We are very excited to announce the formation of a Human Resources (HR) Committee of the Board of Trustees. As trustees elected by you, the congregation, the board feels a strong duty to ensure our members have their voice heard in all areas of governance and that there are policies in place to ensure this. The purpose of this committee will be to assist the senior minister in determining staff roles, job descriptions and evaluations and will include input on resume review when positions become open.
The need for this committee became apparent during a governance review where we found there are no current policies in place for congregational input regarding those decisions. While we have excellent policies in place for our current ministerial position that support and direct quality staffing, we have found there are no current policies in place for congregational input regarding those decisions. The first duty of this committee will be to create policies to ensure decisions regarding staff are made in collaboration.
We realize it is going to be essential to the future of our church to have many ways for people to be a part of our community. Having in person services, classes and groups has always been what we do but, going forward, we are going to need to maintain and improve the way we reach people online. This multi-platform approach requires a revisioning effort to make sure the jobs we have and the employees performing those jobs have the skills to meet the needs of the future. Not only is that a lot of work for one person to take on, but we feel strongly it isn’t a good idea for one person to have all the authority over a significant aspect of how our church functions.
We will be meeting with Rev. Amy as the senior minister to determine what is working and what changes might be necessary for the continued success of our church. For example, at our first meeting we discussed how we will be creating evaluation procedures and creating a separate interview process for the HR committee to use in tandem with the minister’s existing evaluation criteria. After the employee evaluations are complete, we will come together and compare our results. This will ensure there is no one person or branch of our organization that has complete control over these important decisions.
We also discussed the need for church member input into the hiring process. When a position opens or notice is given by a staff member the HR committee will take on the initial vetting of applicants to determine the top candidates for the senior minister to interview. This will have a twofold purpose of ensuring the congregational input as well as freeing up some of the senior minister’s time to be devoted to the more creative responsibilities of that role.
The pandemic has taught us all so much about our need for community and being together. It has also taught us the way we meet that need has been forever changed and we need to change with it. We continue to welcome your input, comments and questions as we move through this process and are delighted to be creating policy that will ensure your voice, the membership, is always heard.