I'd Rather Go Bowling - Notes From The Organization - Part III

Ok, so the latest I heard is that there are now already several DJ's and bar-people who refuse to work for The Organization because of what they believe to be unfair and unworkable conditions. I sympathize and I agree with them completely. Of course you should not become a volunteer for the money or the beer, but what is happening now is the reverse: the failings of upper management are being paid for by the volunteers.

The new rules are mostly and quite squarely aimed at the cafe-activities, not so much at the band- or party-nights. What's much worse is that some people in The Organization believe this cafe cost reduction to be the magic bullet. Now I don't see how people can miss this but they do; even if/when the cafe-activities would run like clockwork and be extremely efficient and cost effective it still would not be enough to solve the insolvency of The Organization by far. In the 'good old days'(I'm talking 5 years ago here) the cafe only contributed a little bit to the total revenue of The Organization. What it did do was give people a chance to learn how to organize activities, which every now and then were moved to the main hall and turned into a big partynight. The cafe as the incubation room of The Organization. Every time such a new party was born it made a hell of a lot of money. Through the years this was how The Organization managed to put up decent parties without spending a truck load of money on outsiders. Nowadays the general and incorrect concensus is that the cafe has to be cost effective in itself.

I had several talks about this yesterday. Of course it is now easy for me to give advice, after all; I am now only a bar-man / DJ. Hearing several people, what struck me as odd is that the reality of the situation(change upper management's way of doing business before anything can be improved) is still not clear to everyone.

For example : who said that the price of a drink cannot go up? Ever? The price of a drink has not gone up in over 4 years while cost has been soaring. Increase the price by 5 percent(which basically comes down to a dime per beer) and you immediately make an estimated  8.000 to 10.000  euros a year more. It's a start. Then use that money to build a smoking room in The Organization which will then make much more money than it does now. I estimate that the total cost of the smoking room would be earned back within three to four months.

Of course this would mean an active role for the board... Oh well, one can dream...

I'd Rather Go Bowling - Notes From The Organization - Part II

Well well well... just as I thought. The Organization(as I will call it from now on) is going to economize by squeezing the last drop of motivation from the volunteers. All rules, no rights, current regulations suspended or plain cancelled, compensation for hours worked cut in half, etcetera etcetera.

We did this before and ultimately decided that the volunteers should not be the ones to suffer from a bad economy or bad management. But I guess they are re-inventing the wheel again.
     
It will all be in vain. Nothing can stop The Organization from hemmoraging money except for a good solution for the smoking ban, better internal management and especially; some really well attended concerts and parties.

Don't save money, MAKE money!

And in the meantime I keep wondering how much the board members get from the local government for the fantastic job they are doing...

I'd Rather Go Bowling - Notes From The Organization

Communication Is The Only Way
              
I work in the cafe of a concerthall every now and then. This is strictly volunteer work but it's fun; DJ-ing and taking care of the bar and all that. Until last week I was also the cafe-coordinator; someone the people could call if they really didn't know where else to go for advice. By and by over the last years this coordinatorship had turned into an almost full managerial job.
                 
The problem with the organization that I worked in/with however, is the almost complete lack of knowledge when it comes to efficient internal communications on the one hand, and the total lack of discipline when maintaining any rule of good communications that they are handed on a silver platter. For the record : I gladly exclude the one or two people in the organization who have actually read a book about the subject in their life, but in general these people do not even know how to write proper minutes.
                                   
Of course you may now think 'Is that all? You can run a organization without minutes and all those things'. Yes, but the lack of communicational and organizational skills is much worse than it looks. Because this organisation is run by volunteers who do not see each other too often, who have day jobs, etcetera, communication must keep flowing like water, using all means available such as email, internal forums or down-to-earth meetings and minutes.

Trust But Verify
                                         
What compounds the problem is that there is supposed to be a - completely new - management, or rather a 'board of directors' monitoring it all. Unfortunately the members of said board can be defined as 'people you never see in the building'. Some time after the government take over of the organization - say about a year ago - this board appointed a managing director to take care of the internal organization. Suffice it to say that - although I am not fainting in admiration at the man's skills - I can see that his job is impossible to do with the current people running around and taking care of things. This is a failure by the board to lead, to organize and then to step back. Ronald Reagan's famous words come to mind : "Trust But Verify".


Have A Smoke And A Smile
                                              
Unfortunately the situation is getting worse and worse now that the government is cracking down on smoking in public places. The organization has had almost two years to come up with a solution but didn't do crap all. So now that the local government(the owners of the building) have demanded a ban on smoking in the whole building, the organization does not have a single alternative. There have been proposals coming from the work floor but they have all been deemed 'too expensive'. We'll have to wait and see if that is still the case when the turnover will drop and drop and drop over the next couple of months. I have seen no official figures so I can make an estimate without violating any trust given to me; I think total revenues have gone down more then 50 %. Frankly; I think the whole place is definitely doomed if they don't come up with a solution in the next month or so. After all; coming up with a plan is one thing, executing it in a timely fashion is something else altogether.
                               
The 'smoking-problem' is a perfect example of the structural problem in the organization: You can see the problem coming, you ignore it for as long as possible, and ultimately you have not even made a financial reservation to be able to come up with a solution. Don't even look at what the competition(e.g. the professional bars and cafe's) do. Don't even take into consideration that most of them still condone smoking until the fines get too high, because they fear that otherwise they will go bankrupt. And don't even look at what it is going to cost you to be more catholic than the Pope.

One Vision
                                       
There is one other major problem and that is the complete lack of vision by the board members and the complete lack of information that flows from the board to the volunteers. Basically, the volunteers can go and play in their little sandbox like Linus Van Pelt, but they should not come out under any circumstances. I could indeed quote StarTrek : 'Resistance Is Futile'.
                                     
When compared to the situation as it was until a few years ago, the first thing that went out the windows under the new local government management was the input and the responsibility of the volunteers for what goes on at a higher level in the organization. This is of course lethal for the initiatives and the ambitions of exactly those volunteers who can really make a difference if they would be allowed to.
                                
If the current board would have formulated a proper policy for the next three to five years this situation would be something that(almost) everyone could live with. In the current 'I Amp Volunteer So Ai Know Nothink' culture that pervades the organization, no volunteer knows anything about anything except where to report to work in the cleanup crew or what time to show up for their 9 hour bar-shift.

                          
Breakdown

So it took another year but last week it was there; that moment when you are so fed up with a situation that you just can't seem to improve, that you basically just stop trying and give up.
                          
In the course of trying to get things working better, a communications breakdown occurred again last week when all the volunteers were invited for a meeting. First of all the communication was severely misdirected. People who no longer work for the organisation received email-invitations while others who still work their asses off did not receive one at all. The email-notice for said meeting was two days. The meeting had been planned while the cafe in the building was supposed to be open, etcetera. Oh! And it was also planned on Mothers' Day at four in the afternoon...

After complaining about this(I admit; loudly) via an email I was told by the person who wrote the actual email that he wrote it on the orders of someone else and he did not feel like discussing the contents of the email. Actually, he used other words as in 'not needing any conversation about this shit' but I'll try to stay polite on my blog.
                   
It was the straw that broke the camel's back so I quit as the cafe-coordinator. I do not stand for these kind of responses, especially when it is so crystal clear that something is being handled wrong. And this sort of thing has happened with alarming frequency for quite some time now.
                  
                    
If people don't want to listen then I'm going to let them do it their way. Because I'd rather go bowling.