Supporting Seasonal Summer Camp Staff

StaffParticipant ProjectCamper Experience & Program Design

May 18

Hello, dear reader, and thanks for diving into this blog post on supporting your seasonal summer camp staff. I fear I’ve got my soapbox and I’m ready to stand on it! Really, I’m a seasonal staff person who sees a lot of seasonal staff-directed frustration, so I feel fired up about it. I hope to build some perspective, as well as outline what I personally expect (and think it’s rightful for seasonal staff to expect) from camp throughout the summer. As my favorite poet, Nelson Strickland, oft says, “Let’s goooooo!”

Staff Training

Staff training is a juicy time! It’s the first time everyone’s meeting in person, and it’s the first time you, as the director, can strut your stuff and show up intentionally and in line with your mission at camp. It’s also literally the only period at camp during which the whole focus is setting your staff up for success for the summer.

My hot take here is that the most important part of staff training is not to teach everyone everything about everything, but to build trust with your staff and to create clear and obvious support structures that will be present and available to them throughout the summer. To be clear, supporting your staff also means giving them information that will make them feel equipped, so definitely prioritize the “training” aspect as well. Our wonderful member and debate enthusiast Dex (who wrote a couple of blogs, including this one) once said during a call that staff training is training, but onboarding is throughout the whole season. How can we approach our staff with the mindset of continued onboarding throughout the summer while knowing that staff training is only part of the story?

SOME SESSION-planning considerations

Some questions to consider as you build out a training session:

How much does your staff’s performance rely on your training?
How can you prepare them mentally for how much work camp will be?
- Seasonal staff spokesperson and TSCS member Lenny recommends this podcast episode)
What structures can you put in place during training that will support them throughout the summer?
How can you continue onboarding through the summer?

connection (& the boat show)

If I’ve convinced you that a priority is to build trust during staff training, lean into connection-building. This means being as present as possible, intentionally having positive interactions with all of your staff, in as small of groups as possible (as well as in large groups). This also means modeling the vulnerability and boundaries you’re expecting from your staff. Run activities that facilitate more peer-to-peer connections, or sessions during which you might tell your camp story or explain your passion around camp, are going to increase your staff’s buy-in tenfold.

My first summer at Stomping Ground, Jack and Laura ran a session called the Boat Show, which was set up like a late-night talk show and hosted by Stomping Ground’s beloved now-Facilities Manager, George. They told the story of founding camp, shared their priorities as an organization, and let us know a little more about what goes on in the admin side of camp. I cried literal tears! The tears were partly sourced from my love of camp and feeling aligned with the mission, but mostly it was about how refreshing the transparency was and how special it felt, as a first-year cabin counselor there, to be given the time to hear from my directors about WHY they cared so much. So… do something like that!

nighttimes

Nighttimes during staff training are vital. Take advantage of the smaller number of people and ham up your night programs that might become a little diluted with more folks. Get into character, and give your new staff who like attention opportunities to get on stage. After the night program, hang around and give a little bit of time to what’s going on there. Maybe give some folks the opportunity or responsibility to organize an after-party that can take place after any programming. I’ve heard whispers of an incredible staff training slumber party (from before my time at Stomping Ground). Note that these can be imbued with learning experiences for different parts of camp, but they can also just be fun, and that’s valuable too.

Support

In terms of making clear staff supports during training, mention existing supports every day. Name who is good at supporting what (for example, you might have a homesickness aficionado on your leadership team, or you might be the best at helping people avoid burnout when they start to feel it lurking). Emphasize how people can contact you, and then stick to it. If you have professional mental health supports, name them and name them every day. The biggest mistake I’ve seen in any organization that provides optional support for its members is not centering resources available to them. It can create a culture of stigma around using the support, or people may simply forget the support exists!

summary

In summary, during staff training, spend time amping up trust-building activities, savoring organic and unstructured time, making support resources abundantly clear, and giving yourself and your staff grace in knowing that onboarding will continue throughout the summer.

Building Perspective with Your Staff

A big point of contention in the camp world is a reflection on the generational shifts in summer staff. As our seasonal staff is getting younger, there’s a shift in work culture and expectations, and more and more directors are having a difficult time connecting with their seasonal staff. Some trends I’m seeing in the younger staff (in comparison with my late-millennial experience as a summer staff) include shifts towards setting more boundaries and saying no to asks from bosses. I’ve also seen less of an indebted attitude towards camp and workplaces, and more confidence in what they have to offer. I see a shift from grind culture (ESPECIALLY at camp) to a sense of self-preservation and desire for work-life balance. I’m also seeing lots of assumptions being made about Gen Zers that have less to do with generational characteristics, and more to do with what it’s like to be a young adult, navigating workplace expectations for the first time.

All of these are objectively present to varying degrees in lots of different environments, and it’s important to reflect on the type of world that young adults are currently experiencing. The combination of environmental disasters, late-stage capitalism, unliveable inflation, social media, experiencing the pandemic during school/college/early jobs, and vast sense of impending doom has hugely informed young people’s priorities. When so much precarity and uncertainty infiltrate many aspects of peoples’ lives, the aspects that feel concrete and reliable (self, perhaps community) become most worthy of attention, care, and preservation.

This is not to say that older generations have had it easier, I purely think that the “work hard and you’ll be okay” illusion is wearing off. If anything, I find that Gen Zers have focused their energy into creating more intentional spaces dedicated to justice and inclusion at large, which often inserts more intrinsic community and support and makes many aspects of “being” easier. However, it feels important to note that this is an intentional structure that exists thanks to a ton of front-loaded work, as well as intergenerational efforts.

All of this soapbox monologue to say that when I hear people talk about how summer staff are getting “lazier”, I get eager to share some perspective that I’ve gotten from my proximity to younger folks. What do you do with this? I vote to keep it in mind, and examine the space between your staff’s possible career uncertainty and your (potential; I’m not making any assumptions!) comfort and stability in a director role. Dan Weir suggests that younger staff are burnt out as they enter camp. What does it look like to spend time working to help them recharge? Work to question and reframe any “laziness” you might be intuiting and see if it’s actually a respectable notion of self-care and boundaries that you would want your loved ones to honor within themselves. Okay, stepping off my soapbox now, thank you for reading and rumbling.

Discussing Expectations with Your Staff

We love this! This is Hidden Curriculum stuff, it’s informed consent, it’s part of the “mutual selection process” that is hiring, it’s setting everyone up for the most success. So how can you give a thorough understanding of what your expectations are? Describe what an average day’s schedule looks like, outline what the hours look like, be explicit about what’s expected of people and what supports are in place, and also be explicit about what’s lacking and what staff has had trouble with in the past. Some people might peace out once they hear that, but you might get just enough people who, not only are up for the challenge, but also appreciate your transparency and can mirror that back.

When you start talking about expectations, it should be a two-way conversation. Wonderful member Paddy says this should start in your initial interview (which I agree with!). Your staff are giving you a large chunk of time and, while it’s “a job,” camp is pretty invasive when it comes to separating work and life. Staff deserve to know what’s expected of them, and what they can expect from you. They should feel comfortable asking for support, and knowing what kinds of accommodations exist. They should know that you are invested enough in them to make accommodations should they need them. They should feel comfortable saying no to you if they need to. And the same should be true the other way around.

If staff are naming that their expectations include getting to pull all-nighters with their besties while campers are unsupervised, telling them that that can’t happen is going to help them adjust their expectations. It also opens the door for them to get to communicate what expectations don’t seem meet-able to them. Make a habit of encouraging people to ask questions and give feedback. A great tool I’ve learned from Nelson and Jack is to hold a mini feedback session as a debrief to most activities during staff training, and asking for three things that went well and three things that could be improved. Asking like this decreases the responses that are just trying to appease you, and if you apply the feedback, people will see that giving you feedback is actually fruitful and effective.

You might be thinking you don’t have the bandwidth to dedicate that much energy to staff support. If this is the case, maybe you can delegate to someone else whose role aligns more with supporting staff. Otherwise (and maybe regardless), a helpful reframe is that doing this will impact all of camp’s well-being

Examining Work Culture Shift in the Last Five Years

I can speak to my young camp staff experience! My first staff summer was in 2012, I was sixteen years old, and those who overextended themselves and weren’t honoring their needs and boundaries were lauded. We were told to take our off time to prevent burnout, but those who didn’t were those who were celebrated. In 2017, I worked objectively too hard and took very little care of myself, and I was rewarded the most I ever had been at camp. Oof!

When Covid hit, we saw several pieces of our work culture shift over. Many people who were called “essential workers” pointed out that they weren’t paid as such, or respected as such. Many people who worked for big corporations completely reevaluated their lives and shifted careers altogether. We’re seeing a “Great Resignation” (the mass quitting of jobs across workplaces). We’re seeing many places unionize! We’re also hearing a lot more about “preserving work-life balance.” My take is that everything we’re seeing is people valuing their lives more and taking charge when they’re being exploited and this is objectively cool. This is also going to make camp directors’ lives objectively harder.

Tragiquely [sic], camps are some of the hardest workplaces to honor a work-life balance. In part, there’s a piece of informed consent that is taken care of when someone decides to work for such an immersive setting, especially for overnight camps. However, it’s definitely still not in line with the trends of higher awareness around what healthy work-life balance looks like. I see two options for camp directors here: 1) change systems at play to get closer to what a workplace honoring work-life balance would be, or 2) empower your staff to see that it won’t be happening, and ham up all of your other supports.

Changing systems at play to achieve better work-life balance could look like a complete upheaval of the way you do things. It could mean amping up off time to at least six hours a day, having a rotation of folks responsible for supervision at night so most people get most nights off, or limiting people’s roles to be very specific and have clear starts and ends and don’t flow over socially. Basically, it would require quite the avant-garde staff structure that I personally can’t imagine well.

Empowering staff to see the lack of work-life balance and supporting them tenfold otherwise could look like tweaking parts of your existing system and pouring a responsive effort into what you’re seeing your staff needing. This starts in the hiring process with a specific description of what a staff member’s typical day looks like, with transparency around what feels easier and harder for lots of people. This can be a very blatant “camp is bad at honoring your work-life boundaries” to all of staff, followed by a “we care about you deeply and want to open the line of communication so you can tell us what you need.” This means researching what mental health resources are available to you and your staff (teaming up with an organization like Dear Scout, preferably, or Headspace and using their Employee Wellness Program, perhaps?) and leaning into other resources like our fearless leader Allison’s blog about supporting summer staff. It also means making a little bit of space and patience for when they’re struggling and they might need to be slightly whiny or grumpy. Mostly, this means having an active empathy when the lack of work-life balance gets to your people, and helping staff voice needs and set boundaries.

Helping Staff Voice Needs and Set Boundaries

Whoa, what are the odds! Okay okay, the odds are very high, it was a prank. All joking aside, this part is *~KEY~* because this is what the people want (it’s me, I’m the people). This is where the rubber (talking about feelings) meets the road (action). In my brain this means having preemptive conversations during staff training about self care plans, and finding productive ways to check in when things get hard. Doing this creates systems of support around people, and these systems can be relied on when people don’t necessarily have the bandwidth to be intuitively supportive.

When things get hard, it’ll be great to refer back to these conversations and systems AND it’s also possible that the initial supports outlined won’t hold up once you’re in the thick of it. However, creating a plan ahead of time will create some common language and practice moving an actionable muscle when thinking about self care. It’s also important to iterate, in staff training and as hard moments come up, what are appropriate ways for staff to ask for help and set boundaries. Doing this also creates multiple access points for people to ask for support and identify what they need (i.e. venting, getting advice, calling to action).

After Summer After Care

A key part of honoring your staff as whole people is acknowledging that they don’t start and end with their contracts. How do we extend care to our people even when they are no longer in our direct orbits? How do we demonstrate the care we have for them so that it can be felt when they leave camp (and perhaps you do, too)? What is your stake in caring for these people when you’re finally getting to think about yourself after an action-packed season?

TSCS member Adam, who could probably be listed as co-author at this point, names several things that he does for his staff as aftercare: promising solid letters of recommendation (as well as explicit instructions on how and when to ask for them), hand-written thank you notes, exit interviews, and continued conversation during the year. I can say for myself that I’ve felt deep feelings around getting texts and casual “how are you” calls during the year from my directors, and that’s made me feel like a bigger part of a community, beyond what I’ve felt in a lot of workplaces.

TLDR:

I kid, I really hope you do read but here are some more concise notes!

Your staff training should be focused on building community. Building skills can and will follow!
Your Gen Z staff are humans with, likely, a pretty different life experience than you. Getting to know them and connect with them is going to bode well for everybody.
“Clear is kind, unclear is unkind” is the quote of the YEAR (thank you Brené Brown) and applies to how we discuss expectations with our staff. Oh and like… everything else?
Mental health resources are super worth investing in!
Note that when your staff aren’t showing up how you were hoping, they might be expressing a need. Encourage that even if it’s inconvenient. Ultimately, the people at camp make camp “camp”, and your staff constitute a lot of the people, so they are worth the care, attention, and need-meeting.
Perhaps most important is giving credit to members Adam, Lenny, Liz, and Paddy, with whom I talked about all of this at length in a Zoom meeting, and who have given me invaluable ideas and feedback that are embedded in this sweet document!
Okay, second most important thing is YOU’VE GOT THIS! Assume positive intent and you’ll be 75% of the way there! Camp staff are there because they care, and if you’re reading this, you probably care too! I bet you are creating something wonderful.

WANT MORE?

So many of the people mentioned in this blog are TSCS members. This isn’t stuff Alice went out and researched (mostly). It’s stuff we talk about nearly every day in the members meetings we offer. We’d love to have you join the conversation.

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