Up to Your Ears in Alligators?
17
by Margaret Puckett
For years I had a magnet I kept on a file cabinet right next to my desk. The message it conveyed was one I found myself referring to on a fairly regular basis. It said “When you are up to your ears in alligators, it’s sometimes hard to remember you were supposed to drain the swamp.” Somewhere along the way the magnet was lost, but the words still echo in my mind.
I accepted my current position at St. Joseph Hospital not knowing a thing about volunteer management in a healthcare facility and facing a projected Joint Commission Accreditation Inspection in six months. The person who had filled the position for more than ten years had departed and was replaced by another individual who had purged the files during her approximately three month tenure. The place had been running on auto-pilot with no coordinator for about two months when I began. Most institutional knowledge was lost and documentation was virtually non-existent. It took me over three months just to figure out who all the volunteers were! Sound familiar? I think most of us have faced similar challenges at one time or another. But one thing the experience did for me was to reaffirm my belief in the importance of documentation.
Now, almost six years later, I finally feel I’ve gotten a pretty good handle on what I am doing. I’ve learned so much and I now have multiple systems in place to help me juggle the many tasks associated with my job. Above all, almost everything is finally organized. It’s comforting to know that whoever follows me will have the benefit of all this knowledge – but will they?
How can we help ensure the continuity and continued success of our volunteer programs? In the U.S. Army we called them S.O.P’s, or Standard Operating Procedures. In healthcare I’ve learned we call them Procedural Journals. Whatever name they go by, their purpose is the same: documentation of not only what we do every day, but also why we do it, and just as importantly how we do it.
“Oh”, you say, “I don’t have time to write all of that stuff down.” Up to your ears in alligators you say? Believe me… I know just what you mean. I have a whole list of proposed procedural journals I haven’t even begun to write yet. But I have found the time to write some, and those have been enormously helpful documents. Taking the time to develop procedural journals yields many benefits beyond just documentation. It helps us focus on just why we do things, evaluating our success or failures and gets us thinking about the possibility that there may be an even better way to accomplish a task. These documents help us to establish standards for what we do, and provide the additional benefit of being great tools for use in training others.
Facing all those alligators everyday is daunting task, but sometimes we all need to stop and remember to expend some effort in trying to drain that swamp.
Margaret Puckett is Volunteer Services Coordinator at Saint Joseph Hospital in Bangor, Maine.
March 18th, 2008 at 6:53 am
Thank you for offering such a fun to read and applicable posting! I believe that everyone can relate to the alligators lurking in many areas of our professional and personal lives.
It seems to me that I get the best view of the swamp when I attend networking events like conferences and retreats with other professionals in the field. For example, this month’s Volunteer Administrators of Midcoast Maine Conference in Bath was a quality event where we all learned from people who had “drained there swamps” so to speak.
March 18th, 2008 at 9:35 am
This post was great! Periodically, I put together such items or revamp them. It is so helpful and inspirational to see what we do here, and remind myself that in many ways it is all going extremely well. Thanks!