Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Assigning jobs / work

[Chapel, Thomas (tkc4]

At Lake Claire Cohousing, we early on went through a process of defining all 
the necessary tasks to maintain the community on a monthly basis and assigned 
an hour estimate for each task.  These group into landscaping, 
cooking/cleaning, and the whole range of other tasks like cleaning common 
house, sidewalks etc.  We also give modest credit for officers to do their 
jobs.   Then, once we agreed on the list and hour allotment, we determined that 
each adult needed to put in 12 hours per month to keep things going.  We post a 
sign up sheet each month and people sign up for jobs.  MOst are first-come, 
first-served, but a few have devolved to the same individual for so long, that 
they are permanently assigned.  This system works well in that most every job 
is signed up for. Works less well when you consider if the job gets done or 
not.  In addition, on periodic basis (sporadic basis), we host work days where 
the whole community gathers to take on larger cleaning or building tasks.  In 
theory these alternate among our committees--common house tasks, landscaping 
tasks, hardscaping, etc.
 
Tom Chapel

        -----Original Message----- 
        From: Dale Grover [mailto:dgrover [at] redcedar.com] 
        Sent: Thu 4/1/2004 2:22 PM 
        To: cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org 
        Cc: 
        Subject: [C-L]_ Assigning jobs / work
        
        

        When assigning jobs to community members, what process do you use?
        
        (If this has already been discussed to death, just a pointer to the
        thread would be great.  I didn't see any discussion in the past year
        or two, though.)
        
        At Great Oak (recently completed, Ann Arbor Michigan), we have all
        the job descriptions posted, have everyone take a survey (web-based)
        indicating their preference for each job on a scale of -2 to +2, and
        then we try to assign the jobs so the least-happy person will be as
        happy as possible.  Our first try was in February, and no jobs went
        to a person whose preference was less than neutral (0) for that job,
        though cleaning jobs were, for some unknown reason, not as popular as
        the "techie" jobs (webmaster, data and phone maintenance, etc.).
        Currently the assignment is made manually, but we're looking at
        trying to do most of the assignments automatically, since many of our
        jobs will change seasonally and it takes a long time to do by hand.
        
        --Dale
        
        _________________________________________________________________
        Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at:
        http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L
        
        
        

_________________________________________________________________
Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at: 
http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L