How Your Building’s Shape Impacts Your Hospitality
We’ve talked before about the challenges of leading a Guest Services Team in a building that seems to have been designed in spite of our guests, not because of them.
Whether you’re in a renovated storefront that has to “make do,” or a decades-old facility that seems to have been built by cataract-suffering psychopaths, you know that the shape, layout, and footprint on your building has an outsized effect on how you help people connect.
That’s why I was intrigued by a recent two-part episode of the Rainer on Leadership podcast. Host Sam Rainer interviewed Todd Brown and Isaac Brown of Brown Development Group, and they explored how building design (specifically the “Baptist T”) affects hospitality. You should listen to both episodes, but here are a few intriguing concepts from episode two:
1. The door to nowhere…or doors everywhere.
You’ve seen it: a 1950’s era building that fronts a busy road, and the apparent main entrance leads directly into a crackerbox coffin lobby with zero room for a Guest Services Team or any type of greeter presence.
The flip side of this is the doors everywhere phenomenon: buildings that sprawl across a property and every door seems of equal importance. Recently I consulted with a massive church in Texas that had – to my best count – 50 exterior doors. The only problem was, only about three of those doors got you anywhere.
[Related posts: How Do I Effectively Run a First Impressions Team in an Older Facility?, How Can I Manage Multiple Entrances?]
2. Meet them sooner.
The solution to the door to nowhere or the doors everywhere conundrum is to simply meet them sooner. Get your team outside so that your guests encounter people before they encounter doors. This gives you the chance to strategically place your people in the parking lots where your guests show up, and get them to where they actually need to go.
[Related posts: Why Outside Greeters are More Important Than Inside Greeters, 18 Inches to a Better Guest Services Team]
3. Dedicated spaces mean lack of flexibility.
Older buildings tend to have spaces designed for very specific purposes: the church library. The calming room for young parents. The Sunday School classroom. The storage closet that houses VBS supplies dating back to 1962 and violating those contents is akin to apostasizing from the faith.
Those dedicated spaces can limit the flexibility needed for discipling relationships. If life happens in circles, not rows, how easy is it to reset our rooms for circles? Multi-purpose spaces give your volunteers the single purpose of helping people connect to people. A larger open lobby gives far more space for relationships rather than the crackerbox coffin.
[Related post: What Should Our Entry Space Look Like?]
4. Engaging buildings prevents passive cultures
I found this part of the episode to be fascinating: the way our buildings are designed can actually prevent engagement. Two key examples:
- A building with no pre- or post-service gathering space means that people have to get in and get out. There’s no time or space for lingering, talking, and getting to know one another.
- A building with limited “serving spaces” points to limited serving opportunities. If all a guest sees is the stage, they’re led to believe the only way they can contribute is if they can sing or preach.
[Related post: How Does a Hospitable Culture Apply to Our Facilities?]
Fellow guest services nerds, those two episodes were rich in content for us to digest. Listen to both of them today, and consider how your building is impacting your ministry.
Full disclosure: I partner with Church Answers (parent organization of the Rainer on Leadership podcast) in their My Church Staff initiative.
