Written by Saul Carliner and reprinted with permission from TIELINE, the
newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, Arlington, VA, U.S.A.

Volunteer Management Tip
Managing a Long-Distance Committee

When you establish a long distance committee for a regional, national, or international organization, try to appoint a geographically diverse committee. Geographic diversity offers the broad perspective needed by a society that represents people in living and working a variety of communities. This diversity affords perspectives on a variety of economic situations, industries, work cultures, and jobs.

But, as you have probably found, a committee that is geographically diverse is also geographically dispersed--and that dispersion presents many management challenges:

• Reaching committee members is difficult.
• Work takes longer than anticipated.
• People don’t always respond to voice and e-mail messages.

The following six tips are intended to help you address these challenges. These tips help you manage expectations, people, and communications to ensure success.

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Tip 1: Set clear goals and communicate them to the entire committee.

As you might have learned on the job and in school, planning is the key to effectiveness at any task, whether the task be developing a sales brochure, planning a new software application, building a house, or managing a committee for a community organization. So begin your committee work with a complete plan. The plan should address:

• One or two key goals for the coming year.
• A list of tasks needed to achieve the goal.
• Responsibilities for completing the tasks, including dates when the responsibilities should be completed.
• A process for regularly communicating with one another.

Plans are especially important for committees whose members are geographically dispersed. Well-articulated goals give everyone a common vision of the intended work product. (Involving the committee in setting specific goals ensures that the vision is truly a common one.) Agreed-upon work plans become firm commitments. (See Planning: The Key to a Successful Year" for a suggested approach to planning.)

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Tip 2: Schedule direct, synchronous communication with committee members.

Under ideal circumstances, you could meet your committee members in person whenever you needed to speak with them. Because it is direct, in-person communication provides essential opportunities to observe body language, hear inflections in voices, and ask followup questions as they emerge.

In-person communication is not possible, however, when committee members are geographically distant from you. The impulse is to rely on alternate means of communication, such as e-mail, fax, and voice mail.

Don’t.

Certainly these other forms of communication are helpful, but only as secondary methods of communication. E-mail, for example, is expedient because people can send and receive it at their own convenience, especially when they have a quick question. But e-mail poses many problems:

• People can easily ignore it. People who are too busy (or otherwise unmotivated) can easily ignore an e-mail message.
• Conversations held by e-mail are often lose their context. If the issue cannot be resolved in one or two exchanges of notes, the e-mail discussion can take several days to resolve and often take several sidetrips from the original subject .
• Discussions of emotional issues on e-mail generally tend to make the situation worse, not better. People tend to say things on e-mail that they would not say in person and, as a result, create tensions that might not otherwise exist.

Voice mail offers little advantage over e-mail. Like e-mail, people can (and do) easily ignore their voice mail. (Some people even use voice mail to screen calls.) Having had left a voice mail message, then, offers no assurance that the receiver acted upon it.

And well-intentioned volunteers who are feeling guilty about not achieving their goals are, unfortunately, likely suspects for avoiding voice mail and e-mail.

The best type of communication is one that does not allow the receiver to avoid it. Direct voice communication, in which both parties are "live" is therefore the best when in-person meetings are not possible. One of the great challenges of managing long distance is the old saying, "out of sight, out of mind." Direct voice communications lets people know that they are neither out of sight nor out of mind. Specifically, direct voice communication offers these advantages:

• Callers can hear immediate reactions to comments, complete with voice inflections.
• Both participants can ask followup questions.
• Both participants can directly ask one another for firm commitments and can find out the status of those commitments.

Most importantly, direct communications provides the opportunity for people to build relationships with one another. Through in-person conversations, the two participants learn not only facts about one another, but how to relate to one another.

Schedule these conversations; don’t call the other party and hope to reach them. 70 percent of business callers fail to reach their intended party on first try. By scheduling the calls, you know that the other party is available to speak.

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Tip 3: Hold regular conference calls with your committee.

As direct communication is essential to cultivating relations with individual comittee members, so it is essential to successful relationships with the entire ommittee. Conference calls provide members with an opportunity to communicate directly in a meeting. Following are some specific tips for managing conference calls.

• Schedule conference calls a minimum of one week in advance, ideally 3-4 weeks. With tighter work schedules, people generally have little available time on short notice (less than 1 week). By scheduling in advance, more committee members will likely be able to participate.
• Send a meeting agenda 2-5 business days before the conference call. As in-person meetings run more smoothly with an agenda, so do conference calls. Sending the agenda in advance serves as a reminder, tells participants how to prepare for the conference call and, most importantly, tells participants that you are taking the meeting seriously. Also, by sending agendas in advance, committee members have sufficient time to add items that they would like to discuss to the agenda.
• Within 2 business days of the conference call, send minutes to the committee. By doing so, you recap the discussion and remind people of their commitments.

For example, the Publications Advisory Committee of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), which sets policies for the STC Publications Program, regularly meets by conference call. Through these meetings, the committee has re-focused the organization's publications program. A related committee, which met exclusively by conference call, recommended the significant changes to the society's magazine and journal.

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Tip 4: Regularly send updates to committee members.

Between conference calls, committee members often benefit from updates on:

• Progress made by other committee members on their projects
• Activities by related committees within the organization
• Information learned as part of the committee’s work

As such information accumulates, share it with the committee.

Committee managers often wonder how frequently to send such messages. The best answer is "whenever needed." Because committee members have other commitments, however, bombarding them with information daily (or worse, more than once a day) might overwhelm them. Generally, limit general communications to committee members to once every 1 to 3 weeks.

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Tip 5: Ask a local affiliate to coordinate a project.

Some projects require a certain amount of in-person coordination and communication to succeed, such as a survey or an event. These projects usually have certain characteristics:

• Well-defined. That is, the purpose of these projects are well-known and the
• Fixed deadline. The deadline for completing the project is known and cannot easily be changed.
• Involves a lot of detailed work.
• Involves more work than can be completed by one volunteer.

The problem is, long-distance committees cannot easily meet for in-person coordination and communication.

To solve this dilemma, ask a local affiliate (chapter) to assume responsibility for the project. Chapters are usually enthusiastic about these projects and appreciate your including them in your work. For example, suppose one of the organization's special interest groups (SIGs) needs to conduct a survey. The SIG manager can ask the manager of a local affiliate to it. As an added benefit, involving the local affiliate makes the members feel more connected to the larger organization.

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Tip 6: Adjust timetables for distance.

Committee work managed long distance often takes more time than efforts coordinated from a single site. At the least, committees need more time to learn how to work long distance and to develop relationships without the benefit of seeing one another. At the most, committee members feel alone and unsupported in their efforts and tend to be more cautious in their work. The extra caution tends to add time to the process.

Regular communication like that just described--directly, by conference call, and through follow-up messages--can certainly promote the smooth running of committee operations.

Similarly, realistic expectations and work schedules can also promote feelings of success. For example, if your work involves reviews of documents by people outside of your committee, you need to leave time for mailing the documents in both directions in addition to time for reviews. This generally adds 2 weeks to a process that already takes about 3 or 4 weeks. (Express mail can deliver overnight but volunteers sometimes take several days to deliver the package to the express mail carrier.)

You might feel that the process should be quicker. It should. But it never is. Those committees that acknowledge this time delay generally achieve their results on schedule. Those that fail to plan for it often take much longer to achieve their goals.

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It’s November and We Seem Off Track

Can we ever get back on track? you might wonder.

Certainly! Schedule a conference call in the next week or two for the committee to regroup. Openly address your concerns and return to tip 1. Develop a new work plan with realistic goals and realistic schedules. Follow up with regular, direct communication (both individual and by conference call) and watch your success.

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(c) Copyright. Saul Carliner. 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002. All rights reserved.