Episode 89 // Should Churches Hire Remote Staff?

Lee Stephenson and Danny Parmelee discuss the pros and cons of church planters hiring remote people for certain tasks and projects. What might it look like to hire someone who never attends your church?

0:21 Lee asks Danny the rhetorical question, “Is it okay to hire someone who may life in a different city?”

1:15 Danny shares about a book that introduced him to the idea of hiring freelancers for certain aspects of church planting tasks and the advantages of hiring overseas freelancers.

3:59 Fair wages are important when hiring overseas freelancers. Danny talks about the website he has had success with when it comes to hiring freelance workers.

6:48 Lee asks Danny if there are any disadvantages when hiring freelancers to do marketing work for a church.

7:17 Danny speaks to the fact that a freelancer who doesn’t know you may not get it right the first time. Freelancing works well when the contracted person knows the brand and voice of the church planter’s church. 

8:21 Danny then recollects a time when working with a freelancer did not work at all.

9:15 Lee talks about challenges one may have when working with a person from another country. And the care that must be taken when using a remote bookkeeper.

10:15 There are certain admin tasks that are good for contracting out to a freelancer. Danny then talks about the importance of admin assistants really knowing the church planter because they tend to become the “face” of the office tasks when interacting with others. 

12:07 Danny also talks about his current experience with having a remote admin working with him.

12:37 Lee agrees with the importance of having an assistant that really knows the church planter.

13:02 Lee asks Danny about the challenges of having a remote team.

13:41 Knowing yourself really well as a church planter and as a leader is very important when it comes to remote work, according to Danny.

14:55 Danny talks about his “management by objective” style.

15:59 Lee asks Danny how his staff meetings worked with a remote staff.

16:10 Danny talks about the slow growth the first couple of years of his church plant.

17:10 Lee touches on the culture a church planter may be trying to develop when dealing with remote positions.

17:52 Danny wonders if and when the church will catch up with culture’s new view on set office hours within an organization.

18:32 Lee echos Danny that he will be watching to see if the church adapts to new office hour trends.

Lee Stephenson: Welcome, everyone to the Unfiltered podcast. Lee Stephenson here, national vice president of Church Planting with Converge.

Danny Parmelee: I'm Danny Parmelee. And I oversee church planting for Converge MidAmerica.

Lee Stephenson: And we're going to be talking a little bit about some things that I think have probably been highlighted or heightened now because of the pandemic kind of going on for so long. And it's related to the staff hiring side of conversation, Danny. Where it's like, should I? Can I? Who should I hire from a remote position? Meaning, you know, as a church planter looks at hiring different positions in the life of their church. Is it okay to hire somebody that may live in a different city? Never actually step on the campus of our church? Whether or not you know, we're in a portable situation, or have a permanent situation? What say you to this conversation to kinda get us started, Danny?

Danny Parmelee: Yeah, well, I'd love to share even just a little bit of my backstory, and how I've kind of become passionate or excited about remote workers. And this is even, you know, pre, you know, before the pandemic. But when I when I planted...first of all, starting out, we didn't own any office space. So I was working out of my house for that. Eventually, as the church grew, and we started adding staff, we got to a place then even when we owned a building that we ran out of office space. And I remember that then some of the, you know, on-site office staff, specifically in the communications/graphic design department said, "Well, we're not going to come in. We'll just work from a coffee shop," type of thing. And it was during that time... I think that's when Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Work Week came out. And it was like, "Hey, you can actually hire people from across the country to do things." Was like, "Wow, that's kind of crazy idea." I mean, what's the difference for me, if I need to hire, or if I'm doing all of my meetings with the director of communications, while they're sitting at a coffee shop, in comparison to someone who's sitting, you know, across the globe. And so that's when I started to dabble in, you know, overseas freelancers. And I found it to just have some huge, huge, huge advantages. And especially for church planters now I even teach to train on this in the areas of, you know, graphic design, web development. A lot of those types of things that you don't really need to hire someone full time. And the advantage of hiring someone overseas is not only just the cost savings, but it's all contract based. So in other words, you can try people out. You can hire someone for a very short term project. In other words, I'm going to hire a person to do my marketing postcard and I'm gonna pay them $100. Instead of saying, "Oh, I need to have some sort of graphic designer on my staff part time for whatever - $20,000 or $25,000 a year." Or whatever the going rate is. So you're able to do that. The other big advantage that I found about doing it is that in the beginning, when your church planter, you're trying to cut corners to save money. You're having people from the launch team. You're having friends and family do graphic design and web development for you. They will always say, "Hey, give me feedback. Give me critique. I want to know what you want." And then you give that feedback and critique and then there's hurt feelings. Or there's this weird like, "Wait, I designed this logo for you. You're not going to use it?" And it's someone from the launch team. And then they get all ticked off and they leave.

Lee Stephenson: They're bent out of shape. Yeah.

Danny Parmelee: Yeah. Whereas if it's someone from the Philippines or Ukraine or something like that, it's like, "Hey, your logo sucks. I'm not using it." I mean, not that I would ever say that. But...

Lee Stephenson: We are unfiltered here.

Danny Parmelee:  We are unfiltered. And so then you can move on. And the other thing is because the cost is so much less. And let me say this about cost. You always have to be careful of taking advantage. Because you can find people to work in other countries for $2 to $3 an hour, which I think could be anti-Biblical. Like if you're taking... I mean, that's almost slave labor, and they will do it because they're so desperate. But when you're paying even a fair wage to someone in the Ukraine or the Philippines, it's just so much less than even if you were to hire a freelance graphic designer, from a, you know, a college student type of thing. So your money will just go much further. So oftentimes even what I would do, is instead of saying, you know, hiring a firm or a freelancer from the United States saying, "Give me give me four concepts of this logo." I would hire three different graphic designers. I'd still be way less expensive, and I'm getting totally different concepts and styles of, you know, logos or postcards or website. You know, landing pages, those types of things. And so it just really helped. And like I said, there's no skin in the game for them. If you use their stuff or not, they don't care. They got paid their money, and they're kind of on their merry way. I know I'm talking a lot about kind of the overseas freelancers. There's lots of different platforms that you can use for that. I'm kind of partial to Upwork.com. I think they've done a great job. And it's very safe and secure. So in other words, you put money, you know, you do a contract. You negotiate it with someone. It's very straightforward. And then that money gets put in escrow. And so let's say you hired someone $100 to build your entire website. Let's say they oversold their skills, and the website comes back looking horrible, doesn't even work, whatever. You don't have to pay them. That money comes back to you. So it's not like people can run away with your money. So it's safe and secure. And you have the ability to do that. So there's other ones I think there's Elance.com. And I mean, you could probably just look up "overseas freelancer" you'd find lots of different places. But Upwork is, you know, has worked well for me. And I use it even in my personal life. I want to get something done on my house and I want a 3D rendering of my basement. And instead of paying an interior designer, I'll pay someone to do an entire you know, 3D rendering video and everything. And you know, use it that way. So big fan of that. So that's one...anything with free freelance stuff that you would want me to speak to? Or that just didn't make sense as I shot off all that info?

Lee Stephenson: I think that's helpful information, Danny. When it comes to freelance, I hear you talking about like, when it comes to the areas of communication and marketing, you found great success with that. And I would agree. I think that you could probably definitely get a lot more out of your buck, you know, going that direction. Are there any dangers that you would vocalize when it comes to working with one of those specific groups in the marketing side?

Danny Parmelee:  Yeah. Well, obviously, and this is where it takes some time to learn it. But if you just off the bat, you're like, "Oh, Danny told me I should hire a freelancer to design my postcards, and I can get it for cheap." There are going to be people that don't know you, or your branding, or your feel. And you're going to have even there's certain... I would say design styles from certain countries. So you'll get lots of people from Pakistan and India that will say, "I am an expert graphic design artist." And they might be and they might even work at some big firm. But it just is like it comes in you look at it, you go this, this is not our style type of thing. But that is something that you can learn over time is that I have now my graphic designers that will design stuff, and I know their style. They know me. They know the feel. Even for some of them that are believers, and they get conceptually the communication. So that's kind of the learning curve to it, and it can be a danger. If you just think I'm just going to hire someone and they're automatically going to know thoughts. I'll say this because this was a lesson learned. I hired a freelancer to do our search engine optimization. So a lot of like, back end tech stuff. And I found out later the search terms they were trying to think and so it was like "Catholic Mass" you know, like just weird things. And they were sending out these Google advertisements where I'm like, all of a sudden, I happen to like stumble upon. I'm like, "Oh, my goodness, this is not the type of wording. This doesn't represent us at all." So it's a major, major fail there and that I didn't even know about because it's stuff that you don't see until later, when you're all the sudden, you happen to see one of your own ads, and you're like, "Oh my goodness." So anyway, so that's the danger there when they don't really know you or know your feel. You could be you know, wasting time or have some egg on your face, like I did for that.

Lee Stephenson: And I would even add to that, you know, you've got language challenges, depending on where you're working with. And then at the same time, you know, being in the religious church space, that is so broad in and of itself. And especially a church planter is gonna be probably on the more cutting edge side of that. That it may take a little bit of coaching and how you interact with your freelance workers. I know even for us like right now with our church plant here in Orlando. One of the people that we've hired that works remote is our accountant. And so she handles all the major bookkeeping checks payable, all that kind of stuff is done remotely. Now, if you choose to do that remotely, you definitely want to make sure that you have really strong checks and balances in place to make sure that you're not taken advantage of in that process.

Lee Stephenson:  Exactly, exactly. And there is something... I agree, the close proximity of an assistant just to be able to be your voice and be you used the word "face" to those that you're constantly interacting with and make sure that they're representing you well. As you're kind of doing whatever that thing is you do. What about Danny, that there's another layer of this that I think is it does affect the church planter. Because many church planters start in a portables type of situation. They don't necessarily have access to have office space. But they may have staff people, even if it's extremely part time. How do you manage that tension? Is it okay? Like, hey, just get your work done. I don't care if you work from home, Starbucks, other coffee shop down the street? What have you seen work? And what challenges have you seen come out of that as well?

Danny Parmelee: Yeah. And I was actually going to start off by saying, this is so dependent on the personality and leadership style of the planter and also of the staff. So there's a danger in reading any of the books that are out there about remote work, and this is how you have to do it. And this is what works. So I would say just as a general statement, and disclaimer is that you have to know yourself really well. Your leadership style. And then also that are expecting and we're seeing actually more articles about this right now. Because you're seeing lots of people who during pandemic, got to work from home. Got to work remote, and they're like, "I love this. This fits great for me, it even works for my boss. We're not going back." And then you're seeing the flip side of that where it's like I actually need to be in the office like other people will excel just by being in community with other people. Or even with their boss and saying, "I can't do this. I need to have face to face time. I need to be able to just bop in the office and ask a quick question and not schedule a zoom call or text or email or that type of thing." So I think you know kind of finding out for yourself who you are. That worked well for my personality. Part of it is because I would, I did what was called management by objective. In other words, I managed you not by how many hours you put in, but I managed you by what you were able to complete and accomplish. And so hey, if you were able to get that done, and you did it at 2am, to, you know, 4am in the morning, and that's when you were at your highest capacity for getting good work done. That's great. I don't need you to do any office hours. And I myself, I hate office hours. So it worked really well for me. And like I said, for the first five years, we didn't even have rented office space. I worked out of my house, and every other volunteer staff and or paid staff worked out of their house and coffee shop kind of combination. And it worked well, up to a point. You know, for kind of the ethos of our church until we needed to become more formalized and had to say, "Okay, well, we have to gather together for staff meetings once a week." But even then we still never had any office hours.

Lee Stephenson:  How did you do staff meetings and stuff like that, when you were that say those first five years of everybody kind of being in remote locations?

Danny Parmelee: I don't even remember. Maybe we didn't even have staff meeting? I honestly, I don't even remember because yeah, we didn't have any space. So I really think...and we were small, you know. And so it was slow growth for us those first years. And we didn't have money to pay. So everyone was essentially a volunteer working their job. So it was kind of like, "Hey, on Saturday, let's get together at the coffee shop. Yeah, meet at my house." And I don't remember, even when we formalized and said, "Hey, we're gonna actually have meetings now." So it might have honestly been three years in before I ever had a staff meeting. I don't know. Now you have me curious of my own...

Lee Stephenson: Sure. I'm sure.

Danny Parmelee: I need to go back and ask Mike Morgan, who's now the executive pastor at Epikos and say, "Hey, do you remember when first started?" Yeah. When did we do this?

Lee Stephenson: Well, I think too... It really depends on the culture that you're trying to develop, as to how you interact with staff working from remote positions. If culture's not going the direction you want it to go, you're probably going to need to bring people closer together to spend more time and you know, shoulder to shoulder type of activities. So that you can kind of, you know, drip the culture on them over time. So that they grasp that. If everybody's like, totally bought in and understands that the culture is being preserved, then I think you can release and give a little bit more freedom to do a little bit more remote work as needed.

Danny Parmelee: Yeah. And like, I mean, I just think it's going to be interesting over even the next couple years, because now, the expectation or the I guess, it's just... the mold has been broken as far as even office hours. That's almost the anomaly now. Like, "Oh, you must come into the office from this time to this time." So I think it'll be unique to see who or how the church even adapts to that. And, you know, kind of goes along with culture. But then again, church culture is usually kind of behind somebody that won't be for like five or 10 years until someone's like, "Guess what, I can work remotely for my pastoral job!"

Lee Stephenson: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That'll be definitely interesting to see over time how that shifts and how it does penetrate the church and we'll stay tuned. Well, thanks, everyone for tuning in to the Unfiltered podcast. This has been a great conversation, just talking a little bit about some staffing and thinking through it from a creative perspective. Thanks for tuning in. Till next time, keep it real.