Before you go
High quality staff training leads to a successful summer for staff and children alike. For most camps, staff arrive one, maybe two, weeks before the kids arrive. A good amount of information can be covered in this time, but the information may not be getting absorbed as well as it could have from home.
These staff have left home, traveled to a beautiful new place, and just met tons of new friends doing the exact same thing. All of this newness and excitement can distract from some of the very important training that needs to happen in order to keep everyone safe and successful.
Virtual Staff Meetups
Help reduce some of those jitters and nerves in the early weeks by hosting staff meet ups virtually, or in person. Have former staff lead, without camp directors, so that staff can ask all their questions. Encourage the staff who are leading to play ice breakers or host virtual games like camp trivia or charades.
These opportunities will allow counselors to walk in feeling more relaxed knowing they already have friends and connections. Their social ease will increase their focus during staff training.
Mentorship
Your former staff are so important. Assign returning staff to a handful of new counselors. Have the returners reach out to the new hires to chat over text, phone call or even in person, if location allows. Encourage these mentors to continue to check in on their mentees throughout training and the rest of summer. Provide a financial bonus to the mentors for each member of their first-timer crew that made it through the summer successfully.
Pre -Training
Take some of the sessions from training and turn them into virtual content. Run live virtual training if your team has the capacity, or just record yourself or a team member and share the recording out to your staff. Have them answer some post viewing questions to encourage active engagement with the materials you are sharing.
For a lot of staff there is a significant amount of time from when they get hired to when they step foot on camp, so it is important to find ways to keep momentum going and prepare them for their summer ahead. Aside from the three opportunities above, here are other opportunities to engage with staff before summer starts:
- Facebook page - closed group where new and old staff can introduce themselves
- Staff specific emails - videos, pictures, packing lists, FAQs and more
- Virtual camp tour - have full-time staff host a live event where they take a tour of camp
- Book club - encourage continual development by having staff read a book together
Engaging with staff before they get to camp will give them the support they need to enter camp with confidence. Rather than pulling up feeling like a fish out of water, they will have already seen pieces of camp, learned more about a day in the life, and made friends they will spend their summer with. The assurance they have will make the remainder of training more digestible and therefore make staff more successful all summer long.
