6 Ways to Undervalue Your Guest Services Team
Too often, we view a Guest Services team as a “nice to have” ministry: if we have the personnel or the budget or the attention to give to it, great.
But if hospitality should be woven into the DNA of who we are as a church, we shouldn’t leave guest services to chance, and we shouldn’t overlook or undervalue those volunteers who make up the team.
Here are six ways that we can undervalue our Guest Services volunteers:
1. Adopt a “Fog a mirror” mindset.
If you’re not familiar with this colloquialism, it refers to checking to see if someone is still alive by holding a mirror in front of their mouth. Too often, that’s the bar we set for a guest services volunteer. “Anybody can do this!” we say. But no, not just anybody can do this.
When we raise the bar for our volunteers, we tend to get volunteers who are more committed. More passionate. More focused. It doesn’t mean we’re unwilling to take the timid and train them up, or call gifts out of people they can’t see in themselves. It simply changes our mindset and makes us dig a little deeper for those who are rabidly committed to providing a great experience for our guests.
2. Put them to work without providing training.
Listen closely, friends: “Stand here and do this” is not a training strategy. Giving someone a checklist is not a sustainable model. Instructing a brand-new volunteer to simply jump in and then reach out if they have questions is a sure-fire way to lose a volunteer.
I’m convinced that most of our “problem” volunteers have a common origin story: we didn’t do the work of training them. In other words, they are not the problem. We are. (Ouch.) So provide training. Do it regularly. Onboard them properly before you put them in a spot.
[For more on training, check out this Primer Posts series.]
3. Don’t tie their role to the bigger picture.
If a volunteer only understands the what of their job, they have a shockingly-short shelf life. Parking cars is a lot of fun until the temps climb into the 90s. Setting up the campus is a blast until they have to roll road cases through a torrential downpour.
Their what needs to be connected to a bigger why. They need to know why they’re there before their what makes sense. (Did I just successfully use “they’re,” “there,” and “their” in a single sentence? I did.)
Every salvation, every baptism, every year-over-year numerical increase needs to echo in the parking lot and on the clean up team and with the door greeters…because every single one of them played a role in paving the way for those things to happen.
4. Fail to implement a leadership pipeline.
If #1 (Adopt a “Fog a mirror” mindset) is true, then we also shouldn’t view Guest Services as a stepping stone or stopping off point on the way to something bigger and better. It’s true that some volunteers on your team will move on to other roles. But I think it’s important to keep two things in mind:
- We don’t lose people. We send people. Enough with the hoarding. Down with the sheep-stealing. Let’s raise up great volunteers and send them out to other ministries. When we do that, our guest services DNA gets spread, and the thing that we do becomes the people that we are.
- If we don’t equip leaders, someone else will. I recognize I’m speaking out of both sides of my mouth, but I believe some volunteers leave our teams because we’re not providing adequate growth opportunities. If someone is going to raise leaders, why not us?
[For more on raising up leaders, see this Primer Posts series.]
5. Wind them up and let them go.
When my kids were smaller and digital toys were less of a thing, they had their fair share of wind-up toys. Wind-up toys only last so long before they run out of juice and you have to wind them up again. And if you don’t wind them up again, well…
I said in point #2 that we shouldn’t put them to work without providing training. Neither should we put them to work, check out, and never check back in. We should consistently communicate big vision and new processes, provide ongoing training to improve their skills, know how they’re doing on a personal level, and shepherd them faithfully.
6. Fail to provide a point person.
I almost left this one off the list because I assumed it was assumed. But let’s not assume.
Too many churches have a random collection of ushers or greeters that function in separate silos with different values and standards. There’s no clearly-assigned leader, and because of this, poor leadership often arises without being asked.
Every church needs to own it and on it in guest services. Volunteer or staff, part time or full time, every team deserves a leader they can look to for answers. Having that point person communicates a lot of value to the team, and not having them tells the team how much they matter to the organization.
Leaders, lets not undervalue our volunteers by making one of the mistakes above. Value them. Care for them. And then watch your team thrive.
