5 Tips For Planning Your Church Personnel Needs

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Churches are established to help people – and it takes people to do that work.

The challenge for churches is that most of the workforce is in the form of free labor.

These necessary laborers are what we refer to as volunteers.

Managing Volunteers

Managing volunteer labor creates a dynamic unique to churches and the nonprofit world.

Human resources represent the people who make up an organization’s workforce (paid or volunteer).

Regardless of whether the position is paid or volunteer, an intentional approach must be taken to manage and reward the people who do the work.

Human resource management provides and maintains the appropriate workforce for the organization.

This includes providing the workforce for current needs and planning for the organization’s future requirements.

In a church, this includes both paid employees and volunteer labor.

For example, if your church has a strategic objective to develop a children’s ministry program, it would be essential to include the planning of the staffing and training of the necessary workers to support the program.

This is in addition to the obvious other planning needs, like church budgeting and facility planning.

Every organization is structured differently, but organizing employees and volunteers under one umbrella helps ensure that all people who support the church’s work receive the same level of training and care for the work they do.

This can mean establishing close collaboration between the HR department and the Volunteer department or organizing the management of volunteers within the HR umbrella.

The goal is to create a strategic approach to managing the people who do the church’s work.

5 Tips For Planning Your Church Personnel Needs

1. Identify Position Needs

Planning for the human resource needs of new programs requires systematically thinking about and organizing the activities or tasks required to support the new program.

This includes looking at the possible roles required to run the program.

To do this, take some time to brainstorm and answer the following questions:

What positions would be needed to support this program?

What are the tasks that need to be performed in each position?

How many people do these positions represent?

How often will each of these positions need to be available?

What days and times would someone need to be available to work in these positions?

2. Create Job Descriptions

Every position and every role should have a detailed job description. This document serves as a tool to communicate job expectations and the details of a job.

Whether the role will be performed by a staff employee or a committed volunteer, the details matter. A detailed job description will ensure the job is completed as expected.

This is also a necessary first step when developing employee or volunteer job descriptions.

Let’s Tackle An Example

Suppose your church wants to expand children’s ministry. To help determine the human resource needs to pull it off, try to answer these questions.

What positions would be needed to support this program?

Classroom supervisor
Teacher
Teacher Assistant
Classroom Assistant

What are the tasks that need to be performed in each position?

Classroom Supervisor

Oversee and train teachers.
Manage issues with parents and children.
Act as liaison between children’s ministry and global church planning.

Teacher

Plan for weekly classes.
Prepare lesson plan.
Work with teaching assistants to manage children.

Teacher Assistant

Help teachers manage children.
Work with the teacher to deliver the lesson plans.
Answer parent questions.
Assist children with restroom breaks.

Classroom Assistant

Prepares classroom for weekly sessions.
Organizes materials and supplies.
Cleans and disinfects toys and equipment.

How many people do these positions represent?

These positions represent four people in each classroom. So if there are three classrooms, this will equate to 12 people.

How often will each of these positions need to be available?

Since there is a goal to have each person work twice a month, that would double the number of people needed. This means there would be a 24-person requirement to run a children’s program with three classrooms.

What days and times would someone need to be available to work in these positions?

Children’s ministry is available 15 minutes before and after church services. Workers must be ready when parents drop their children off, so they should plan to be there 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after church. If the church service is from 10:00 to 11:30 am, workers must be there from 9:30 am to 12:00 pm twice a month. This equates to 5 hours a month.

If you are a member of SCM, you can log in here to access an editable copy of a Human Resources Planning form.

3. Plan Worker Training

Now that we know what positions we will need to support this new program, we also need to think about training the workers.

An essential aspect of HR planning is ensuring people receive the proper training to perform job duties.

This includes developing training that orients the employee or volunteer to the organization, the specific area (department) they will be working in, and training on the specific details of performing their job tasks.

For instance, if you have an attendance policy, new hires need to be aware of ministry expectations for showing up to work on time.

Planning for detailed information sharing ensures employees and volunteers are prepared to meet job expectations.

4. Succession Planning

Another vital part of HR planning is to create a succession planning process.

Succession Planning requires identifying leadership potential and training and developing employees and volunteers for increased responsibility.

Organizations become vulnerable when this critical step is neglected.

For example, I worked with a church where the person who managed the children’s ministry stepped down two weeks before a major event.

This created a challenge to fill the roles this person was responsible for at a hectic time of year.

The volunteers pulled together, and things worked out, but it took a couple of years to get another person trained and in place to fill that spot.

The best situation is always to have someone developing for that next leadership level.

5. Management Oversight

Planning for the human resource needs of a church is a crucial step. However, once workers are identified and trained, there needs to be a management process that supports the efforts of both employees and volunteers.

This includes creating an environment that is challenging, fulfilling, and rewarding.

This is done by continually looking for ways to improve the way work gets done and soliciting feedback to learn about the worker experience.

For instance, in the Children’s Ministry example, someone must ensure that employees and volunteers have the resources to perform job responsibilities.