06/26/2017

Managing Volunteers: An Overlooked Skill

There is an art to properly managing volunteers and their expectations

At this year’s Council of Science Editors (CSE) Annual Meeting, I moderated a session about managing volunteers. This is something that I’ve been giving a lot of thought to and have written a bit about before.

Many publication managers manage volunteer editors and their boards. For my team at ASCE, the challenge of having 36 journals is having 36 editorial boards to manage. I didn’t really have a sense of what that meant until we pulled the numbers and found that at any given moment, we have between 750-850 editors, associate editors, section editors and guest editors working on the journals. That’s a lot of people!

Across ASCE, there are an additional 12,000-15,000 people working on committees. Many of these people volunteer for more than one committee. Recently, I participated in planning and facilitating a training session for staff about managing volunteers. In the preparation, we found that no two departments seem to have the same basic set of processes about managing the ASCE committees. Given the overlap of individuals volunteering, it is really in our best interest to have some continuity between staff and volunteer interactions.

Please click here to read the complete article on The Scholarly Kitchen.