Playfully Professional - Hiring, Training and Retaining a Playful Team

Speakers talked about the importance of looking for playfulness in potential employees.  A few key pieces of advice:

- "Children's museums are about people, not things."
- "I can take someone with a great personality and teach them new skills.  I can't take someone with good skills and teach them a new personality."
- Rather than focusing on a set list of questions when interviewing, have a conversation.  This might not work for us, since we're a government agency and have to follow fairly strict hiring practices to ensure fairness.
- Look for the following in potential employees: outwardly positive attitude, flexibility, team-oriented, can-do attitude
- One panelist starts with group interviews.  She includes a tour of the museum to see how potential employees react to situations on the floor (do the pick things up off the ground?  Do they engage with children and other guests?).  In the group interview she uses a question grab bag.  Each potential employee draws a question and answers it.  Others can then chime in.  During the interview, toys and games are left on the table, and she observes how applicants engage with them.
- Another panelist spoke about how to train staff to engage in meaningful interactions with children.  They train their employees in a system called OPT-IN, which stands for Observe and join, Participate, Talk (in a open-ended way), Inspire, Nexit, which means to "naturally exit" from an interaction and move on to another child.
- Employees are trained to comment on what children are doing, introduce new vocabulary and ask them to observe and comment on one another's play.

Finally staff from Marbles Children's Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina spoke about injecting fun into all aspects of their work.  They collect "Moments of cute," stories that make you say "Awwww," and use them to hook donors.  A touching story can often be as effective as a strong strategic plan.  They also integrate play into donor meetings and board meetings, bringing staff in to play with the board and donors and engage them in the kinds of activities that they might be funding.

-Jason