Assessing the Year's Best Practices for Staff Development.

Fall is an excellent time for camp professionals to review the past year. Before experiencing the distractions of camper recruitment and while the memories and experiences are fresh in your mind, take a moment to review your notes from the season that just ended and set goals for the upcoming year.

In my travels this summer, I encountered various practices that attempted to improve the collective practice we call "excellence in camping." As you survey this last season, you might consider some of these practices and fit them into an overall plan for staff development and planning.

Tracking Staff

The most common complaint that I heard this year about staff was how difficult it is to find qualified male staff, a challenge that has been with us for the past several years. Maintaining a high return rate for good staff ought to be a priority for every camp director. Establishing ongoing communication with staff outside of camp can be part of the recruiting process for next year. Here are some tips to make your contact more effective:

* The Internet is one great way to stay in touch with those staff members that you would like to have return to your camp next year.

* Sending newsletters via e-mail is acceptable, but keep in mind general contact cannot replace personal communication.

* If the staff person has started school, a new job, or a new relationship, convey genuine interest.

* The supervisor on your staff who worked closely with the staff member you are trying to stay in touch with should be the one to make personal contacts. Unless you, as the director, had a direct affiliation with the staff member, the communique is more powerful coming from a peer who knew the staff member during the camp session.

* Don't forget to acknowledge staff members' birthdays or other important anniversaries.

Staff Evaluations

To help you discern which counselors should be the focus of your recruiting efforts for the following year, gather your key staff together and jointly rate the performance of your counseling staff. Create a simple rating system that prioritizes the degree to which you would like to see certain staff return. Those that are high on the priority list should get more attention during the off-season.

You might also consider doing what a handful of camps are now doing -- instituting a full-fledged staff evaluation program. Holding formal staff performance reviews during the camp session helps motivate your staff while giving your supervisory staff clear performance guidelines to follow. A staff evaluation program that is well planned is clearly a "best practice" that any camp pursuing high standards needs to consider.

Setting up a well-defined, effective staff evaluation system takes time and planning. Here are some guidelines:

* Pick three to five areas of staff performance. These might be camper relationships, group or cabin management, work ethic, personal management, etc.

* Establish specific behaviors under each area or category of performance. These should be stated in "video language," meaning they need to be stated in such a way that the person listening or reading the guidelines can picture what he or she should be doing to conform to the guidelines. In other words, specific behaviors need to have action words (verbs) as part of their descriptors.

* Set SMART goals! The criteria for evaluation needs to be specific, measurable, attainable, reasonable, and must occur in a specific time frame. An example of a smart goal or guideline under the area of camper relationships would be "knows the names of all campers and is aware of their personal favorite camp activities and hobbies."

* Develop a simple, universal rating system. The five-point system seems to work best. Other camps have avoided numbers, substituting a word for each rating, like the following: outstanding, very good, solid, below par, or unacceptable.

Training pointers

A staff evaluation system cannot be properly implemented without significant training of the individuals who will be evaluating the staff. Face-to-face feedback sessions, while extremely valuable, need a lot of preparation before your supervisory staff will feel able to "enter the fray" and have those delicate conversations.

Let's face it, most of us avoid confrontation and a staff evaluation program is actually a systematic, formalized method of confronting the staff with feedback about their performance. That confrontation may have positive and negative elements, but it is a confrontation nevertheless. Here are some training tips for executing a staff evaluation program:

* An evaluation is a guide for a conversation Plan on doing a check-in with staff that focuses on a qualitative rather than numerical rating.

* Evaluators must walk into the face-to-face session with good information. It is essential to get out and record data in a systematic way.

* Other senior staff members can provide valuable information about the performance of the general staff.

* Counselors should walk out of the face-to-face meeting with a clear idea of what they do well, what they need to improve, and when the evaluator or supervisor will follow up with them.

* Any serious, unacceptable behavior should be discussed with a counselor immediately.

* The overall system should be presented in a positive way. You may want to describe the evaluation system as a positive motivator to help everyone reach his or her maximum potential.

* Some directors attach a bonus to the performance while others simply give feedback. What you do depends on your own philosophy.

Professional Development

Creating a camp that delivers a quality program in an environment that is both emotionally and physically safe and responsive to parents, campers, and staff is no small feat. Consider that you have only, at best, eight weeks to "get it right." With the kinds of pressures and service demands, everyone involved in camp needs as high a skill level as possible. This might include learning better ways to train and evaluate staff and enhancing communication among your key staff members. Now is the time to review what the skill levels are among your staff and plan for ongoing communication and professional development.

Bob Ditter is a licensed clinical social worker specializing in child, adolescent, and family therapy. He supervises content for Bunk1.com