RX 24 - Increasing Staff Engagement in Rock - Karen Rossi

Transcribed Content

Alright everyone, welcome, welcome. Sorry for the brief technical difficulties. Please welcome Karen Rossi to the stage. Hi, thanks for joining us. Tonight we're gonna cover our strategy for increasing staff engagement in Rock. I just, number one, wanna preface this. None of us are getting this perfectly right, but over the last two and a half years, we feel like we finally started shifting our cruise boat a little bit more towards our staff being just more engaged. And so we wanted to walk you through what our process has looked like since then. But first, a little bit about me. So my name is, as he said, Karen Rossi. I have been married to my husband here for fourteen years. We have two children. I have Sofia and Jamison. They are both officially in middle school come Monday, so I would love all the prayers you can give me. We love to be outside. We camp. We hike. Not that that's important for today, but just fun fact about me. But another really, really important thing about me is I actually don't have a technical background yet. Here I am standing up here with a Rockstar t shirt on having my only experience be in rock. And so I just want you to know that no matter where your technical background is, you too can be up here and learn these skills. So how did I end up up here, you might be wondering? Well, I have about eighteen years of experience working in restaurants. I ran training programs at all of the restaurants that I was in. And I'm also a certified middle school math teacher. I know, glutton for punishment, but nonetheless, certified middle school math teacher. So needless to say, training is a giant passion of mine. I began working for the Crossing Church almost seven years ago. I started as a Kids Crossing administrator, and I was in that role for about three and a half years. I shifted to our youth ministry for a year where I was the main administrator for that until a position came on our Rock team. I was that person that fell in love with Rock and just took it and ran with it. In fact, I was that person that would go to Rock U, watch as many videos as I possibly could, and then I would go running up to Jim Michael's office and I'd be like, Jim, why are we not using this? I need to add this into our stuff. And so he'd appease me and be like, all right, Karen, you can try it first before we give it to everybody else. And I'm like, okay. And so I loved rock. So I was so excited when this position came available on our team. In fact, I really kind of think it was God's plan for me all along, right? That love of training, my teaching, and now my love of rock have just collided into one role, and I couldn't be happier to be where I am today. So before we get to where we were as an organization and what we've done to change our staff engagement, it's really important to know a little bit about The Crossing. So The Crossing is a multi site church. We do have four locations. All of them though are within the St. Louis area. They're really within about a 30 mile radius, so they are really close, which is a little unique to us. We have about 135 staff members. That does include part time and full time folks. And we use Rock for everything. And by everything, I do mean everything. We use it for a database, a website. We have our mobile app built on Rack. So we have jumped full all in. So what kind of struggles were we facing? If I had to guess each one of you are facing similar struggles. But number one, our staff was using tools outside of Rec. I know nobody else has this issue but we have people that like to use our Google Docs, we like to use Planning Center for just some basic scheduling and so we have whole separate databases out there. We like to use kind of anything and everything, Trello. So staff were using tools outside of Rock. One, another problem that we had, processes were just not clear. Even amongst ministries, people were doing things differently. So that was a problem. And the last one, and it's kind of a big one, we had large, large gaps in training. Training is hard, y'all. Like and so we were feeling that pain. So why did those struggles exist? Well, people are using outside tools because the two answers I would get, it's what we've always done. Nothing pains me more than to hear that sentence. I'm one of those people that likes to blow up processes and change what we've always done. Or it's just easier, right? Like it's what they know. People are gonna reach for the tool that they know. And so that is why they're using outside things. Staff transitions, I don't know about you, but staff transitions are hard. Like we have long gaps in our staffing. There are times where somebody leaves and they may dump all of their job responsibilities on two, three, five people. You never know how many. And they're just dumping their knowledge and then they leave staff. And replacing them can take time, which makes transitions super rough. We had a one size fits all approach to training. I don't know about you, but we were finding that that really was not working. And we heavily relied on ministries to do their own thing. Anybody ever played the game of telephone when you were a kid? Right? So remember the staff transitions are tough. So what was happening is somebody would start with knowledge and then they would transition. They would quickly give their information to somebody else. The next person would come along and they would get part of the information. And by the end, they're up to using those outside tools and resources because they have no idea what they're doing and they're just trying to live their lives, right? And then we had virtually no continued training for our staff. I can recall being on staff for over five years before I took on this role and I went to one continued training. And it was purely because a new feature had been released. And so no one knew anything about it. So that was why all of these struggles existed. So what I would like to spend the rest of our time in is just looking at some of the things that we have implemented over the last two and a half years that helped us mitigate these struggles even just a little bit. So but first, we required a shift in our mindset. I don't know about you, but has anybody in your organization said, man, it'd be really cool if we did this, but they never asked for it. Right? Well, we had to get rid of that mentality. We're the Rock experts, not our ministries. We can't expect them to know about all these awesome things that are in Rock that will help them. They're not doing that research. They're counting on us to come to them and give them that knowledge. We needed to work together to see change. Here you're seeing a picture of silos. That is what happens when you're not working together and it is typically what divides our digital and IT teams and our ministries. Right? If we're not working together, they feel like we're telling them they need to change a process and we aren't gonna be there for them and help them in the process. So as I've already said, I have eighteen years of restaurant experience, so run with me here with this allergy or analogy. But we have all been to a restaurant and had terrible service. Right? We've all been to restaurants and had phenomenal service. What makes up great service? There's some really common buckets that I'm guessing that you're thinking of. Number one, they're anticipating needs without being asked. Right? Your server is filling up your drinks. They're there when you're ready to order. You're trying to hunt them down. They're there with a check. They're bringing your kids crayons when they're acting all crazy and you're trying to keep everybody happy. They're there when you need them. If you turn around and you need ranch to go with your chicken strips, they're standing there ready to help you whenever you something comes up. And lastly, they have a kind and gracious attitude. Y'all, we're in the service industry here on our digital rock teams. All of these things can and should be applied to RAC. So the next thing we did in order to serve them well, right, we had to get to know our ministries. You can't anticipate their needs without getting to know them. We were in a little bit of a unique situation in that I had spent a whole lot of time working in two of our largest ministries. So we knew some we got to bring that knowledge into this experience. But that's not where we stopped. Those ministries that we didn't know, we've started meeting with them one on one any chance that we had. Now, why did we do that? It allowed them to walk through all of their processes. This helps us keep training in mind for the future. It helps us find pain points that we can help with. And it helps us ask questions. Just a really quick side story. I was meeting with our finance team. That team doesn't have really any turnover. And one person was leaving staff and we all decided we had no clue what they were doing. And so we sat down and said, hey, we just want to meet with you, hear what you have going, and hear about what your processes are. Guys, I learned that they were going into rock, looking up a whole series of numbers across our four campuses, opening up an Excel spreadsheet, hand typing all of these numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. And this was happening every week. Somebody was spending four to five hours every week pulling data at a rock. They didn't know that we could give them a way easier way to do that and save probably three and a half hours of that time. So ask questions. We were able to jump in and help. I know that we're all crazy, crazy busy. But when you jump in and help, it gives us a chance to feel pain points. Some people may not even know they have a pain point, right? I jumped in to help our small groups lead create our semesters worth of groups and I instantly walked out of that process and said, guys, we've got to help them. They just thought that's what it had to be, so they weren't gonna ask for help. They just thought this is how it is. And other ways that you can get to know your ministries is to work closely with your central services teams, including communications. We actually have a couple people on our communications team, myself included. This helps us keep track of all these big picture things. We get a bird's eye view. We can speak into things about website, or we can speak in things about events and try to get ahead of problems and make things even better. So just kind of in summary, getting to know our ministries helped us find pain points. It's helped us adjust training, helps us build trust with our ministries. I can't stress this one enough. And made our ministries feel supported. We were listening to them. K? So in addition to getting to know our ministries, we created a rock point person. Does your staff know who to connect with if they have questions? For us, that person is me. And I know this sounds like a lot and we joked when we listened to that song yesterday. I don't know if you all remember that AI song, it's, you know, let me read the manual for you. In reality, I can't expect my staff to go read the manual, be able to find what they're looking for and not find too much of what we don't want them to look for, right, and solve their problem. So I became that staff point person. There were times where we were like crazy busy and I would go from an empty schedule to a full week. But I can tell you that that process has gotten so much better. And now they'll call me, they'll shoot me a quick Teams message and they're quick to ask me a question. And by having one point person, I'm able to ensure that our staff feels supported. Again, we're keeping with that trusting relationship that we have going and it ensures that we're getting the correct and consistent information. That bad guy with a telephone isn't happening because it's me giving the info. So this has helped us immensely. The next thing we did is we updated our onboarding process. I can't even begin to tell you how bad our onboarding process was. We had a thirty minute one size fits all approach to onboarding from pastors to an administrator that's gonna be in Iraq All Day long. That does not work. I don't know about you but that's crazy to expect all the things that they need to know to fit into a thirty minute session. So now onboarding is dynamic and it's based on their ministry role. Remember we've gotten to know our ministries so we know what tools, what processes they have, what are they using so we can focus on those when we do our onboarding when we hire somebody new. We're now breaking up that training into multiple sessions. Typically I drop I'll do one when they first start and it's big picture. And then I will wait every couple weeks and I'm gonna give them a new one. This allows them to not get overwhelmed. It helps keep that trusting relationship and then they get to work in the tool and come up with their own questions that they would like me to cover when we're onboarding. I also always include rock background. This is kind of just a thing that I'm just so passionate about rock that I have to tell everybody that it's just such a great tool. However, it has helped because I cover things about how customizable it is. The staff that have had this new onboarding process are the first staff that will come up to me and say, hey Karen, do you think Rock could do this? And they're the ones that are dreaming about how we could change our processes. It's not taking us starting that conversation anymore. They're coming to us. And I put a lot of that on that part of the conversation in their first onboarding. I also always cover what we use Rock for. Most of your staff probably don't know that answer. If I asked some of my seasoned staff today if our website is built on Rock they wouldn't be able to tell you the answer to that, right? They have no clue that the reason when internal Rock goes down and our website go down, it's because they're connected. They've got nothing. So I always include that as well. We've started offering continued training at the crossing. We have the more we empower our staff, the more engaged they will be with RAC. If you make them comfortable with the tool, they're going to use it. So we do this now in several ways. One, we offer in personal trainings. We have a Rock University Library. We're gonna go through each of these in a little bit more detail. We have what's called Staff News. And we use Loom training videos. So in person trainings, we typically offer those roughly two to four times a year. We do cater these to whatever season we're in and the specific audience. Some examples that we've done, we've done ones for our administrators and they had a whole series and we covered communications and data views and reports and other things that they're using on a regular basis. But we've also done training for our pastors on logging pastoral care. So that was something very specific to them. We also have seasons where we're doing serve starting points and it's where people can take tours of all of our serving opportunities that we have at the crossing. Well these are times that we'll highlight connections for all of our staff that are in charge of connections because it just ensures they're gonna use the tool and they're gonna use it correctly. One thing that we do that's different is I typically for these, depending on my audience, I will try to find times when these groups are already meeting. Your pastors are not gonna wanna come to a whole separate rock training and sit there for an hour and a half. They're just not gonna wanna do that. So can you take five or ten minutes out of a pastor's meeting and honor their time? What better way to serve somebody than honor their time and just teach them a little snippet or give them a little tip of what will help them do their role better. Need longer trainings? We offer those multiple times. Now we have a larger staff so this is also a little bit of a necessity. But we offer multiple trainings and we typically try to shoot for different days of the week and different times. If I can't make Wednesday at 01:00, if you only offer Wednesday at 01:00 I'm never gonna be able to go. So we try to offer multiple days and times every time we do that. But the most important thing that I will say that we do whenever we do these trainings is we have somebody that the audience trusts in the room. Maybe that's you. In most cases it is me because again, I am that rock person. I'm the person training our staff, they're coming to me with questions so I'm gonna do the trainings. However, there are times, like we had that pastoral training that we took the five to ten minutes out of a meeting, we had a pastor give the vision and the why so that way when I came in it wasn't me just suddenly telling them this is what they needed to do and why they needed to do it. It was that trusted voice that those pastors needed to hear from. So I mentioned a Rock University Library. This is a page that you're seeing here that is on our internal Rock. It's on our Staff Connect section of our database. And in here we have a bunch of links. Now don't go out there and recreate the wheel. The first eleven that you're seeing here are actually direct links to the Community Rock RMS page. We have them searching for people. There's links to how to send an email, data views and reporting. This is actually how I got to where I am today. Right? I would go to this page. I had no clue how to find the ROC community page. But I would go here and I would just watch video after video. You're gonna have some staff that if you just give them the tools, they're going to jump in. We've also created some of our own content. So everything you see under Connections Training is actually our instance. I find that there are times where our staff can look at some of those Rock You videos and they feel a little disconnected from it because it looks different than our instance. And so in those instances I do try to record our own things and just try to make them as timeless as I can so that way I don't have to keep recreating them. Staff news. So we take a unique approach to communicating with our staff. And by unique approach I mean we don't send them a single email or text unless it's an emergency. We will post staff news on our internal rack. We actually have a workflow that our staff can go ahead and fill out requests. Our communications teams approve them and they get added here. We ask our staff to check staff news once to twice a day. I typically recommend two, once in the morning, once in the evening. That way you're getting all of the things that get posted. But this is a spot where we can post HR updates, important staff updates. Like today we just got one that they're fixing our AC in various different parts of our buildings next week. We can post in the IT updates, I'll add special trainings in those if I want all the staff to watch them, sign ups, birthday celebrations, you name it, it can go here. We don't send them emails. If we force them into Rock to get the information, they're going to use the tool. We just the more we can put in here, the better we are. So I've mentioned a couple times training videos. I do use a platform to make these. This is called Loom. Loom is a fabulous training platform. You can record your screen. You can put yourself on there if you want. I never ever do that, but you can. And so you can record your voice. Sometimes I don't even record my voice at all. And I'll record a quick thirty second video that I can send to whatever staff member has a question. And that helps answer their question, and they know how to do it. We do personally pay for an account. If you pay for an account you can actually download the videos, upload them to Vimeo or wherever you want. They're your videos. You also aren't limited to time with the paid account. But you can actually get a free account. You're limited to five minutes and then you can get links to your videos that you can send out to your folks. Like I said, I put them in staff news, sent them in emails. They're on our Rack all those connections trainings on our Rack University page, those are all recorded from here. They do have AI too that's phenomenal at putting chapters in and giving some summaries also. So the last thing that I can say has made the biggest impact for our team is we have made process updates. Remember those pain points. What better way to get people using Rock than to fix those pain points with Rack, right? Put things in there. Rack is always changing and adding new plugins. So is there a plugin that you can now use that will get something out of another service and into Rack. The more your people are using it, the more they're not even gonna look elsewhere for solutions. We also started visiting old processes. We've been on Rack for about eight years. So there are processes that were pretty out of date. There's new features. Rock is always changing. And so we needed to update our processes to fix some of those pain points. If you aren't sure where to start, my recommendation to you is to think global. Is there something that you can add that would help serve your staff at large? It's all about building the momentum. As you start fixing processes you'll get more and more things and people are gonna get excited and they're gonna start asking you for fixing them. And lastly, again, I can't stress asking questions enough. You're gonna be so surprised on what your folks are doing. Another little side story, just this summer we have a softball team that meets all summer long. It's like 156 men, 50 women. They make all these teams. And as I was making those registrations, knowing that they don't use groups, they don't use anything else, all they do is have this registration, I quickly thought, I wonder how they administrate this. Like, there can't be an easy way that they're doing it because they're not using any of the tools in Rack to do it. So I asked the question. And sure enough, they were using paper and pencil and they were typing out the teams and sending them to all the coaches, and they were having to communicate all the people's contact information. Well, I quickly said, well, what if I can give you a solution in Rack? I didn't have to build anything crazy. Right? There's already group placement in Rack. You can already have group leader toolboxes. That's all built in features. But they had no clue that that was a resource that they could use to make their jobs easier. So they used that needless to say this summer and have been blown away by how much simpler it is. One thing that I really want to stress though is just because we can make things fancy does not mean that we should. In fact, I would argue that how fancy it is should match the audience that's using it. So this picture on the left is a picture actually of our ministry request process that you're seeing there. It looks pretty busy, right? Like a little complicated. I'm not gonna give my pastors that tool to start adding all of their events. They're just gonna shut down on me and be like, nope, too hard, right? But if I want them to log some pastoral care, I'm gonna use the thing on the right because it's super easy. They don't have to think about how they need to enter the info. Just a little overview of some big processes that we've adjusted that triggered our staffing engagement to increase. One, we implemented the room management plugin. Room reservations was a really big pain point for us. We were using an outside source. Only a few of our staff members had access. No one could see the reservations. No one knew what rooms were booked. And so we, about two years ago, implemented the room management plugin and that was a game changer because now all of our staff have some sort of access. And even better, we can set security on that. So again, I'm not giving my pastors the full gamut but they can book a meeting space. They don't have to go walk up to an admin to do that anymore. Our ministry request process. This was a process that we had that had it was a fully email process going back and forth with all the support people and everything. It was a hot mess. And I actually make all of our event registrations so I felt that pain a whole lot. And so we actually moved that all into Rock. That was that picture that I showed you on that left side of the previous slide. Our Pastoral Care Step program. We had an issue where our pastors were meeting with folks but they would only be able to add private notes to track that. Well, the next pastor would meet with them and they would have no clue that this person was given action steps by the previous pastors. So this allowed them, we started a step program where they could fill out a simple form, it would add timeline notes, but all of our pastors now have access to this step program and they can see what did the previous pastor tell this person, what is their next action steps, is there any important things that I need to know. They can log hospital visits, home visits, pastoral meetings, and funeral information. I will say our pastors are probably our least likely users of RAC. Since February they've entered almost 400 pastoral care steps because the tool fit them. Right? It's simple. So the last thing that I would like to encourage you to make if you haven't done so or if you're not on the Rock team to ask your Rock team for is merge templates. The more that we can keep our data in Rock, the better. We were exporting camp things like crazy. We had 13 registrations that made up summer camp and they were just one after another getting exported to Excel over and over and over again. And so we made some merge templates. Now they have bus rosters. Now they have first aid lists. Now they have those kind of things. We have dashboards so they can see all 13 registrations in one screen instead of having to go to the individual ones. So the more you can keep your data in ROC, the better off you're gonna be. So what have we seen through these changes? Our staff is just more comfortable with rock. We've had way more engagement with rock overall. Our staff is coming to us with ideas, making them our advocates. In fact, we have now a form on our website because they were coming to us with so many ideas. We had to find a way to be able to track all the things. And so these are the same people that used to tell us that their outside tools were easier. Now they're asking, hey, can Rock do this instead of me using this other thing? And with full transparency it feels like everybody feels so much more supported. We do feel more like we're on a unified front. It's not us versus them. We're all in this together, and they know that they have our team's support whenever they're working through things. That's all I have for you today.