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.
Comment on Resignation of OTW Directors
stormyseasons Sun 30 Jul 2023 07:11AM UTC
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Elf (Elf_Herself) Sun 30 Jul 2023 03:29PM UTC
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azarias Sun 30 Jul 2023 05:51PM UTC
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(Previous comment deleted.)
Elf (Elf_Herself) Mon 31 Jul 2023 06:31AM UTC
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switchwitchbitch Mon 31 Jul 2023 12:20PM UTC
Last Edited Mon 31 Jul 2023 01:48PM UTC
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stormyseasons Mon 31 Jul 2023 12:51PM UTC
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