Church Custodial Management (part 2 of 10)

2014 12-December 27 (2120) Barcelona; Nave of the Sagrada Familia

Give tools & equipment & training

  • A church is responsible for providing its custodians with all tools necessary to do his/her job. A custodian cannot be expected to perform duties well without the necessary tools, resources, and training.
  • Encourage the custodians to wear out a machine before it rusts out. Challenge them to really use up a piece of equipment by using it heavily.
  • Training is one of the most valuable and most overlooked tools for custodians. They need cleaning supplies and equipment, but they can also benefit a great deal by being trained in good and new techniques.

 

Lead On!

Steve

 

Church Custodial Management (part 1 of 10)

Hire well

  • The most important part of managing a custodial staff is to hire well.
  • Hire for attitude, not aptitude. You can train a willing, cooperative person to have better skills, but a person’s attitudes are nearly impossible to change.
  • While custodians are not highly paid, there are numerous benefits the church can provide to them:
    • Clothing: the church can buy uniforms so they don’t have to spend money on work clothes
    • Meals: Wednesday suppers can be provided at no cost to the custodial staff, and often there are enough leftovers from other meals during the week to feed custodians and many other staff members
    • Benevolence: when a custodian has a large medical, housing, or other need, the church can step in and help take care of all or part of that need. It will engender loyalty on the part of the custodian and depending on how it is handled, it might not be taxable to the custodian.

 Lead On!

Steve

Financial Office Contact Info

What is the email address for your Finance Office? Too many times churches use the name(s) of staff. It’s good and necessary for your Finance Office staff to have an email address for their professional needs. However, your Finance Office needs a generic email address for companies use for sending invoices or acknowledgements or other financial docs.

I recommend that every church create a fictional person which will be the point of contact for all routine Finance Office correspondence, snail or email. This “person” is:

  • First Name: Finance
  • Last Name: Office
  • Email finance@church.org (where “@church.org” is your church’s email server)
  • Address: your church’s main mail address

Creating this will ensure that whenever there is staff turnover in the Finance Office, you won’t have to change email addresses on all the various accounts the church has with vendors. This also creates a standard by which everyone in the office (and even the membership) use with vendors to get bills sent to the church. This keeps things simple – simple is good!

 

Lead On!

Steve

Monthly Employee Meetings

Every employee must know on a monthly basis how she or he is performing according to the supervisor. Saving all the info and “dumping” on the employee at the annual meeting is unfair to the employee, the supervisor, and the organization. Monthly meetings are a must for the health and well-being of all. These monthly conversations will also help the organization progress faster and farther.

Some managers are fearful of what to do and say in a monthly meeting. The following is a “Staff Development Conversation Guide” from North Point Ministries in Alpharetta, GA. All rights to this material belong to them. This is a tool they use to help their supervisors know how to craft these meetings. I appreciate that church sharing their resources.

Goal: Ensure that every employee has routine conversations with his/her boss allowing for a full bilateral dialog about all aspects of the job and permits discussion about the current situation and his/her personal and professional development.

Method:

  1. Every staff member should have a one-on-one meeting with his or her boss on a monthly basis. Those conversations should be designed to discuss one or more of the items mention in the goal above.
  2. The following five questions are examples that can be used to capture information, emotion, and foster conversation.
    1. What are you most excited about right now?
    2. What’s most challenging?
    3. What’s bugging you?
    4. What do you wish you could spend more time one?
    5. What can I do to help?
  3. Additionally, here are five questions/statements which can be used periodically to allow conversation around the work environment, personal growth, and the staff member’s future desires.
    1. What changes, in areas outside of your control, could be made to improve your job?
    2. Let’s identify specific growth area and develop a plan for improvement.
    3. Do you feel ready for more responsibility? If so, what type?
    4. Let’s discuss your priorities for your job for the next 6 months.
    5. What changes would you suggest to help make our team function better overall?
  4. Managers should have some written method to capturing critical elements of the conversations and actions that come from each one-on-one meeting.

 

Lead On!

Steve

Email Address Format

The format for email addresses for most companies is firstname.lastname@company.com

However, many churches use the firstinitiallastname@church.org format and that leads to some interesting combinations. Here are some that I’ve collected over the years:

I strongly encourage churches to use the standard format used by most companies and organizations. There are several advantages (you’ve already seen the disadvantages above!).

  • The email contains the full name of the employee which makes it easier for people new to the church to remember the staff person’s name
  • It differentiates between people with the similar names: James Smith and John Smith would have different email addresses (under the older format the church would have to come up with something to differentiate between the two and that can cause confusion to people trying to contact them if they presume they know the church’s email format).
  • Writing an announcement becomes as easy as: “Contact john.smith@church.org for info on the deacon retreat.” You don’t have to write out the contact person’s name because it’s in the email address.
  • You can still have email aliases for the other email addresses that people might use while you train them to use the new email format.

 

Lead On!

Steve

Staff Members’ Meeting on the Church’s Nickel

I received the following question: “Our church budgets $100 per month for meals for ministers. Is it allowable for our pastor and worship director go out to lunch each week for a planning session and have the church pay for both meals every week?”

My reply:
There are two components to this question

  1. Legal
    1. The IRS does not permit an excessive benefit to the staff in a non-profit. A lunch every week is not an excessive benefit if the meal is typical $8-$15 meal.
    2. The IRS does encourage an accountable reimbursement plan. That means that for every expense, there must be a receipt and documentation about who was there and how it related to the church. It can be as simple as “Prospective member lunch with the Smiths” – there is NO need to write a paragraph. If you don’t have the proper receipts, then reimbursements might be considered income for IRS purposes. Documentation is not only good but absolutely necessary.
  2. Church Policy
    1. The church SHOULD care if staff are good stewards or not. My professional opinion is that staff members work alongside each other all day and can meet with each other at any point during the work day and work week. If they want to go out to lunch, then that is NOT a professional expense because they could have had that meeting any other time during that day.

To me this is not a financial matter, it is a personnel matter. I suggest that the personnel manual (and finance manual if you have one) make a statement that “meetings between staff members which have expenses (meal, coffee, etc.) are not reimbursable expenses because staff could have met at the church without incurring an expense” or words to that effect.

I do not know the relationship you have with the pastor

  1. If your relationship is strong and he isn’t threatened, then you can approach him and help him understand that if all staff were to do this it would cost the church tens of thousands a year which could be used for other things.
  2. If the pastor might be threatened by you and this subject, then you have to be willing to leave. You can either approach the pastor with this matter OR you can talk with the personnel and/or financechairleader and ask him/her to address this and to keep your name confidential. If the personnel or finance committeechairleader doesn’t think it is a problem, then drop it. That just means you have higher standards than they do.What they are doing is not illegal or immoral but it does stray into the ethical gray area for churches. And one of my sayings is, “Stay Out of the Gray!”

Lead On!

Steve

The Executive Pastor’s Ministry

Does an executive pastor do any ministry or that position completely subsumed in financial, personnel, and facilities management? Good question and here’s my answer:

  1. “Back office” work is ministry, but at a creative and different level. It is not “just” paperwork. I can’t tell you the number of vendors I’ve talked to about church – and those are doors that are not open to other staff persons. When I’ve called a customer service line and got a call center in India, I knew that they could see they were dealing with a church and that I might be the only Christian that person EVER speaks to in his/her life. Paying bills on time is a HUGE witness to vendors who are sour on church. I used all those things to educate other ministers to help them think outside the box and understand that the minutia they detested really did have a Kingdom impact. Think about this as not “just paperwork” but as opportunities for creative ministry. For instance, every year I shred old financial docs – I leverage that by telling members that they can bring in their stuff to shred (because I really don’t much for the shredder). The senior adults LOVE that they can bring in all their old files from the 1960s. So, what I was doing any way I could use to help others and everyone wins.
  2. The XP ministry is higher and more focused in scope. XPs continue to do the ministry they were doing before but now use those opportunities to train the campus and other pastors so they can learn from the XP. Every XP must seek every chance to teach the next rising generation how to do avoid mistakes and to stand taller on the XP’s shoulders. XPs get to work with a high level of volunteers and members – leaders in their community and businesses who can open doors for the church that most ministers can’t imagine. That can give an XP an opportunity to reach people who would never come to the church, all because the XP is working with high-net worth members or upper management members. Most churches neglect high capacity donors but that needs to a focal point for the Senior & Executive Pastors for both the sake of those people and of the church.
  3. The XP ministry is at a broader level. Not just on a campus but on a larger basis and even, through professional contacts, the XP reaches people across the state and region. People will come to the XP’s church to learn the way that church does things and the XP can teach them so they can replicate what the XP is doing in their own context. Just as the XP needs to follow in the footsteps of others, every XP is also responsible for pulling those behind him or her up to his or her level. This is a leadership position – one that people look up to and want to emulate. This position needs to be worth following, not “just another minister.”

The ministry of the XP is more creative, deeper, higher, and broader than other ministers. It requires more excellent ministers to do this work for the Kingdom.

Lead On!

Steve

How do you define loyalty?

“A strong feeling of support or allegiance” is the dictionary definition.

Many people feel that loyalty is when a person adheres unquestioningly to something or someone. In church work I’ve seen this exemplified when staff and members look to their leader(s) and express support for whatever he or she wants to do. And in return, the leaders expect their staff and most members, to follow whatever they say regardless of what it is. That is loyalty to some, but not to me. To me, that can even be a betrayal of trust, the opposite of loyalty.

Loyalty is when a person supports and has allegiance to a person or principle, but is willing to ask hard questions and not be satisfied with simplistic answers. Loyalty is challenging a leader privately on his statements before (and after) he goes public. Loyalty is being willing to speak truth to power knowing it may cost you your job and career. Loyalty is being constructively critical for the benefit of the leader and of the entire organization.

That kind of loyalty helps your leader be a better leader. A leader may not like this kind of feedback but in the long run it will help him or her. After all, it is better for a leader to hear criticism from members of his own team who want the organization to succeed just as much as the leader. I challenge leaders to invite constructive feedback, not just accolades. Constant praise or at least non-criticism does not help a leader grow.

Be loyal by helping the leader be better to help the church be better through appropriate and constructive private criticism and public support.

 

Lead On!

Steve