“Donna, will you work on the mission program?”
“Well, I guess so.”
“Good. It’s all settled then.”
That’s a conversation almost guaranteed to lead to disaster—unmet expectations, missed deadlines, overspent budgets, and angry, disappointed, or burned-out workers.
Consider the questions not addressed:
What does work on mean? Chair a committee? Serve on a committee? Do all the work?
What does mission program include? A particular project now underway? A conference? The total mission effort for the church?
When is this program to be done? On a continuing basis? For a year? By next Thursday?
How much time will I need to put into the program in order to be effective? Will the fact I can attend only evening meetings be a problem?
To whom will I be responsible? The minister? The board? The Sunday school superintendent?
Are there volunteers lined up? Is there a budget to work within?
Do I need special skills or information that I don’t have yet? Where can I get those?
When these questions aren’t asked and answered, we start to hear, “I thought you were doing that,” “You needed it today?” or “I didn’t know I was supposed to check with you.”
Why we don’t ask
Many of us active in churches, however, have some hang-ups about asking these questions or pinning down the details.
If I’m doing the asking, I may not want to carry on the conversation so long that Donna has time to change her mind after she says yes! Or I may need to hurry to make other calls on my list.
If I’m being recruited, especially if I’ve been trained to accommodate others, it takes a monumental effort not to say yes immediately to a request for help.
That’s where job descriptions come in.
A few years ago, to shore up our volunteers and programs, our church applied a standard business practice. We developed job descriptions for our standing committees and certain individual tasks.
Not everyone was immediately enthusiastic about writing up job descriptions for church work. After all, it is time consuming and, to some people, too cut-and-dried for church activities.
But we have learned that good procedures, drawn up and understood by the people involved, make for smoother operations and more energetic volunteers. As our chairman reported after the first job descriptions were written, “People want to know what’s expected of them. When they understand a job, they are more willing to say yes.”
The descriptions also go on helping long after people have been recruited. Recently, while chairing a steering committee budget session, I realized that I did not know – and neither did anyone else on the committee – whether the steering committee was simply to collect the individual committees’ budget requests or to edit those requests and submit a total recommended budget to the Session. We wandered aimlessly during the meeting, all feeling at sea.
The next day I checked the steering committee’s job description and discovered our responsibility is to develop a total budget. Having something in writing settled the question.
Another benefit: If two committees are stepping on each other’s toes, job descriptions can settle the dispute without offending individuals. As one member of our volunteerism committee noted, “job descriptions are a subtle way of controlling overlap.”
Introducing the idea
How do you present the idea of job descriptions to others in your church?
The vocational make-up of the congregation might have an effect on acceptance. My church has a large percentage of university administrators and school personnel in its leadership. On the positive side, many of these people are accustomed to operating with job descriptions. On the other hand, some want their church volunteer time to be free of paperwork; these people have more than enough bureaucracy at their workplace. So they made sure (often by complaints!) that the job descriptions never became top priority.
Regardless of the church’s make-up, however, it’s important to have the backing of the minister and, if possible, the ruling lay body.
Our church got started by sending several members to a workshop on mobilizing volunteers. I recommend sending a cadre of delegates. Frequently one delegate attends a meeting, has a great experience, comes back, and gives a three-minute report. Everyone says, in effect, “Sounds fine; thank you,” and moves on to other business. But because we’d sent several delegates, we had a whole group ready to improve volunteerism in our church, and developing job descriptions was one method.
Another way to introduce job descriptions would be to develop one with a new committee starting a project. If the person in charge leads the committee through the writing of a job description and keeps referring to it when people ask, “Who does that?” and “When should I have this ready?” the group can serve as a model.
Writing the descriptions
We learned early that it’s not enough to say to committee chairpersons, “Write a job description for your work.” A few may oblige, but most tend to put that assignment at the bottom of their agendas. If I have a choice between planning a mission fair that’s two weeks away and writing how to set one up, unless I’m a highly structured person who always makes lists first, I will opt for action, not procedural exercises.
So we scheduled a meeting in which the only item of business was explaining the purpose of job descriptions and writing them. In that gathering we first gave the rationale: “We will be better able to match people with particular jobs because we will know what each job entails,” and “It will be easier for you to find volunteers.”
Second, we reminded people of the problems that occur when one person retires from a volunteer role and another takes over. Often the outgoing person is so accustomed to the procedures that he or she forgets to tell the new person many basic details. That argument hit home, because almost everyone in the group had been in the situation of trying to do a new job without adequate orientation.
Third, we showed that a person does not have to be a personnel specialist to write a job description. We passed out a standard form, on which committees filled in the needed information. (See box for samples.)
Some specific tips:
- As an old English major, I suggest you make verbs precise: “prepare,” “enlist,” and “provide,” for example.
- A clear statement of who is responsible for preparing the budget and handling the expenditures encourages up-to-date financial information. It also discourages individuals from paying for supplies that are provided for in the budget.
- For an individual’s job description, state the time needed to perform the work. The most misleading words in the world may well be, “It won’t take any time at all.” People often accept a volunteer job and then become resentful as well as tired from the unexpected commitment of time. A deadline for one-time jobs helps a chairman keep people on target. I once asked an artist friend to make our church’s main entrance more inviting. She jumped at the opportunity. We met to measure the area to be repainted and decorated. I listened to her ideas. I gave her names of people who might help. I checked with her regularly on progress. I included her oral report to me in my monthly written report to the committee. I thought I was being a great chairman. But the project never materialized. Why not? I didn’t set a deadline. This person was busy and other projects with specific deadlines kept taking precedence. I thought because there was no absolute deadline, I shouldn’t set an artificial one. I was wrong.
- List what interests and skills are needed. An usher committee chair needs to have a sense of organization, willingness to recruit, and persistence (because the commitment lasts through December). A one-Sunday-only usher, however, needs only get his or her shoes on in time to show up twenty minutes before the service—with a smile. The virtues here are dependability and friendliness.
- For a committee’s description, state the extent of the committee’s authority—what decisions the group can and cannot make. For example, if one women’s circle decides to put on a program for the entire women’s association without checking with the association board, it may set up a conflict of dates and personalities. If everyone in the association knows that the board sets the calendar, this problem should not occur.
- A committee’s job description should include resources available to the committee members: the minister, a person in the community who works in the field, other committees, facilities, or books.
“Annual report ramrod”
The completed job descriptions were assembled into an officers’ handbook, which was given to all committees and officers. This book also contains staff job descriptions and a statement of our church’s overall goals. In the two years since the material was distributed, it has been referred to repeatedly, especially when the question, “Who is responsible?” comes up.
Each year, committees are asked to revise their own job descriptions, because the jobs change and also because people gradually improve their job-describing skills. The notebook is in loose-leaf form, so new pages easily can be added. The communications committee makes sure new officers receive a handbook and that each committee carries out the annual review.
An example of the usefulness of job descriptions came to me unexpectedly. Our annual report to the congregation, a fifty-page collection of committee and staff reports, is a major undertaking that has at times thrown the office schedule off balance and even has arrived at congregational homes after the annual meeting.
So our new communications committee, after hearing staff and member comments, established a volunteer position: “Annual Report Ramrod.”
The following fall, when I needed a volunteer to fill that position, I simply pulled out the job description and used it to explain the task. The description included items I had completely forgotten since our January decision. And the result of the ramrod following the job description was that no one on staff worked overtime to put the report together, committee reports came in closer to the deadline than before (not a perfect score, but definitely better than before), and we set a standard for future years.
