Alternativas para el desarrollo de la gestión

One volunteer gave positive feedback about what the SAs did for communication and knowledge within the organisation, they:

“heighten the organisation; Trustees have more of a clue what’s going on in the operations stage of it, you know about the volunteers by the nature of having to carry out the surveys you know what kind of a cross section of people are volunteering. Rather than just the volunteers that happen to be there when you swim, or if you only take your children in for lessons but

don’t go swimming yourself, then you will only see a certain selection of people. Also some Trustees are early morning swimmers so you’re not going to see the volunteers because it’s very rare that you have volunteers in first thing in the morning. So actually I think it heightens - and people are more aware of what other parts of the organisation are doing. And also by reading the SAs, people at the operations end of it are more aware of what the Trustees feel, what the customers feel” (V1).

Another useful thing from SAing for a volunteer:

“I’ve found it very useful to read through the accounts and see why people are volunteering, why the Trustees are still involved, what they want to get out of volunteering” (V1)

The Project Manager found SA to have useful outcomes:

“It’s another way of proving how we’ve done here because in the past if people had said ‘How well are you doing?’ I would have said ‘Well we’ve met our target’ I would go down what I call ‘the hard route’ looking at those figures because I’ve always done that really….it’s given us a different area where we can look at what we’ve done for people and what we’ve done for other issues too. I would say your annual report is for your industry and your SA is for your people because they would probably understand that a bit better” (PM).

The Project Manager thinks there have been changes as a result of SA:

“it’s certainly changed the way the staff see things and probably the Trustees and probably how the public see things now because we’re now starting to gather information on what else we do, ‘the soft things’ I call them. I think what we’ve done now – we’ve had to set up a few systems whereby we’re

logging information now, in the past I would show the staff, so I’m keeping the evidence of stuff like that. We’ve got our informal comments book where we just note down things that people say to people, if someone says something we’ve got our own comments book, we’ve always had, so we take information from that. I think staff are probably generally a bit more aware of the social affect of what we’re doing” (PM).

“I’m sure it has because I think it’s made some of these decisions more explicit than they would’ve been otherwise and I think it’s been useful in giving a bit of focus for the work of the project sometimes. I’ve been party to, for example, the communications group, discussing the SAs and they did

discuss the SAs and looked at what was the implications of the SAs for the work of that group and that was probably a useful discussion because it was like a stimulus for that group to think about itself and its work. I think that other people – for example, the personnel group, I know they do it as well. But I think there was evidence that it was useful in getting different people to consider matters and make decisions and move on. So I think it definitely changed things” (T).

This point also demonstrates that SAing was starting to be embedded across the organisation, within the finance sub group SAs had become a standing agenda item with time being spent on issues arising and future plans.

One Volunteer did not believe that SAs had changed JSP as much as it might do with other organizations:

“the way it (JSP) was set up to serve the community, has always been very socially aware, so possibly the impact of SAing hasn’t been as major as maybe for businesses who aren’t community-based businesses, SAing might have more of an impact. I think we’ve always been quite socially aware, but at the same time I totally agree with you, I think there’s always opportunities to be even more aware and to act on it and whilst we might’ve been aware of situations, this has caused you to act” (V1).

Yet it was recognised that SA was important to JSP as a way of gathering evidence to support a need for bike racks:

“one of the reasons you get the money to do the bike racks is because you have evidence to say that it’s needed. I think SAing is very important, rather than saying ‘I think it would be nice if we had it because I’m sure loads of people would use it’ you actually have evidence to say people want this, look at all the surveys, look at the people who have said ‘We can’t get parked.’ We have a social and moral obligation to do this, so we would like the money. And I think it gives you more support when you go to bid for money” (V1).

Actual examples of where customers and local community had changed their view of JSP through the SA process were difficult to find, although the Project Manager said:

“I don’t think they’d probably notice. We’ve always supported local events we’ve always done that from day one so we haven’t suddenly started doing more because we’re doing SAs. We’ve just done exactly the same so I don’t think they would see a great deal of difference which is quite good. One example might be the fact that the Board meetings have always been open to anyone to come to. Nobody ever comes and still nobody ever comes and you could take that as people don’t want to come or they couldn’t come, or they’re happy with things. And I think if they’re happy with stuff they let things go along so I take that as not a worry, I think it’s a positive sign if people don’t come along because they don’t need to come along. So I think from the public’s point of view, they probably won’t see any change at all, which isn’t a bad thing” (PM).

The process of SAing changed the Project Manager’s approach to always putting the economic at the front of decision making:

“yes I’ve probably been happier putting stuff on cheaper recently…but to have activities going ahead and always to have some activities that don’t

make money or don’t cover the costs…I was probably very very cautious of pound signs than people signs to get the money coming through…I think I can look at it and say ‘Right that activity now’s actually good for us as a business to do, good for us to be involved with’” (PM).

The Trustee does not see SA as changing the way the organisation is run but that the SA made other things more explicit

“it has helped the Project Manager make a number of these things more explicit...an example being the work with other groups and the consultancy type work, it was highlighted in the SAs as a good thing, so I think it almost legitimised that sort of work that he was doing as a clearly accepted…there were some useful discussions there about the Trustees saying ‘Look we actually encourage you to do this, we think it’s a good thing, we think it’s partly your job’ which must’ve helped him a bit” (T).

“It probably is because to me ‘accounts’ is money, yes. I know the first time you mentioned it, which is probably a few years ago, I asked at home and they said ‘Oh that’ll be all the money. So I don’t know, you’ll have to come up with something else you could do something like ‘what’s happening at the pool’ and that would maybe make people have a look…it’s ridiculous isn’t it when you think, it’s just the heading that’s probably going to put people off” (S).

A volunteer was clear that the name SAs should not be included as a heading on the report suggesting:

“not using ‘SAs’ have a strap line and then put ‘SAs’ underneath it” (V1). The Trustee agreed and thought SAs should be:

“the subtitle but think of some sort of title for what we’re going to be doing in the coming year or whatever and the annual reports have names, straplines and so on. If we really crystallise what we’re about into a few words then it could start being used as a strapline and then feed into future SAs” (T).

6.4.2.1 Wider circulation for the final SA document

To overcome the issue of not many people reading or engaging with the actual final document, suggestions were made by the two volunteers. These were:

“a copy lying around in the staff room or in the office behind the desk, then when people have got two minutes, people tend to pick up and read what’s there. Yes, particularly volunteers as they don’t have other things they can be getting on with.”

Also to include the final report as part of the volunteer induction:

“if you gave them a copy of the SAs, or just the whole AGM pack, when they first applied then they’d have the chance to read through it. They’re quite enthusiastic when they first apply so possibly it would work” (V2).

This point was also reiterated by the member of staff:

“when they come in to start with they’re dead keen so they would read this, they would think ‘Right we need to see what’s going on’” (S).

“having a pdf file to download on the front of the website59 and putting:

” (T)

“a copy in Reception in a nice folder - I think people coming out of lessons would pick it up and have a flick through and people who have copies on the tables on poolside so when they’re watching their children swim they could pick it up and have a flick through and maybe put summary pages as well” (V1)

or

“even with bullet points just so that if they’re picking it up for two minutes, they’ve got a quick glimpse of what we do and what it’s about” (V2).

6.4.2.2 Social accounts as a worthwhile experience for JSP

The staff member was asked to comment on whether they found the final report of the SAs a useful document:

“I do, yes. I think something like that would be good for the volunteers to read when they come in because they get a good idea of what goes on from that, because probably a lot of them just think it’s a case of, we do a bit swimming, the gym’s there but they don’t know what goes on other than that. So I think it would be good for them to read that and see that there are things going on behind the scenes as well” (S).

The production of the interim SA was perceived as easier by the Project Manager who saw it as:

“the first one seemed to be an awful lot of work, for you and I and a couple of staff there was a lot of work to do and we spent many hours going through stuff. We didn’t this time, there was nothing like that the second time around but I think we’ve learned a lot from that first one” (PM).

The interim report was shorter with no audit panel process included.

The Project Manager viewed the SAs as a worthwhile experience:

“it is worth doing it. I could now look at an organisation and say whether it’s worth them doing a SA, depending on their structure and their culture” (PM). He sees this as depending on the extent of the values of the organisation:

“Yes. I can only go by my experience on leisure, going back, some local authority sports centres you go in, absolute waste of time because they don’t give a toss about the customers, otherwise you would think they would do it, that would be good and I think the leisure centres going down the Trust status route now should be doing this” (PM).