22. Is It the Right Mindset? Why the People Who Won't Serve Are Usually the First to Complain - Asalatu Empowerment - Empowering Members
22. Is It the Right Mindset? Why the People Who Won't Serve Are Usually the First to Complain
Years ago, as an executive officer at the Asalatu, Jack Lookman ran a survey. One document, was sent to members, asking a simple question: how could the service on offer be improved?
The responses were, by his account, exactly what you would hope for. Members criticised constructively. Others criticised less kindly, which is also normal. People had opinions, people had suggestions, and for a few days it must have looked like the organisation was listening to itself properly.
Then came the last question in the survey. Would you be willing to serve?
The overwhelming response was no.
That result is the subject of this piece. Not because it was unusual, but because it is one of the most predictable findings in any membership organisation, church, mosque, charity, club or community association you care to name; and because it exposes something that is uncomfortable about how groups of people decide who does the work. Everyone wants the service improved, but almost nobody wants to improve it themselves.
The survey question that reveals everything
Notice what the survey actually measured. It did not measure satisfaction. It did not measure engagement. It measured whether the people who had just spent time describing what was wrong, were prepared to help fix any of it.
That is a far more revealing question than the usual feedback form. Ask somebody about how the organisation is doing and they will tell you, at length. Ask them whether they will give up four Saturdays a year and the answer changes shape entirely. Feedback is cheap, on the other hand service costs you something.
This is why the finding deserves more than a shrug. It is not evidence that people are bad or ungrateful. It is evidence of a structural gap between consuming an organisation and maintaining it, and a gap most organisations leave unexamined until it becomes a crisis.
There is a particular kind of person this question flatters: the one who always fills in the survey. They care, they read the documents, they notice what is slipping.
They are also, very often, the person with the least capacity to add one more commitment; and the organisation mistakes their engagement with its service for a willingness to deliver it. The gap between those two things is where most volunteer strategies quietly fail.
The 80/20 rule is not a law of nature
Jack poses the question directly: is this a case of the 80/20 rule? In most volunteer organisations, yes. Roughly twenty per cent of the members do the work, and the other eighty per cent benefit from it.
But the 80/20 split is frequently described as though it were gravity, which is an unchangeable fact of group life that simply has to be endured. It is not, rather it is the predictable result of a design decision, or rather of no design at all.
Ask yourself which of these is true of an organisation you know. New members are told what is expected of them, or are they simply welcomed and handed a programme?
There is a clear, short, scheduled task somebody could pick up this month, or is the only route into service an open-ended committee role that sounds exhausting? Somebody asks personally, or does a general appeal go into a group chat where it can be safely ignored?
Where those three questions are answered badly, you get 80/20. When they are answered well, you get something closer to 60/40, which is the difference between an organisation that survives and one that burns out its core.
Why people say no, honestly
Before treating a decline as selfishness, it is worth understanding what people are actually declining. The reasons are usually more reasonable than they look from the committee table.
Time is genuinely scarce, and it is not distributed evenly. The person best placed to serve is often the person with young children, a job, a commute and a parent to care for. The retired member with available hours may be the one who has already served thirty years and is quietly exhausted.
People do not know what serving involves. "We need help" is not a task. It is an invitation to imagine the worst version of one, like an unending commitment with no boundaries and vague expectations, that is ending in resentment. Most people say no, not to the reality but to that imagined version.
And some have served before and been burned. They took on a role, found no support, were criticised for how they did it, and left. They are not unwilling. They are cautious, and their caution is a record of what the organisation taught them last time.
Understanding this, changes what you ask for because it turns "can you serve?" into "could you do this one thing, on this date, for two hours?", which is a very different question and gets a very different answer.
The uncomfortable question about standing
The sharpest line in Jack's reflection is not about recruitment. It is this: if things go wrong, will the passive observers have a right to complain?
It sounds harsh, and it is worth examining rather than dismissing. On one level, of course they have a right to complain. A member is entitled to expect a service they contribute to financially and belong to emotionally, regardless of whether they fold chairs.
But there is a second kind of complaint, and it is a corrosive one, which is the complaint that arrives from somebody who has never attempted the task, and it is delivered with the confidence of somebody who believes they could do it better, and offered without any intention of helping. That complaint is not feedback. It is consumption of the very goodwill that it criticises.
The distinction is worth making explicit in any organisation, not to punish critics but to rebalance a conversation that has gone lopsided. Feedback from people who have done the work is different in kind from feedback from people who have not. Both can be right. Only one comes with an understanding of the constraints.
There is also a version of this that matters even more, that is, if the people who care enough to complain never serve, the people who end up in charge may be neither the most able nor the most committed, but simply those who were willing to sit in the room. Jack puts it as a question which is, could the wrong people end up being in charge? It is not rhetorical, and most organisations can name an instance.
Is voluntary work really free?
Here is where the reflection that gets genuinely interesting. Jack asks whether voluntary work is really free, and whether there are latent benefits to giving, or whether you could end up receiving.
Conventionally, volunteering is framed as sacrifice: time given away, nothing received, moral credit as the only return. That framing is both inaccurate and, practically speaking, a recruitment disaster. Nobody volunteers for a transaction that is all cost.
What volunteers actually receive is real. Skills they could not have built elsewhere, like running a budget, managing a team, speaking publicly, handling a difficult person without losing composure. Reputation, in a community that remembers. Access to people they would never otherwise meet. And the specific satisfaction of watching something you fixed continue to work without you.
The most underrated benefit is the least discussed; which is, volunteering is often the only place in an adult life where effort and outcome are directly connected.
In a job, you may work hard on something that is cancelled by a decision made three levels above you. In a community organisation, if you fix the ticketing system, the queue gets shorter. That is a rare experience and people stay for it once they have felt it.
None of this means service should be sold as self-improvement, which would be its own kind of dishonesty. It means the exchange is not as one-sided as the word "volunteer" implies, and organisations that say so plainly recruit more honestly.
Incentivisation without corruption
Jack asks whether there could be incentivisation. It is a reasonable question that is often answered badly.
Incentives rarely mean money, and they should not start there. Recognition is the cheapest and most effective: naming people specifically, publicly, and for the particular thing that they did. Not "thank you to everyone who helped" - which thanks nobody, but "the schedule only worked because Aisha rebuilt it at short notice on Friday."
Reducing friction is the second. A volunteer who can work in two-hour blocks at a time they choose will outlast one committed to an open-ended role they cannot control. Being explicit about what is not expected is as valuable as being clear about what is.
Investing in the person is the third; like paying for their training, giving them the good equipment, sending them on the course. It signals that the role is worth taking seriously.
Where incentives go wrong is when they become status. Titled positions, precedence, access to the inner circle and those that attract people who want the position rather than the work, and they are extremely hard to dislodge. The moment serving becomes a route to importance, you have created a new problem while solving the old one.
Training and development, not appeals
The most practical suggestion buried in the reflection is proactive training and development. It deserves more attention than it usually gets.
Most organisations handle volunteer recruitment like a charity appeal, they advertise the need, hope for compassion, and then repeat annually. That is asking people to supply a resource they are short of.
Training works the other way around. It says: here is something you will learn, here is a role you will be competent in, and by the end you will be genuinely useful.
It also solves the confidence problem. A large share of the people who say no, do so because they are quietly certain they would do it badly. A short training session converts that fear into capability, and capability is what converts a reluctant member into a reliable one.
The sequence matters; you train first, ask second. Asking somebody to take on an unfamiliar role and promising training later is how you recruit people who will resign within four months.
Passing the buck, or picking it up
The final question is the one that stays with you. If members are active, could we get better results; or should we live with the mentality of passing the buck and letting others do the lifting?
Passing the buck is comfortable because it is invisible. Nobody announces that they have decided not to help. It simply accumulates, one unreturned message at a time, until a small group is doing everything and calling it normal, and then leaves, and the organisation discovers the true cost of all that free labour at once.
The counter-move is not guilt. Guilt produces a burst of volunteering that is followed by rapid withdrawal, and it poisons the atmosphere in between. The counter-move is specificity, like small tasks, short durations, clear expectations, personal invitations, and genuine recognition.
A thirty-day test for any organisation
If this resonates, here is a way to test it without a strategy document.
In the next thirty days, do four things. Name one task that could be done by a new person in under three hours, and make it concrete, this is not a role, but a task.
Ask three specific people personally, by name, rather than announcing it to everyone. Publicly thank the person who did the least visible job, with the detail of what they did. And record how many people said yes.
That last number is your baseline. Most organisations have never measured it, which is why they believe the problem is people rather than design.
The mindset worth choosing
The question in the title is not really about the eighty per cent who declined. It is about what a community decides to be. A group that treats service as somebody else's job becomes a small committee and a large audience, and eventually a large audience wondering why the committee stopped.
A group that makes serving small, specific, trained and recognised, finds that people will do more than anyone expected. Not because they are better people, but because they were asked properly, and given something they could actually do.
The survey result was not a verdict on the membership. It was a verdict on the invitation.
Ps. Artificial intelligence was leveraged in creating this content.
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