Staff Meeting – Pro Tip

A tip by Kimberly Mallory of Camp Gilead given during SCampCon 3.

Now we all know the problem. We have a staff meeting, maybe yours are in the afternoon or the morning, or maybe even in the evening. Here at camp Gilead, ours are in the early morning.

And I would find that my staff was barely rolling out of bed and coming to staff meetings and they weren’t quite ready to have all that I had ready to unpack for them. So I kept asking them, “What would help you, in regards to staff meetings, what would make it easier for you to engage and be ready to go for the day?”

Overwhelmingly they said, “More food..have food“. And I thought that’s strange because we’re going to have breakfast in just a few short minutes, maybe an hour or so. So I thought about how I could provide some food for them besides the usual coffee and occasional snack.

I decided to reach out to some of our camp partners, donors, camp parents, staff parents, staff alumni, and asking them if they would sponsor a staff meeting.

Now, like I said, our staff meetings are at 7:10 in the morning. That’s pretty early. And so I took a gamble and I told them, “If you get here 20 minutes early (so we’re talking about 6:45 in the morning), I will have food for you every single morning.

I began to enlist different friends of Camp Gilead that would sponsor, or adopt, a morning. And it was so fun to see what they would bring. We had things like pizza (even at 6:45 am), muffins, cookies…someone came in and made waffles. We had bacon. We had Oreos. We had a wide variety of different items. Sometimes it was cereal and milk. Sometimes it was yogurt parfaits. I just wanted to provide something to get them going, to get their blood pumping in the morning.

And it was so fun to see the staff not only wake up earlier to get there at 6:45, but as they got there, they began to engage with each other. And by the time I was ready to start the staff meeting, they had already talked to their friends and they were ready to engage with the information that was coming to them for that day.

Yes, it took a lot of work on my part to find people who were willing to come, but the results that we were able to see were a huge payoff for the work that it took.

And I was surprised at how far people drove that early in the morning to come and bring food for our staff. Some people would even send me gift cards and then I would go purchase the food. It was very, very valuable for us, and we continue to do it each year.