If you run a small or emerging charity, there’s a good chance supervision looks something like this: an occasional catch-up, squeezed in between everything else, that only really happens when something has gone wrong.
It’s understandable. Most charity founders didn’t set up their organisation because they wanted to become HR experts. They did it because they cared about a cause. However, supervision, as a regular, structured one-to-one time with your staff and volunteers, is one of the simplest and most protective things you can put in place, and it doesn’t need to be complicated, formal, or intimidating to work.
The problem with ad hoc supervision
When supervision only happens as a reactive “121 chat,” a few things tend to go wrong:
Small issues become big issues: A minor frustration that could have been raised and resolved in five minutes festers because there was never a natural moment to mention it.
Nothing is recorded: If a concern about performance, wellbeing, or conduct ever needs to be evidenced later, there’s no paper trail which is a real risk for you as an employer as well as for the person you’re supervising.
It feels like a telling-off: If supervision only appears when there’s a problem, people start to dread it or avoid raising things themselves, because they associate the conversation with criticism.
You lose sight of the good stuff: Without a regular structure, you rarely get the chance to properly notice and reinforce what’s going well.
The fix isn’t complicated. It’s simply committing to regular, light-touch, structured supervision before there’s a problem, not after. A structured conversation every four to six weeks makes a lot of sense.
Why we recommend using a ‘happiness score’
There are lots of supervision formats out there, but the one we come back to again and again with small and emerging charities is a ‘happiness score’. Check out the link to a template form at the end of this post.
The idea is simple. For each area of someone’s work, you ask them to score how happy they are, out of ten. Then you dig into why. We like this approach for a few reasons:
It’s positively framed: You’re not asking “what’s wrong?” you’re asking “how happy are you?” That small shift in language changes the whole tone of the conversation. It invites people to talk about what’s working just as much as what isn’t.
It keeps the conversation focused: You can go through the headings fairly briskly, capturing a score for each one, and then circle back to explore the reasons behind the scores. A typical session takes around 45 minutes: enough time to properly explore what’s happening, without it sprawling into an open-ended meeting.
It surfaces things naturally: People often find it easier to say “that’s a 6” than to volunteer a problem out of nowhere. The number becomes a way in a low-stakes prompt that opens up a much more honest conversation than “is everything okay?” ever does.
It creates a record over time: Because you’re using the same headings and the same scoring system every time, you build up a picture. You can see patterns. A score that’s been quietly dropping for three sessions in a row is worth noticing, even if no single conversation flagged it as urgent.
How it works in practice
The structure we recommend has two halves.
Standard questions: covering the basics of working life:
Self admin (time management, flexi, leave, sickness or other absence, paperwork and filing, reports, and so on)
* Working conditions both physical (desk, screen, chair) and emotional (feeling cared for, knowing what’s acceptable and what isn’t, and being confident they’re not being bullied or harassed)
* Professional development
* Teamwork
* Organisational values
Role-specific questions: tied to that person’s key objectives usually three or four, drawn directly from their role description or from the relevant headings in your team or organisational business plan.
For each heading, you ask for a score out of ten, note it down, and move to the next. Once you’ve got all the scores, you go back through and ask “why did you score it that way?” exploring what’s driving the good scores as well as what might bring the lower ones up. Ask questions like, “what are the challenges in keeping that score up?” or “what do you think is bringing that score down?” Actions get captured alongside the notes, so nothing gets lost, and you’ve got a clear record to refer back to next time.
Our recommendation on the notes section is that you keep it very simple, short and to the point. When you have drafted the notes share them with your supervisee, to check they are happy that the conversation is reflected accurately, before saving them as a final version. Read on for a couple of happiness score supervision examples.
Riverside Green – a local environmental charity
Priya coordinates a small team delivering a river restoration project, including one part-time member of staff and a rotating group of volunteers. At her monthly supervision with her manager, her ‘working conditions’ score dropped from an 8 to a 5. When asked why, she explained that recent heavy rain had left the site access muddy and unsafe, and she’d been improvising with wellies from home rather than raising it as an issue, assuming it wasn’t worth mentioning.
Because the drop was flagged early rather than emerging as a complaint months later, her manager was able to action a small budget for proper site equipment within the week. On the role-specific objective ‘volunteer recruitment for the riverbank planting phase’, Priya scored an 8, and talking it through revealed she’d found a genuinely effective new way of reaching people through a local allotment association. That hadn’t been part of the original outreach plan so the insight got fed straight back into the wider organisational strategy.
Nothing about this conversation was dramatic. The session took around forty-five minutes, but it prevented a safety issue from continuing unspoken, and it surfaced a piece of good practice that might otherwise have stayed known only to Priya.
Sunshine Holiday Club – a primary-aged holiday activity programme run largely by volunteers
Dan volunteers as a session leader for a holiday club that relies on around a dozen volunteers each half-term. In his supervision, ‘teamwork’ scored a 4 which is lower than his usual score. Gently exploring why revealed that two newer volunteers had been unsure of their roles during a recent busy session, leading to some confusion in front of the children, and Dan had felt he had to firefight without really having the authority to direct others.
This wasn’t something Dan would have raised unprompted; he didn’t want to seem like he was complaining about people who were giving up their time for free. But because the happiness score gave him a low-stakes way in, the charity’s coordinator was able to put a simple fix in place a one-page ‘who does what’ role card for each session before the next half-term, rather than waiting for it to cause a bigger problem or for a volunteer to quietly stop coming back.
On the role-specific objective ‘supporting children’s confidence in outdoor activities,’ Dan scored a 9, and the conversation that followed let the coordinator capture a couple of activity ideas that were working particularly well, ready to fold into training notes for future volunteers. Again, the whole conversation took around forty-five minutes enough time to properly explore the scores without it becoming a burden on anyone’s day.
Making the role-specific section work for you
The role-specific section is where this really earns its keep, because it’s the part that’s tailored to the individual and to your organisation’s strategy not a generic HR template. If someone’s role objectives include, say, growing a volunteer programme, delivering a specific project, hitting particular outreach targets, or supporting a regular activity as a volunteer, those become your role-specific headings. It keeps supervision connected to what actually matters for that person’s job, rather than being a purely generic wellbeing check-in.
A simple habit with a big return
None of this requires HR qualifications or elaborate systems. It requires a recurring diary slot, a simple form, and the discipline to ask the same honest questions regularly before there’s a crisis, not after one.
If you’re currently running supervision ad hoc, or only when things go wrong, our suggestion is simple: pick a rhythm (monthly works well for most small teams), use a happiness score format, and start now while things are going fine. That’s exactly when the habit is easiest to build, and exactly when it does the most good.
Freelance charity management consultancy 