Blog
Keep It Short
Years ago I required my volunteers to attend monthly training meetings on Sunday nights.
This worked well, but eventually less and less people attended the Sunday night training meetings.
If I am doing something that is having less success than it used to have, it may be a signal that I need to change.
One thing that has changed is that volunteers do not have as much free time as they used to have.
I don’t want to throw untrained people in a room, so I had to figure out a shorter more efficient way to train people.
I found the answer at a business seminar.
I overheard a conversation where a colleague was talking about the Ten Minute Huddle.
I asked her “What is the Ten Minute Huddle”?
The Ten Minute Huddle is an opportunity for all employees to meet for ten minutes before the doors open to discuss what is happening that day. I did the quick math. Ten minutes of training for three weeks equals 30 minutes of training. The best part is that my volunteers do not need to come back to church for an extra meeting.
The Ten Minute Huddle transformed our KidMin.
Volunteers started looked forward to the Ten-Minute Huddles because they knew they were going to be short meetings and it gave them time to connect with each other before ministering to the kids.
Many people have a false idea that if it’s spiritual it needs to be long but that is not necessary the truth.
We have all sat through long boring sermons that didn’t do anything for us. Some preachers forget that the scriptures say, “Blessed are the short winded for they shall be heard again.”
One thing I have noticed about growing churches today is that they have short services.
If we want to have more volunteers we need to keep our meetings short and make it convenient for them to attend.
The bottom line is we need to think of things from the point of view of our volunteers
The same thing is true with blogs. I find if I keep my blogs short more people read them.
What types of things do you do to train volunteers in a busy world?
We do alot of training by webinar. We keep them short, and since people can attend them from the comfort of their own home, it is easier to attend. We can also record them so they can watch them later if they miss the training.
I LOVE doing a ten min huddle with my team! The best part is my team members love it too! This helps them to feel like they are apart of a team instead of a lone teacher. Another thing we do is a training time once a year where everyone comes to the church, the rest of the time I do a minute training. I video (with my laptop or iPhone) a pointed one minute video about training items or upcoming events and email them from YouTube to my team. It comes as a link and all they have to do is click on it. Everyone loves it!
I do this! I call it a VIP session – Vision, Information & Prayer, but I like the Huddle title – feels less formal, which is my goal. I was there — fewer and fewer people coming to meetings. Now we meet for 10 minutes before our first service and almost everyone is there. Keeping things short and to-the-point (and having coffee for them) has volunteers returning without complaints. It’s great! I’m now working on how to include huddles before our Wednesday night service – or mid-service, or something, but I need to get it to those volunteers as well. Thank you!
I love this idea and been wanting to implement something like it in our own ministry. The challenge is finding a good time for all our volunteers to huddle together, since we have 3 services on Sunday mornings. Anybody figure out any way to approach this problem?
Hey Mike!,
Have you tried doing it near the tail end of each service?
I’ve been in some of Mark’s 10 minute huddles and they were always near the end of the services or between services while the other team was still serving.
Talk soon,
Lance M