Some SSAFA paid staff may wish to volunteer alongside their paid role. While SSAFA does not want to discourage this, it is important that in order to distance the volunteering from the paid work, the volunteer role should be substantially different to the paid role.
Differences between the paid and unpaid roles will help to avoid confusion in the organisation about the person’s role. Such boundaries should be clear to ensure there is no pressure to deal with issues from the paid work while volunteering.
Appendixes to this document give some specific guidance for roles, where the boundaries are particularly important.
General Principles
In principle, the following should apply:
- Any application to volunteer by a member of staff should follow the usual volunteer recruitment processes, including an interview.
- The recruiting manager should check with HR to ensure the vetting check is in date. Further references will not be required.
- It is not permitted that anyone volunteers in the same role as they are a member of staff.
- If the volunteer role reports to themselves in their paid role, this line management must be transferred to someone else.
- If a role is subject to quality checks, and this would usually be conducted by themselves in their paid role, then this task must be transferred to someone else.
- Individuals should volunteer in another branch / area / service wherever possible.
- All volunteers will have a volunteer Assemble / SAVI profile. Assemble profiles must not use the volunteers Office 365 Account.
- All volunteering activity should be conducted outside of normal working hours.
- Any complaints will be dealt with in line with the staff policy.
Volunteering Days
SSAFA also offer staff 2 volunteering days per year that individuals may wish to utilise for any volunteering opportunity. Volunteering days should be agreed with Line Manager in advance and booked via the employee self-service system.
Appendix A - Regional Casework Coordinators who also volunteer as a caseworker
This guidance sets out some safeguards for Regional Office Casework Coordinators - RCC (staff) who also volunteer as caseworkers in trial areas.
SSAFA want to make volunteering accessible, meaningful, manageable, and mutually beneficial. To ensure clarity and distinction between paid and volunteer roles, the following safeguards aim to ensure that all involved are clear which role they are carrying out and that there are no conflicts of interest.
- Volunteering as a caseworker should not be used as a mechanism to address case backlogs.
- Volunteers should be recruited in line with volunteer recruitment processes, be interviewed and a check with HR to ensure the vetting check is in date. Further references will not be required.
- All volunteers will have a volunteer Assemble profile.
- All volunteering activity should be conducted outside of normal working hours.
- Expenses for volunteering activity will be reimbursed in line with volunteer expenses processes.
- Volunteers should engage with support and supervision in line with the requirements for all caseworkers.
- Volunteering activity will be line managed by the Regional Casework Manager (RCM)
- Volunteers will not be able to self-allocate cases in their paid RCC role to carry out in their volunteer capacity, this will be done by the RCM or RCC in line with usual practice.
- Volunteers will not almonise their own cases in their paid RCC role.
- All such cases will be quality checked by another RCC or by the RCM.
- Any complaints will be dealt with in line with the staff policy.