In this short video, you can get feel for how the Canadian campus staff do their operations training.

Russ Martin – director of campus operations in Canada – talks about some very simple habits his staff have developed:

• For a team to function well, there must be smooth, well defined modes of communication.
• Sharing ideas – even sharing failures – is a must for collaboration.
• One team can learn so much from other teams.  Ideas should not be hidden.  Wheels should not be re-invented.
• A threaded conversation (such as a message board or Facebook wall posts) is often most effective for sharing ideas.
• Russ trains his staff to use a threaded conversation rather than email in most cases.
• Canadian teams have common resource pools online where they can all share documents.
• Using online documents such as Google Docs provides a great solution for saving meeting notes.
• Rather than emailing a document as an attachment, the Canadians upload the document to a common resource pool and then share the link.  Subtle but powerful difference.

All these practices tend to reduce email inbox overload and promote the highest level of interactivity and sharing. Can all this help increase capacity of field teams to reach more people for Christ?  You bet!  It’s happening even now in Canada.

All of the Canadian teams use Google Docs.  If anything, this has been their “killer app” – the tool which has been the most helpful to enhance team communications.  Google Apps for Non Profits has also been a huge boost for them.  These tools are free, easy to deploy, easy to use and allow ultra fast sharing of critical resources.

Here’s the direct link to the video.