Life on a church staff can be hectic. You feel the need to reach as many people as possible with the Gospel and to serve your community.

However, you could use more "hands to the plow" to get all the work done.While adding to your staff may not be an immediate possibility, there are ways to increase the capacity of your current team.

Tip 1: Offer short training moments

During a staff meeting, provide tips on how to effectively manage your time, prioritize tasks, manage projects, lead teams and more. The content might be a refresher for some staff members and entirely new information to others.

Regardless, those short training moments can align the team and help everyone become more productive.

Tip 2:Teach how to delegate more effectively

Those who lead ministry departments or have direct reports need to be excellent at delegation. Coach them on how to identify what tasks they can and should delegate, how to decide who should handle each task, and how to delegate.

This frees up the leader to do more strategic thinking and handle complex efforts while empowering others to manage the details.

Tip 3: Provide a consistent onboarding process for new employees

What tends to happen is the new person fills out enough paperwork to satisfy HR and legal requirements, then we throw him into his new role. His predecessor may or may not have left any documentation about regular tasks and how to accomplish them.

You might not have him set up to access the church's internal network files, email or other tools he'll need. That doesn’t help a new staff member start off in a productive manner.

Instead, create a checklist of what every new employee will need within the first week. Get those items ready in the time between him accepting the job offer and starting work.

Tip 4: Leverage technology

Train your team on how to manage email, use project management tools such as Asana or Basecamp, and how to save files where others can easily find what they need. If your church uses a church management system (ChMS), provide training on how to use that system.

Tip 5: Develop an annual church calendar

Create a calendar of events (including weekly services) and obtain approval from senior leadership on what you'll do as a church for the upcoming year. Use this calendar to plan months in advance for events and special projects.

By creating the calendar and discussing upcoming projects as a team, you'll quickly discover potential scheduling conflicts and times where you may have too much going on. When you learn that before asking the pastor to approve the calendar, you have time to work out any conflicts and rearrange event dates to make the schedule more manageable.

These are a few examples of how to help the entire staff become more productive and accomplish more together. Our shared goal of reaching people with the Gospel is too important not to seek out ways to increase our capacity.