Tonight, a gazillion people will make New Year's resolutions. A week from now, the fitness clubs will be packed and I suspect fast-food sales will take a slight dip. Before I (or you or you or even you in the blue shirt) make any resolutions, it's best that all of us look at what we learned last year so we do not make the same mistakes again.
My Mistakes and My New Plans
1. Forgetting to schedule someone for sound for the Christmas Eve service. Perhaps if I wasn't Christmas shopping at the last moment, I'd remember to do this. The problem, I'll be honest, is that I like running sound during special services because I have new opportunities to do different stuff. On the other end of the spectrum, my family sits without me during the Christmas Eve service. This year, I'm mapping out all the special/holiday services and scheduling people for them months in advance.
2. Forgetting to update the inventory. Our big stuff is inventoried but not our cables. I never thought much about it until a few weeks ago when a band came in for a special service and needed to borrow some of our cables because they ran short. I trust they returned everything they borrowed. The issue is usually a cable being left or taken accidentally. This year, I'm cataloging cables by type, length, and quantity.
3. Letting my team size drop. I usually run 5-6 people on my a/v team. In the spring, I was down to 3-4 people including myself. The result was the frequency of assignments increased and as people would take off days for family vacations, individual weekly involvement requirements increased over what I like to have for my team members. It wasn't until the fall that I added two more people to my team. My plan for the next year is never let my team size drop that low for that long. No one wants burnout.
4. Double-booking myself on more than one occasion. I've given up trying to keep everything straight in my head. Now I use a daily/weekly planner. My plan for this year is to keep it up to date!
5. Over-committing myself at church. I'm not talking about just audio. How much involvement do you have at church on any given Sunday? When I realized that I viewed a Sunday at church without any responsibilities as "a day off," I knew I had to change the way I was living. I've pulled out of some activities so that issue is resolved. My problem area/plan for 2010 is to STOP VOLUNTEERING FOR EVERYTHING WHEN ASKED! Burnout isn't just in over commitment in one area. Burnout comes with over commitment in total.
What mistakes did you make last year? What are you going to change for 2010?
I'm Chris Huff and I've been working successfully behind a mixer for the last twenty years. Since 2008, I've been helping other sound techs learn all about the art of church audio through behindthemixer.com.
Sound Systems: Design and Optimization, Second Edition: Modern Techniques and Tools for Sound System Design and Alignment
Mixing Audio: Concepts, Practices and Tools
3 Insightful Comments on "The Five Audio Mistakes I Made in 2009"
I know this post is way old, but I just found your blog. Anyways, I wanted to ask about the stuff with keeping the size of your team where it needs to be, and higher. I’ve running into this same problem. Luckily I’m starting to come out of it. What kinds of things are you doing to keep you team roster where it needs to be? What are ou doing to recruit new volunteers? I’m trying to come up with newer/better ways than how we do it, which it’s pretty much just hoping they come to us.
Recruiting new members can be a challenge. There must be people who want to join the a/v tem, there must be people who can commit to the schedule, and there must be a way to see if they are capable.
I found the easiest way of recruiting is advertising. Place a note in the church service bulletin and monthly newsletter that says the a/v team is looking for new team members. Give a contact name, email and/or phone number. You could even give a web site address if you wanted them to first fill out a form. Also, make an announcement during the service. You could even make a short video to be played during the service.
Here are some team forms you could use which should include the application. That is also in a link near the bottom of each page for Team Organization. in short, the application gathers their contact information, availability, and previous related experience. They don’t need to have prior experience if you are willing to train them but if you have one position open and three people apply but only one has prior experience, well you get the idea.
Now it’s time to look at your existing team. Email your team and say "While I am recruiting new team members, I’d like to know if anyone would like to roll off the team." In short, you want to prevent burnout on your team. You might get someone who says, I could use a year off, or six months off. Recruit accordingly.
Keeping the roster where it needs to be… back to what I just said, you need to lookout for burnout. Give people the opportunity to roll off and also let them know they can join the team again when they are ready. Also, look for people who continually arrive late or have continual scheduling issues. It might be time they roll off for a new team member.
I’ve also had people say "I’m moving in a month" and therefore I need to fill that spot.
One last point on recruiting. You might have three excellent recruits but only two openings. You have a few options;
1. Only recruit two and tell the other that when a space is open, you’ll bring them on.
2. Recruit all three but tell the third that due to team size, you can’t place them into regular rotation because too many team members equals too much time between work sessions and that’s not good for building experience and confidence. Instead, give them the option to work as the "go-to" person whenever someone can’t make their scheduled time. For example, Bob will be on vaction that week or Bob called in sick the night before.
Hope this helps. BTW, I checked out your site…very nice…I’ll check it out often.
Thanks for the help man. I’ll talk to the higher ups and see what we might be able to do about an announcement of some type. We’ve been talking for a while about doing a blog for the adult production swtuff for a while and I think we’re about to pull the trigger on that pretty soon, so that could really help with the recruiting stuff. I actually saw the stuff on the bottom of the page right after I commented earlier.
Unfortunately I don’t have any problems with having too many people interested right now, but I’ll keep the advice in mind WHEN we get to that point.
Anyways, thanks for the compliment on my blog too. And for the comment on the post. I just replied to it.
Well, thanks again for the advice.