Shaping Volunteer-Friendly Organizations in Hungary

Abstract

Volunteering has gained much publicity as a feasible solution to emerging financing problems in public health care, social care, education, and in the cultural sector. Human resource management in the civil/nonprofit and public institutions that employ both paid staff and volunteers is a special field with a number of new challenges.
In the current paper volunteering is discussed from a multidisciplinary perspective that may help in understanding both the opportunities and the challenges involved. After outlining the changing global context, authors focus on existing Hungarian traditions on volunteering. In both contexts, budgetary restrictions force the organizations to seek costeffective alternatives to maintain previous standards of their services. How do these changes promote shaping a volunteer friendly organizational culture (Allen, 2006) and a volunteer friendly society? Management techniques and approaches that help build such an environment are discussed in details.
Authors provide a substantial survey on the international literature and complement these with several findings from national and regional studies. Presently, the majority of the civil/nonprofit organizations are aware of the many possible advantages of  employing volunteers, such as active citizenship, building social solidarity and trust, promoting personal development and offering a remedy for burnout, extending community based learning and providing a rich resource of motivations for the entire organization. Still, volunteering is most often interpreted as a way to employ “free workforce”.
Studies on volunteer management have shown that the idea of “invest to save” holds for volunteering as well: serious deficiencies in management usually cost more to these organizations than the amount they wished to “save” by neglecting management needs. Authors argue that professional human resource management is a priority in this field; and leaders and paid staff should be prepared to work effectively with volunteers. Social professionals’ expertise supplemented with specific trainings could serve this purpose well.