"Free Help" Court Ordered Community Service

Just like donated merchandise, nothing is really free.

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

This post is mainly for to my not-for-profit friends. For a deeper narrative about the legal details click this link. The specifics of the mechanics vary greatly between courts.

It’s been my experience that the people that bash these programs don’t work in stores day to day. They hear when something goes wrong, but don’t understand how many things go right. 

People in these programs aren’t actually volunteers and shouldn’t be called that. Doing so diminishes true volunteers that contribute because they choose to actively support the cause. For that reason, I prefer they be called something else, community service participant seems to depict their role. Participant for short. 

It isn’t about diminishing participants, it’s about recognizing the essential difference in why they are there. 

I have found community service participants to run a similar spectrum as employees. Totally in it, to those that would rather sneak a smoke or stare at their cell phone.

I once had a bank VP that had 500 hours of service to do over a year. Yes, DUI. He chose one of our facilities that was far from his home and work to avoid meeting anyone he knew. That was fine with us. 

He was a skilled person used to leadership roles. He took his service seriously and showed up to get stuff done. Over the months he learned every job that didn’t involve cash handling. He became an informal leader of the community service corps. It became easy to forget he wasn’t a paid employee. 

He burnt up two weeks of vacation working full-time to knock out enough hours. I think he worked 60 hours each of those weeks. He was one of very few that I eventually trusted to even price wares. 

True, he was an outlier, they do show up from time to time. 

The other end of the outlier spectrum shoved one of our teen employees. It was some stupid disagreement on where something should be placed in the back room. There was no excuse. Thankfully we got it on videotape. 

As bad as that was, I have had employees get into fights at work. Dumping an entire program because of that one-off when thousands and thousands of service hours had a good result does not make sense to me. Using the same logic, we would stop hiring employees. 

Most participants fall somewhere in between. So they must be managed not unlike employees.

A key difference between participants and volunteers is how they are managed. If a volunteer steps away to chat on the phone with a friend for half an hour, well, that’s OK. If a participant does the same, they are not fulfilling the requirements of working their assigned hours. There is a quid pro quo with participants. 

There are several parts to making a community service program work: 

1. Have main contact with the courts, make them your friend, and communicate with them regularly. If the contact changes, re-engage with the new person. Understand what they want and if there are differences in how they want to interact. 

2. Be proactive in building and maintaining this relationship. Your appointed contact should also be in charge of record keeping even if several staff members can check people in and out. 

3. There are enough components to this type of program that it’s a great development responsibility for an assistant manager.

4. Be clear about who you will and will not take. For me, no violence or theft is key. 

5. Document, document, document. You don’t want to miss hours worked and you never want to credit hours not worked. Be accurate. Have a process that works well with court requirements. There is no honor system in recording hours worked.

6. Don’t tolerate any s*&t. Progressive discipline isn’t needed here. It can be one strike and they are out. Be sure you are on the same page on how with court services. The guy that shoved an employee had been troublesome and should have already been sent on his way. 

7. Don’t make their problems your problems. If they show up on the last day before court needing 15 hours, well, that’s their issue. 

8. Do a basic orientation with every participant. Safety, reporting, expectations.

9. Limit the number of participants that can work at any one time. They can become a negative net with too many to keep track of. 

10. Treat everyone with respect, and thank and appreciate them for their contributions. 

11. Some stores require signing up for times to ensure a more level flow of people. Others let them come in whenever but will turn some away if there are too many. Just be consistent. 

12. Require a minimum number of hours worked per shift, I prefer 4. Depending on store hours that can be tough for some, so a bit of flexibility may be in order. If someone shows up for an hour of work, by the time they are signed in, assigned their task, and get to work they are about ready to be checked out. That’s more disruptive than helpful.

13. Have a minimum number of service hours they have to have to work. I have seen as few as 4 hours, that’s the basic orientation and getting familiar with what is where in the store. That few just don’t add value. 

14. Those with a lot of hours to work off can sometimes be given higher-skilled jobs than those working off 20 hours or so. 

Participants can have a great positive impact on store operations when their role is defined and there are good guardrails around the process. When the occasional bad apple shows up, get rid of them. When the golden one shows up, give them higher-level stuff to do. 

A few things community service participants can do that add value:

1. Spotless Bathrooms.

2. Floors cleaned and swept regularly. 

3. Empty hangers sorted and hung.

4. Display racks, chrome, and shelves should be spotless.

5. Lobby doors, and glass cleaned.

6. Trash emptied regularly.

7. Trash cleaned up around the outside of the store, shrubs grass, and so on.

8. Displays faced forward.

9. Color rotations current.

10. Textiles sized and even colorized.

11. First sort of donations.

12. Clean hard good donations being prepped for the sales floor.

13. Assist the donation attendant.

14. The list goes on and on.

These things free up paid staff to do higher-level work. More production, customer service, better displays, and so on. 

Some math:

Let’s assume an average of 10 hours per day, 6 days a week, about 240 hours per month. If paid employees cost $15 per hour you have about $3,600~ in labor value. (over $40,000 per year) Getting a good return on that labor comes down to managing.

Tim Gebauer

Thrift Retailer - Dedicated to the business of thrift retail.

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