if it's ten people you have them send you a spreadsheet weekly and if it's a hundred people you move on to the second time tracking system that comes up when you Google "free nonprofit volunteer time tracker". Because making a single decision to demo a system and see whether it will get you to within a 10% margin of error on such a basic thing as "figuring out how much work it takes to run your organization" does not lock you into defending that decision forever and ever, amen. It is okay to do trials and see if they work or not. The OTW's apparent need for every single one of its decisions to serve as a floor wax and a dessert topping is pathological.
I agree this is a fixable problem; I think "this could be covered in a half-hour meeting and half of that is discussion" is an extreme exaggeration. Especially since none of the software options come with any discussion of "how many people will quit if we require this?" or "how do we convince people to actually use this as intended, and not just lie about it because that's easier than wading through the project menus?"
I repeat: I think this is doable. I just don't think it's a matter of "Just grab something, install it, and start using it; if it doesn't work for us, we'll just switch to something else." And that's what a short meeting with a decision would mean.
I would like to gently suggest to anyone whose thinking aligns with this to reevaluate how much they trust their colleagues and seriously consider what leadership looks like within the organization.
In a healthy, high-trust environment, you can trial solutions and switch when something doesn't work, because individuals feel empowered to express when something's not working for them, and organizational leaders are able to delegate platform selection and feedback gathering to interested/motivated individuals.
In an unhealthy, low-trust environment, you get stuff like this: the immediate jump to the idea that people will quit when asked to spend 5 minutes on an administrative task intended to help the organization scale, and the immediate jump to the assumption that people will lie about time spent.
These problems are best solved with a combination of subject matter expertise and collaboration. There is just no need for this level of control and mistrust.
Thank you oml. It feels like people on the inside are so used to the dysfunction/inaction that they don't realize how bizarre certain statements sound. As for how to convince people to abide by a self-reporting time tracking system, transparency about the goals and methods would help. "We need to track volunteer time to get data on how to make your lives easier; help us help you. We welcome your feedback as we may need to trial different methods of time tracking to meet different volunteer needs; report any feedback to X. In about X months we should have the data we need and you can expect to see results as we make changes based on it." That's clumsy but it at least starts from a place of collaboration with volunteers and lays out clear expectations
My paid employment, which requires every employee to track different aspects of their work for HR reasons, work allocation reasons, and prevention of employee burn out reasons, literally does not bother to get this granular.
Literally it is a self-report of how many hours per week did you spend on X aspect of your work, across the various aspects of work, anonymised for management's analysis purposes. For an organisation with tens of thousands of employees working on many many seperate yet interlinked projects, across different sites.
A google form or a per-committee self-report shared excel sheet might even be a workable start. And if it's not enough, then reassess and improve the method. There's no need to get it perfect on the first try! (there are also no shortage of transferrable admin experiences from others, whether by consulting other non-profit's admin, or asking what tools they might use for this.)
I really was only objecting to "this could be done in a half-hour meeting."
There are solutions. Figuring out which ones would definitely not be effective, would take at least a bit of discussion, and possibly some research.
(Is a self-reported excel sheet still useful if 1/3 of the people involved forget to add their hours about half the time? How about if a notable percentage are just guessing, and some of their guesses are wildly inaccurate? If it's not working and you switch methods, how many people will resign because "fuck it; this was my fun place and now it's acting like a damn job?" Do we need to plan for extra recruitment in advance or can we just wait for the fallout to settle?)
Again: Definitely solvable. But I don't agree that "this is a problem so let's start testing solutions at random" is the right approach.
If any of those things turn out to be real problems, you can assess the situation then and adapt to the reality. Demanding that you must have full solutions for all of them ahead of time, in advance of any data whatsoever, is just making up reasons not to proceed.
I'm not catastrophizing. I'm not saying "people would quit and therefore we must not do this," or we must delay this, or we need to investigate every possible way to reduce the hassle effect. I'm just noting, there will be a hassle effect, and it's very likely some people will quit over it.
It's not "quitting in a huff." (Well, there probably would be some quitting-in-a-huff, because this is fandom and wow can we do huffs. But I'm not talking about those.) But we have a lot of, "I'm volunteering because this is my Happy Fun Work; the tasks I take on because I love fandom and I want to be part of building something good - but if the volunteering stresses me out and makes my life worse then I need to walk away from it, even if that makes me sad."
And adding bureaucracy to the existing jobs is probably doing to do that for some people. Probably not a lot. But I don't know if there's some committees where that'd be a third of the people involved, who are already stretched thin and have no spoons to deal with new responsibilities.
...There are always people on the edge of burnout. It's pretty much certain that any org-wide change in process is going to be someone's tipping point. And that's not a reason not to do the change, but it does mean checking with committee leads first to say, "hey, is this going to cause real stress for your crew, and if so, how can we mitigate that?" (Which is not, "then okay maybe we won't do it." And is not, "get back to us in 6 months and we'll see about moving forward." This is, "would detailed instructions make it less stressful? Or would they like the four-bullet-point overview instead?")
Adding basic admin tasks would eventually just be folded into the standard workflow, and also would hopefully FIX some of the current burnout problems. But the transition period would be rough on some people, and I don't want changes approached with an attitude of "anyone who can't handle this SIMPLE THING can GTFO."
It's not going to be simple for some people. It may be that they have to leave, for their own mental health, or because they literally cannot do the thing, for whatever reason. It may be that they need accommodations or support of some sort. Planning for org-wide changes should include the awareness that it's going to be disruptive, and some time & energy needs to be budgeted to help people deal with the disruptions.
If 1/3 of the people forgot to add their hours reliably you still have data from the 2/3 who did, and now know roughly how much strain 2/3 of your volunteer workforce is under. That is more collated information than you had before. If it is enough to be useful for discussion on further change, good, if not, iterate the process further and figure out how to improve things.
Similar for if the data isn't entirely accurate. Data collection does not need to be perfect on the first round - there is no perfect data collection. There is only more and less accurate data collection, and the conclusions or understandings drawn from it.
... volunteering for the OTW is volunteer work, not volunteer fun, as you and various others have pointed out before. And given the firehose of information now available on what it's like to actually volunteer work inside the OTW... if it was my job, I'd quit. Immediately. Money isn't worth this level of trouble. Fortunately for the OTW, it seems no few people believe the OTW and what it does is worth the trouble. (no few fans, readers, writers, or other members of the OTW or international public at large also agree, hence donations and volunteers and so on)
Denise in particular has already given you a very succinct suggestion on something you - or rather, the OTW - might want to try as a solution to the collective 'we have no info on how heavy the load is, where the pain points burning people out are, or how many more people we need in what specialty or skill' problem. You yourself have stated, up front, that it would be a good thing for the OTW as a whole to have better information about those issues.
Perhaps instead of arguing that an imperfect solution is worse than none, work on what an imperfect solution gives to improve what can be done step by step. In the manner of the OTW and the imperfect but slowly improving solution of the AO3 to fandom's needs.
When I was in grad school, we had to track our TA job hours; the work varied from "10 minutes to answer an email" to "Welp time to mark 80+ exams." There were a number of quick & simple solutions for this, including phone apps.. ten years ago.
If your comment is representative of the attitudes inside the org, no wonder I hear about so much volunteer burnout. :/ Work-life balance - or in this case, volunteer-life balance - is important, and part of that is knowing how much time (general) you spend on related activities.
Comment on Resignation of OTW Directors
Elf (Elf_Herself) Sat 29 Jul 2023 12:50AM UTC
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