Prioritizing People and Tasks in Animal Welfare: A Balancing Act

Animal welfare is not for the faint of heart. Each day presents new challenges that require us to pivot and get creative in our approach. But in the midst of responding to the fresh chaos of the day, where do the daily tasks fall? Running a small to medium-sized animal shelter with a small staff and a limited budget comes with many challenges. However, the foremost priority is always the wellbeing of my team—both staff and volunteers. The old adage, “Put your oxygen mask on first,” serves as a daily reminder to my team, but ensuring they have the support and resources to make that a reality is an ongoing challenge. It’s essential to take the time to address it.

In recent months, despite the considerable accomplishments of my staff each day, they began to feel increasingly frustrated by the tasks they couldn’t get to. The constant deluge of calls, emails, voicemails, and questions from our volunteers can be overwhelming. Our priority is always the animals and people in front of us, which often leaves frustrated callers and emailers without an immediate response. This, in turn, leads to multiple follow-up messages, compounding the problem. (We’ve had callers leaving voicemails and sending emails multiple times within the same day, despite our outgoing message asking for 24-48 hours for a response!)

On the other side, our volunteers have expressed their own frustrations. Some are frustrated by their lack of access to information about the shelter pets, while others feel that the staff isn’t addressing what they see as priority tasks. Conversations with volunteers in various roles revealed that they weren’t fully aware of the overwhelming number of responsibilities the staff handles each day.

Interestingly, our volunteers also expressed a desire to take on more responsibilities to support the staff. This prompted us to reflect as a team: Why don’t we delegate more responsibilities to our volunteers, such as returning phone calls, data entry, and some of the more time-consuming daily tasks? What tasks could volunteers realistically take on?

To tackle these questions, we conducted an exercise with our staff to visualize our priorities more clearly. This exercise helped the team distinguish between high-priority and low-priority tasks and identify those that truly require staff attention versus those that could be assigned to volunteers. It also provided a platform for staff to share their frustrations about feeling overwhelmed by the many directions they’re pulled each day and to finally accept that they can delegate some tasks to trained volunteers.

In a few weeks, we plan to follow up this exercise with a Town Hall meeting that includes our staff, volunteers, fosters, and board members. During this meeting, we’ll repeat the prioritization exercise with the entire team. The event will include a potluck (because who can get feisty with a full belly?) where we’ll break into small groups—each comprising staff, volunteer task forces for dogs, cats, and small animals, and board members—to revisit the priorities exercise and see what insights emerge.

Our hope is that by visualizing the scope of each staff member’s daily responsibilities, our volunteers will gain a clearer understanding of why staff priorities may differ from their own. We also hope to establish a task force dedicated to creating training materials for volunteers, enabling them to take on some of the more time-consuming tasks and lighten the load for our staff.

In animal welfare, balancing priorities is an ongoing challenge, but by fostering communication, collaboration, and mutual understanding, we can ensure that both our team and the animals in our care thrive.