Podcast Episode 6: AI Voice Models & the Hidden Costs of Untrained Staff | Ep 214

Description

Most church leaders know their staff training isn't as robust as it should be, but very few understand what it's actually costing them.In Episode 214, Jon, Emily, and Nicole bring to light three real costs: lost staff productivity, missed connections with your congregation and redundant software your church is paying for because they don't know Rock already does the job.Before diving into training, Jon walks through AI voice models coming to Rock that sound human, compute deals between major AI providers and cloud platforms, and the important distinction between chat AI and agentic AI.The episode closes with a four-question self-assessment every church leader should run this week and actionable steps to strengthen your staff's Rock training.Visit the show notes to find all the resources talked about in this episode. Don't forget to join the new Rock Cast Rocket Chat Channel to see what other churches are saying about this episode.

Transcribed Content

Hey, guys. Welcome back to ROTcast. Thanks for joining us. AI has been moving so fast recently, so we're gonna take a minute and recap everything that's been happening from voice models, compute deals, and an unpacking of AgenTic AI. John, what do church leaders need to know about this month? Oh, man. A lot. Everything's changing so much. I feel every day I get two units of of smartness forward and four units backwards. , I just feel it's hopelessly to keep up. But that's why we bring this into the podcast because we want to just summarize some of the stuff that we're hearing about just to help you so maybe you don't have to feel the same kind of anxiety that I feel every day listening to these podcasts every day. So let's talk with voice models. Voice models are really interesting. Here's what the industry is saying: Voice is the future of AI. We're going to be talking much, much more with AI. Now, if you're me, that doesn't feel super comfortable. I don't want to talk to my technology. I don't really enjoy Siri. I don't voice text. I probably should. I know. I just don't. But the future is this for two reasons. Why? One, it's faster. You can talk faster than you can type. Second of all, you can give more context. And the AI actually wants that. It wants some of those ideas maybe that you wouldn't have typed because it wasn't important enough, but you'll see. The transition for most of us is going to be difficult, but that's not to say that it won't happen. So, here's what you need to know. OpenAI just released Realtime two, which is a real time model, and it's fantastic. It's really good. There's a reduction in latency. It has better intonation. It sounds more lifelike. The interruption handling is next level. You can even say, Hey, hold a second. And then you can go talk to somebody else in the same mic and it'll just ignore that until you come back. Wow, that's very cool. Almost a human would. That's really interesting. I think it's really great that we know that these models are getting better. This new voice model is going to be in the Rock Mobile Voice Agent, which we're super excited about. It's amazing. But here's another thing you have to understand with these voice models. You have to understand how they're billed. So OpenAI bills theirs by the minute. However, if you're not talking, you're not paying, which is really great. So the AI can be there listening and you can have it on. But if you're not saying anything, it's not getting billed. So that's really important to understand. Other models are cheaper, but they do pay per open airspace. And so it appears cheaper, but it sometimes isn't. So And in that mode, what they do usually is a walkie talkie, which means there's a button. You push the button to talk and then you let go of it. And then it will talk. So that way you can kind of keep your tokens down. However, that changes the experience a little bit. if you're driving in the car, you probably don't want walkie talkie. But if you're debriefing with AI, maybe adding some notes to a record from driving back from coffee with somebody, to me, I think the open AI model is a little bit better. Pricing, it costs money. So, I think we need to have this paradigm shift. It's , hey, this AI costs money. Some of these voice models, you might get a bill. It could be more than you're expecting. But you have to look at the value that it's giving you. Not only were you better prepared to have a relationship when you got to that coffee because you were asking questions on your ride there, and you're better suited to have a better relationship afterwards because you're putting reminders in, because you're putting notes in. It's a cost, but a cost comes with value. And so you have to weigh that value to the cost. And I think we're all gonna have a hard time with that. I know when I started looking at it and I started running some calculations in my mind for how much that might cost, I was , Oh, I'm not sure how that's gonna go. But I'm , Okay, well, if I'm thinking I'm gonna be talking to it for two hours, I'm not talking about, How's your day? I'm literally putting in notes. I'm putting in reminders. I'm following up. I'm getting better relationship. And that comes with value. And so, we have to really make sure that we pivot on this value proposition. Yeah. My only experience with voice models is when I was in school, would use diction to write my essays and it would go 10 times faster. It was great. But typically, AI voice models have kind of been the weakling for me. , if it's really robotic or interrupts awkwardly, I'll just ditch it and move on. Yeah. But it's cool to hear that OpenAI is closing the gap. It sounds a big deal. Yeah. And others are doing the same thing. So they're making huge progress, OpenAI is, but there's others out there too. Grok has some really good capabilities in that space too. So it's really interesting to see the change. And it's it's gonna feel unnatural for all of us. , it is. But I think it's just pushing through these boundaries. We're going through a revolution right now. , most of us didn't weren't alive when there was no computers at work. I was alive when there was no computers at home, but not with at work. And it felt very awkward for them. We just assumed everybody got the PC and just did their thing. Right? But it didn't. We're going through a revolution. It's gonna be very hard for us to understand how to use these tools. Once we do, we'll be , Could you show up to work and not have a computer? Very few of us could do that. It reminds me when I actually worked at Honeywell. This was in the 90s. I walked into this guy's office. I had a meeting with him. And it was probably about 10:30, 11:00. He's an engineer. So I walked in, I'm , Hey, did you receive the email I sent you on our agenda for this morning? He's , No, I have not turned on my computer yet. Oh, wow. I was , What? I don't know. He was an engineer. He was very old school. And this was in 1995. But it just floored me. How do you mean you haven't turned on your computer? What have been doing all morning? But he came from where they drew blueprints by hand and that kinda stuff. So to him, it wasn't important. And that's kind of what we're going through right now. Yeah, that makes sense. I think the big note to me coming out of all of this is just that usage based pricing. Churches are used to fixed monthly costs. So that's something I'm glad you're highlighting because people are gonna have to start having those pre budget conversations now so there's less surprise when they get there. And it does have to be anchored in value. Yeah. And I hope everybody listening to this is regurgitating this to the leadership because that's your job. Have to train your leaders on what's coming with AI so they have good expectations. And I hope you would frame that in two ways. One is how is the church going to need to use AI to become more relational? Because all this is in the effort to be a better church, more relational. It's not to detach from people, it's actually to attach to people. So how do we do better as a church? But also, this is impacting our whole economy, our whole society. And churches, pastors need to lead through that, through messaging and sermons. We have to prepare the people through this revolution. I think the church has a huge role in that. And I think it's sometimes easy to downplay because we generally think about ourselves. How does this impact me and my job? How do I feel about this? There's a whole world around us, and we need to make sure that our pastors are preparing people for this. We're gonna go through some very big anxiety as a culture on AI. I think you kind of saw it this weekend. Graduation's kind of big on my mind because my youngest son just graduated college. His speaker at his commencement was Harrison Ford. So that's good job. U of A just down the street had a little bit of a different take. They brought in Eric Schmidt from Google. He got booed loudly for twenty minutes because he was trying to talk about AI and the students just didn't wanna have any of it. The part of it is U of A know your audience. And you probably could have gotten pie by talking about AI, but not in the way that Eric was. And he was trying to make a positive statement about it, but not in the way that the students were wanting to hear. This is their celebration. I think people coming out of college right now are under a lot of stress because there's lot of unknown about the future. And they just didn't want to hear about that. I think that's exactly where churches need to be coming in, and they need to be wisely talking about it. We cannot be just putting our hands over our ears and saying, AI bad, AI bad. For sure it's not, it's just a tool. And if used correctly, it can actually be very great. If used incorrectly, it can be very bad. Kind of the internet. That's right. And the church has always historically been present in the midst of whatever the revolution is that humanity is going through at the time. The church has to stay relevant. Yeah, and I think we don't even know how to use AI right now. So maybe now is the time the church can actually speak into that. Yeah. Okay. So that was just voice AI. Also, you need to know compute land grab. There's a land grab for more compute right now. AI is taking significant amounts, orders of magnitude more compute than typical workloads, storing your email or saving your files. AI takes so much more compute. So people are running out. We are running out of compute as a country. It's a major problem. So people are brokering deals right now trying to prebook as much compute as possible. And it's something to keep your eye on because this is basically leading to prices going up. We've been subsidized on AI. Some of the numbers you hear, sometimes people are being 20 x their usage is being subsidized. So when we go to pay for that, there's gonna be shocking numbers. Some people are saying they've calculated what their token cost would be if they weren't subsidized, and it might be $20,000 a month for some people. Now those are advanced users. But the whole what you said, Emily, the $20 a month, that's what I'm used to. Yeah. It's not gonna be that for very long. Just know out there, we're running into a shortage of compute. And that will impact even your Rock hosting too because if Azure can sell that same compute for other things now all compute is compute, but it all comes down to electricity at the end of the day. And the thing that we've been talking lot about too is the difference between different types of AI. So I think everybody in the audience is probably pretty familiar with chat AI. , I ask it a question, I get an answer. I ask it to write me a SQL statement, I get an answer. But that's not really what is fueling the growth of AI right now. Since January, it's been agentic AI. Here's a task. Go figure out how to do it. Call several tools. Let me know when you're done. And so I think it's really important that we understand that difference. And if you haven't experienced AgenTic or if you're not really up to speed on AgenTic, it's really important that you do. It's really the second wave of ChatGPT. Remember the first time you saw ChatGPT, you're blown away? AgenTic is the next realm. And I know internally we've all been doing that. We've become an agentic AI organization. We have. And it's surprising how quickly that happens once you get over the understanding. It's a different comprehension. But John, can you help a church leader consider when to reach for agentic AI over chat AI if they're used to operating in that chat realm? Now. In all things now. I find sometimes I still go to chat because sometimes it's a little bit faster, but I almost always regret having done so because now I'm stuck with this chat and I don't have an artifact. I don't have a handoff document. It's , Oh, it's in there now. And so the chat really can't really write something to a file. And so I think it's best to probably almost always start in agentic. And if you don't understand that, it's best to get up to speed on that. I said, we're going through a revolution right now. Imagine the world before computers in the workplace and now computers are in the workplace. Imagine the world before the internet and now there is internet. This is the same thing. The only difference is a transition is gonna happen 10x faster and that's what's causing anxiety. And as much as you might think I'm just the AI shill, I actually have some very contrarian views on AI. However, this is a tool that can maximise our productivity so that we can have a bigger impact on this world. And so we will use it correctly and we think deeply about how we use it. But that's something really important. And as we make that transition, we've been talking about, sometimes you need incentives. Sometimes you need to incentivize people to use AI. It reminds me of a story of Magnus. Magnus is a plugin. Hopefully, many in the community use it. It's a plugin that allows you to edit web pages inside of Versus Code. Before, you had to go right into the block and edit it there. No problem, but it's kind of slow. We created this tool called Magnus. A great tool. However, even we didn't use it for several months. Why? Was it a bad tool? No, it was a change in habit. It was a change in our workflow. It was always that thing, yeah, I need to get to that, but not today because I just need to get this thing done. But once we all pivoted to using it, now we would refuse to work in anything other. if MagnaSquid would go away, we would just go home because we're not going to work. And it's I think the same thing with these tools. Once you have them, I couldn't go back. It reminds me of the Atomic Habits book that we talk about all the time here. And it seems if you can just find the right anchors, the right habits you already have and stack it and create a I'm going to do this when I do that. It's something that's much more approachable and then it can be incorporated. You just have to get that entry point. Yeah. I think people need to be incentivized because we are creatures of habit and we don't change, most people. True. And I feel I'm an early adopter in a lot of things, but I can still it's something new and different. If I can be transparent, I remember one night I was working at home trying to learn this and I thought to myself, because I'm not old, but I guess I'm old, I'm in my young 50s. I actually thought , John, is this the era and the advent and transition that you don't make? There's always gonna be one of those where you just don't make the next one. Is this the one that you just let other people do? Do you just sit back and you could probably ride it out without becoming an AI expert. Because something wasn't really working and I hit a challenge point. I said, is this the point where you just this is where you tap out. And you don't tell people that you're tapping out, but you tap out quietly. And I said, no. , come on. Just push through a little bit more. Let me just figure this out. And now I'm , oh, dude, come on. What was I thinking? And the impact is real. So incentivize. Be thinking about how you can incentivize the people around you. And the one thing I'd probably just tell people too is if you don't think you can do it, just ask. What harm is there in just saying, Hey, can you just do this? And if not, can you just describe to me how I might tell you how to do this? You'll be blown away. I'm constantly , Oh, I won't be able to do this. And I do it, and it just doesn't. I'm , There's also, just to put out there, just to keep you in the loop, there's a huge discussion. This was about a week and a half ago on how do you talk to your AI or how's your AI talk to you? And the big thing is about Markdown. Markdown became a file format of AI because it's simple, easy. Formatting is fairly easy for the AI to do. There's a huge conversation about, is that really the right format? So now there's this huge tension between isn't HTML a better option? And so, yeah, I think in some cases, HTML is better because it's easier to read. It's richer and denser in terms of its formatting capabilities than Markdown. But just know there's this huge debate going on right now. What is the best format? And the answer is both. I don't think there's one that solves the other. I've switched a lot of my outputs to be HTML. And I think in some cases, I've really enjoyed that. However, I did run into a huge robot yesterday because I did it and I'm , Okay, now I just need to polish this up and edit something. And I'm , Oh, no. It's in HTML. Obviously, I know HTML really well, but I did not feel trying to find where I needed to edit. And I was , oh, markdown would have been much easier. And so I actually told it, I could convert this HTML to markdown. I edit it. I'm , okay, now change it back to HTML. Not the most productive thing. , when I first got here, I didn't know a lick of code, but you taught me. You gave me a one on one HTML lesson. Yeah. So you look that you're Now. It's not hard. It's just tedious, think. Right? Yeah. So HTML might be back in your life. You might have given it up for markdown and now you have to go back. At least I know how to use it now. Yeah. That's great. So anyways, those are all the tips. I would say if you want more, I get a lot of my tips from a podcast called the AI Daily Brief, which is done by Nathaniel Whitmore. What I about him, he is a great condenser of a lot of topics into a short amount of time, and he is very humble. And you might be asking, that's a funny thing to say. It's very rare to see that in a technical podcast, I find. I feel he just has a really good humility. It's not about him, and he's not arrogant. He's just trying to give you I feel he's trying to be a servant of knowledge to you. And I think that's super rare. So plug for that podcast. I highly recommend. But it's a lot. It's drinking out a fire hose. I've been trying to distill that down every two weeks to share. For this podcast here. And that is a lot of content, and I'm sure it's not even the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. And sorry I went a little long on that. No. That's great. Yeah. Okay. So let's transition to the main event for this podcast, and that's about staff training. Emily, do you want to kick us off on how our church leaders can be approaching training now? Yeah, that's great. So, this is something that might make people kind of uncomfortable. But it's something that we find is needed over and over with so many different churches that we talk to. And it might be a little controversial in the way that we approach some of these points. But it's a very important topic. And I think it gets right into the crux of where are our Rock leaders versus the leadership of the church and who sits in a position of saying how something needs to be done or not when it comes to staff training, when it comes to Rock specifically. So let's talk about this a little bit. Let's jump right in. One of the things when it comes to training your staff on how they use Rock and we're not just talking about your Rock team. Send your Rock team to Rock masterclass. But your staff that use Rock in their everyday work, in their ministry lives, their training needs to be required. It is not optional. And by required, we do not mean from the person that they work next to. Right? So training new hires takes a ton of effort. A lot of times we have central HR based training on certain topics. But Rock probably isn't a part of that. We might have planned training, then there's on the job training. When you transitioned in about a year ago, Nicole, how many things did ahead of time versus how many things did you have to learn when they came up? Oh, look, this comes up once a quarter. It's time to learn it now. Right? I feel I'm still learning. Yeah. Some topics are great for that, but some aren't. And we need a structured approach to that. And how you use your tools definitely falls into that. If you onboard a new hire by saying the team around you can help you learn Rock, You're asking for trouble, and here's why. You're placing the next generation of Rock knowledge on the shoulders of someone who may or may not have been trained themselves, may have habits that get in the way, may have a misunderstanding about something, may have come in with certain bad habits. Now your team's Rock knowledge is on the shoulders of that person, and they don't even realize it. Sounds the telephone game. It's exactly the telephone game. It degrades every time you train another new person. So you really don't know what people are being trained on or how something's being used. That creates a lot of problems. So we want to set something up that's much more intentional. The time to strategize around it and create something that's more structured. How do you set up intentional Rock training? That's a great question. Here's some good news. A lot of the content already exists. So what does Rock do when it comes to setting up event registrations? How do you input groups? This training exists today in our Rock U library. There are videos, and they're broken down into bite sized chunks. So there's something that anyone can watch. And if that's the area they're operating in, they can understand it. They're not overly technical. They are specific. You don't have to create that content. You just have to decide , okay. So for this ministry assistant role, which of the Rock U videos are best for them? So if you can do that for each of the roles that we use Rock, now you've got a great beginning training content. Right? That's the fundamental training. So that's, I'd say, layer one. Layer two is gonna be, and how do you use that at your church? Because there's a specific way you set up groups that are affiliated with your campuses that are tied to your event registration. And many areas of how you configure Rock needs to be done a certain way. So that in the, video training with RockU should be combined with your in house training on how we do it, and that needs to be central. This includes things your naming conventions, your workflows and configuration, how you use attributes, maybe even data integrity or data hygiene. If all you have in your training is a list of boxes to check, people get lost. Right? They need something that's a little bit different than that. So you have to train someone how to think about the way that you do it. And and really, that is not something you can pass shoulder to shoulder from colleague to colleague. That's the strategy part that's missing right now. I to tell people when they start that they have a unique gift. It's a gift that lasts for six months or less, and it's the gift of fresh perspective. So when they hop in and they're learning something, that is the time to give them the training for the right patterns and point out something that's , oh, we had some people doing it this way, but we can't do it that way anymore. You're giving them the insights to know how they should approach something. And once that fresh perspective is gone, it's gone. So use that time really wisely. , that reminds me in a lot of the other roles that I've had. Sometimes when the onboarding process is left to the people around you, you just kinda learn their bad habits or you pick up their workarounds. And then, , by month three, , don't even know what the actual process is anymore. Know, my mom always said as a kid, and it didn't make sense to me till recently. She said, when you hang out with your kids, you only pick up their bad habits. You do not pick up their good habits. And I'm not sure why she told me that as a kid because in in hindsight, it probably wasn't very I probably wasn't doing something good. But I noticed that in life too. I guess so many times, just pick up bad habits, I don't pick up good habits. So that's exactly what you're talking about. I've seen that sometimes in myself where I pick up some weird vocal twitch or something that someone has when you hang around them too much, and then you hear yourself later and you think, where did that come from? Okay. Another brief inside my mind when that when I am around someone who does that, I'm constantly in my head, don't pick that up. Don't pick that up. Don't do it. Don't do it. That's not a good habit. Don't do it. Don't do it. Because I do the same thing. Yeah. Is that effective? I don't know. Okay. But I remember once again I don't know. I'm off topic again. When I was a kid, we would host traveling singing groups into our house occasionally. And so we had these German boys' chorus staying with us. And so we had these three German kids, and they're about my age. Within probably four hours, I had a German accent. And looking back, it's so embarrassing and so stupid. Do you still have that German accent? Could you give us a demonstration here on the No. Maybe next time. I have a story for next time too about some French boys course folks who decided to go swimming in in a thunderstorm. Oh, don't forget that. Somebody I'll say that remind you on that one. Yeah. Okay. Well, a quick heads up before we move on. The Rock You that we just referenced, that whole library is in the middle of a transformation. So very cool. We're doing some things that make it a lot easier to move through the content and know where you are, easier to assign. Don't delay and figure No. Out Make sure you're thinking now about what roles and what videos, but it's gonna get even easier soon. So set it up, you'll be ready for those cool updates when they come out probably later this year. Right. So if you've I would ask you, do you have, do all your staff get a centralized Rock training? Yes. If not, strike one. Yep. Strike two is going to be Do you have a continual rhythm of creating more content for them? And so I would just challenge you, we have to do that. We are all trainers. Who's the trainer? We are all trainers. That's my role too. I make a lot of training content. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to continually make a ton of training. But if you're not putting out something every month, something, I would say five minutes. Make a five minute video of some new feature that's coming or something that you learned that's exciting. Make it a part of your self accountability. No one's going to probably in your role force you to do it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. So make an accountability. Start with one, but maybe try to do more. I don't think one five minute video is that hard to create. Just do it. Yeah. I mean, from a communication angle, creating a monthly five minute video is going to be way easier to produce than a quarterly all staff training. That's so true. If you lower the bar just a little bit, but increase that consistency, that sounds a pretty good trade off to me. I feel a lot of people are very hesitant to do a video because they don't the sound of their voice or whatever. Just do it. And here's a scientific fact. You will never understand what your voice sounds . That's true. If you listen back on a recording of your voice, your ear and your brain are wired in such a way you will never understand how other people hear your voice. So if you don't it, don't worry. It's not your voice. That's interesting. It's true. I don't the way I sound either, but it's what God gave me. It's the instrument that I have. Although you can learn to play your instrument differently. I've I've done coaching on that. For instance, a German accent. Still not going to happen on this podcast. Shoot. Thought it was worth a try. Well, , a great piece of content that people can recycle is our version update video. And we release these during our beta testing. , there should never be a reason your staff are not expecting or not familiar with Rock updates because we do have this video and we put it out so people can plan ahead. And if you can, , clip it into two or three important parts that are impactful for your team, You just made that video 10 times more relevant for them without, , the hassle of having to recreate or produce something completely new. If I wanted to cut a video, say I'm not technical and you say cut a video and I don't know how. what tool would you tell them to Oh, I use Opus. That's how, , we produce these broadcast clips. So that's a great AI editor. Yeah. So AI did it for you, Yep. So it was easy? It was easy. There's no excuse. You can set a template and make it repeatable. So it's a great tool. If you had to cut it yourself and you didn't because you knew the part that you wanted. -huh. CapCut maybe? Yeah. CapCut's good. Super easy. Other other other content. And there's online editors. Don't even have to have software. , so if you're , I don't know how to cut a video. , don't worry. Go to AI. How do I cut a video? It'll recommend you tools. Yeah. For sure. I think this is where churches tend to drop the ball sometimes. It's that an update will land and then something moves in Rock that the staff aren't aware of. And then the Rock admins, unfortunately, are flooded with tickets that, , a ninety second video could have prevented. It's so easy to do. I mean, we just gave you all the ideas. So definitely attack that one if you don't have it yet. The content's almost fully prepared for you. Yeah. And take credit for it. Good point. I mean, look the hero, man. , we're not trying to say, , give out give out the the glory to somebody else. You take the glory. That's it. That's what we're here for. Well, the next point is something you alluded to, John, already. Everyone's a trainer. If your church is big enough to have an HR team or maybe a central person that does training, you might think that they're the person in charge of that. But the truth is no. In a healthy organization, we're all in charge of it. I'm in charge of it. You're in charge of it. We're all here to make it happen. And there's no way Rock training can be effective if it's being created and delivered by people who are not working in the platform. Right? , that's one of the reasons we have the Rock community set up the way it is, is because support comes from people that are using Rock every day. In your church, your Rock training should come from people that use Rock. So that's why it's important that you're part of it. And so here's the deal. If you're wondering, not sure. Am I a trainer? Still after you're hearing this. If you're listening to this podcast, you are a Rock trainer, and you are responsible for how Rock is used on your staff. Yeah. And I would just challenge you if if think back since the beginning of the year, if you've not created, , at least two or three training resources this year, I would say that's a flag. So much of what I hear talking with churches is , well, we don't do training or our trainers hasn't done that or we're looking for a trainer. We're all trainers. In my role, I create a ton of training material. Not because I have to. There's no one telling me, John, this is due by the end of the week. It's just I want to help people. I want them to be successful. And I want to save costs later. You can train now, and we're gonna talk about that. But I would say if you haven't made at least two or three significant training resources this year, that's a flag that you need to do more. Yeah. And keep in mind that it doesn't have to be Rock specifically. Everybody can be a trainer in something. And if you can't declaratively say that I'm training my team on XYZ, then that's the problem, but also the starting point. Yeah, that's exactly right. Training isn't a department. It's a responsibility of leadership, and we're all leaders. Yeah. Don't judge each other by how many PowerPoint decks we make. But if we did I've made a lot of slides You have a lot of badges on your sash. Yeah. It's not workspace. But if it was, if heaven was about the number of slides you've made, luckily, it's not. But but we're all that. And and and almost 99% of all slides I've ever made were not because someone told me I had to. That's right. It's because that's what we do. Yep. And that helps set the culture for other people to become trainers as well. Yeah. And so I guess a lot of times it goes back to that. I don't own it. Yes. And that's what we're trying to cement in is yes, you do. Everybody's the owner of the training. So, I constantly hear that no training is happening. It seems in everybody's role, it's , but it's not their problem. Which I get. It probably isn't officially their job description. It's not in their role. But if there's a problem that needs to be solved, then we should solve it. Right. And I think the downstream impact of this shoulder to shoulder poor telephone game training will impact you. So if you want to not be impacted, get into the trainer role up at the very top of the stream. Right. And I get it's one of those roles that everybody enjoys. That's true. But it's super impactful. And so get the joy out of that. Yeah. And then also make sure that you have some time you block on your calendar for it. So if there are people that are operating in a role that you need to help give them some input, make sure you have some calendar blocked for that or it will never be a priority. Yeah, that's a good point. If only there was a built in tool inside Rock that would help make training convenient. Oh, man. I wish we had thought of that. Yeah, that would have been smart. Oh, wait. Good news. In v17, we released the built in learning management system. And if you're gonna require training, this is probably the best place for it And to that's because in this feature, can assign courses, track completion, and tie training to specific roles. So, , your children's director is going to need different training than the worship pastor who needs different training than the finance team member. And in the LMS, can create all those different curriculum and then assign it to the people on your team. And this is going to help you make help you hold your staff way more accountable. But it's just crazy to me that churches are still, , purchasing external tools to do this while the one inside rocks hits completely unused. Yep. And that's the perfect setup for the next thing that we want to talk about. John? Oh, I'm sorry. That's alright. I was , I'm looking down my notes. You're good. So the next one is really there's a lot of reasons why you need do this. You want your staff to be trained because they can be more effective this. But here's another selfish reason why you want to do this. If you train your staff, they will use the tools and they'll use the tools correctly. If you don't train your staff, they will find different tools that are outside of Rock that will cause immense problems downstream. So, is it the carrot or is it the stick? The training is the carrot. If you train them ahead of time, they will go down the stream in the path that you chart for them. People generally are not trying to do more work. So if you train them exactly how to do the work and it works, they're , Oh yeah, this is great. But the minute you don't do that, they go find another tool and they fall in love with that micro feature of You that will never get them back out of it. So it's a matter of , do you want to have a good time now or do you want have a good time later? And it's always better to have a good time later. Because if you don't, they're already downstream, so your staff is losing productivity. And now they've just fallen in love with this other tool that you can never get them out of. And who's losing? I would say the attendee is losing because the attendee is missing out on the personalized misconnection, the relationship building that can happen when everybody's working together inside the same boat, we're all paddling together, the attendee loses because their experience is not as personable or as relational as it could be. I that take. But you're gonna regret it long term anyway. So you might as well just do it. So if you find that tool out there that somebody's loved and adopted and there's nothing you can do about it right now, what is the answer? Use the carrot, right? Use the carrot. Maybe I am blessed because when I started working in the church space, the church I worked for didn't really have a great system. Everybody hated it. So it was , okay, well I'll just start the whole course. As long as I'm giving people what they want, they're just going with it. So I never had to really battle against it. Occasionally, someone would go lean a rogue and do something, but usually if you caught it early, it's easier to get them back under there. So Yeah. Great. A couple more quick points about training. You wanna wanna start by hiring for it. You wanna build it into your review system, and you wanna keep the Rock team looped in. So consider this. As you are hiring new people, your job description should indicate that part of what they do and get measured on is their use of the tools, which include Rock. And how do they get measured on these things? Well, do the inside the cadence your church already has set up of a sixty day review when they're a new hire, annual reviews, work with the hiring, managers and and the team leads to build an effective use of their tools into their accountability processes. And that's what helps keep everything going the direction that it should. And this isn't again just about Rock team members. This is your staff that use Rock as part of their ministry roles. This should be included in that. The Rock team should be providing structured input that go into all the accountability systems for staff that use Rock as a tool. That's a different concept for many. Yeah, and I would say this should be part of their job reviews. This tool is so important to what we do. We hear it all the time we couldn't operate without this tool. Well, are people being reviewed on their usage of the tool, on their understanding of the tool? I I think think it should be a part of everybody's thirty, sixty, ninety day review and yearly review. It should be that the leadership goes, gives a report of , Hey, can you just rank these people's usage of Rock? And not that we want people to get in trouble. It's not there to make them look bad. It's just to help them realize what's expected. In every sport, you need to be a look up at the scoreboard and say, Am I winning? And in a lot of cases, when you're working in an organization, you don't know if you're winning. People will if they know the rules, they'll be , oh, that's how you win? I just follow these rules? They'll follow the rules. So if it's making sure that they understand Rock, they'll go take the training. And you can identify all sorts of training gaps that way and people literally just don't know you can close those. You don't know if it's never been talked about. Yeah. This isn't just a regular tool. We're not saying how good do Microsoft Word? This tool, if you use it right, deepens relationships, deepen connections. This is a ministry driving high impact tool that again impacts attendees as you said before. That's why it's important. And then finally, I think it's interesting how this ties back to the an unreasonable hospitality book that we talked about in one of our previous episodes. Because if, if their people in the stories in that book didn't have all of their information in one place, they wouldn't be able to create those, the Wow files, the person briefs where they knew who was coming into the restaurant, greeted them by name, knew enough about their context that they sounded friendly and familiar, created these amazing experiences for people. You can't do that if everybody's using their own system of record. It has to be a centralized approach. That's the piece that drives the ministry. So this really does tie back to everything you're doing to create unreasonable hospitality at your church is just gonna fall flat if you don't have everyone using Rock effectively. Yeah. That unreasonable hospitality was possible because it was built on the trained staff members who went out of their way to make others feel special. Yep. But they had to constantly reinforce that mindset into their culture and into their staff training. So, that episode that we did on the unreasonable hospitality, that's the dream. But this conversation right now is kind of the discipline to make that possible. And if you want unreasonable hospitality, then you have to have uncomfortably consistent training. Yeah, that's That's really good. Get that Opus clip on that. Yeah, clip that. And keep in mind that the order of priority matters here. So you can't expect your staff to be trained when your volunteers You can expect your volunteers to be trained when your staff aren't trained first. But if you try and train your volunteers first, you're gonna burn out. So if you can activate your staff, they'll become your force multipliers who'll become the engine to train the rest of your team. If you untrained staff trying to train the volunteers are just gonna create frustration and then even worse, it might mess with your data and you'll be left off with worse data than what you started with. It's It's true. Been a while since I've used the LMS features, but I do believe they work on volunteers too. I think so. We definitely have documentation that you can go find. No, I'm just joking. But yes, use your LMS. For sure. So let's just close this all down. This has been huge. I really do think that training is just as important as a product. If you have Rock, great. But if you're not doing the training, you're really kind of hamstringing its capabilities. And so I think sometimes we underestimate the impact here. And so what I want to do is I want to bring a scripture verse. And I'm going to misquote the scripture verse. And I think that's okay as long as you call it out beforehand. I also, just for the record, I cherry picked the version. So, I'm checking all the boxes today. So, here's what I want to say. Proverbs 2nine 18: Without revelation, people run wild, but one who keeps the law will be happy. And I think this elegantly fits this. Now, this verse is talking about something else, so I'm not trying to say that clearly the Bible talks to you about the importance of your Rock training in this verse. But I think it kind of highlights some stuff. Without revelation, without training, people run wild. We know that. They go find other tools. They find something else. Some of those other things are terrible tools. But it doesn't matter if they're good tools because it's not the same tool, and therefore we don't get the data in the right place and we can't make the connections that we want. So you've got to give them the revelation, which is the training. But the one who follows the law is happy. So if we can get them to follow these rules, not only will they be happy, but again, I go back to the happiness should be measured by the attendees' happiness. When their day can be made delighted because of a connection that you could do, Again, pinching back over to the unreasonable hospitality, that's what matters. We don't do this to have good data and to feel good about our data. We do this because we want to encourage people. We want to get them closer to Christ. And data can help with that. For sure. Is there, John, , how will staff know that if they're ahead or behind on this? Is there a way that they can benchmark it for themselves? I would just do a self audit. , does every person who come into the church, do they get trained? Is there an established training program with accountability? Are you providing routine, consistent, scheduled content once a month? All of those things. , do you have an LMS? Are you pulling in Rock Rocky video stuff? A lot of the stuff that we talked about today, could literally set up in a matter of a day or two. At least at least a start. Right? You're not gonna have it done, but you're going to have a start. And with AI, you can help it create some of the LMS content off of a few prompts that you want. Hey, know, explain why duplicates are a huge problem. So therefore search before you add somebody. I think in general, we all know where we stand on the training, at least the churches I'm talking to, they know they have a training problem. I think the thing I would probably coach on, I think they all recognize they have a problem, but I also feel they don't feel they have authority or responsibility or agency to actually fix the problem. And that's what I would probably say, Oh, that's what I would change. We all have agency here. I don't know of a single leader who would condemn somebody who just made some more training content for the staff. So is it the fun thing? No. I didn't enjoy writing the documentation for the initial versions of Rock at night. I didn't have time during the day, so I'd write it at night. But to me, it mattered. It was so important. We can have a great product, but there's no great documentation, then what does it matter? Because in that case, the people will run wild. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. For our listeners, we would love to know what your training rhythm looks . If you guys are implementing that, let us know. , if you can't answer how you're training somebody this week, that's again your starting point. So you can drop that in the Rockcast Rocket Chat channel. And then also we'd love to know if there's one ROCUE video that took your team from good to great. And I think if you left that in the Rockcast channel, that'd be a great starting point for other churches. I think too, share your training stuff too. A lot of it is relevant across churches. And that might be another thing too, as you're creating content. If there's one little teeny fraction that has your church logo on that's not needed, take it off because now it's reusable. I was actually thinking as we're talking about this outline, maybe we should make another rocket chat channel for sharing learning stuff. And I'm , well, we have enough channels. maybe just a Rock cast channel we'll do for now. I think there's a plenty of other channels that you could use for that kind of stuff. Do share and share alike. Yeah. And to close today, we did just have our in person masterclass graduate. So congrats to all those students. That's really big. And then our next upcoming masterclass is completely maxed out. Really? So that an online one or in person? It's a virtual one. Oh, okay. But we were breaking at the seams. We've done all we can to accommodate as many students as possible. Could we get Harrison Ford to talk at the commencement? Possibly. I'll get in touch with his Okay. Yeah. Let me know. Yeah. We'll circle back. But if you're looking for training, our classes are a great investment to do that. And then we also have our Rocky videos and we have our documentation. And then we also have some technical training at Rx. So if you're not yet, register for that. And then thank you guys for joining us. And you can subscribe to our YouTube channel so you won't miss a video and then hop in the ROCKS Rocket Chat channel so you can join the conversation too.