Today's question. How do you know if your church staff is suffering from low morale?
Dan Reiland suggests a few ways that you can tell.
Do you hear increasing complaints from your staff?
Have you recognized an increasing lack of enthusiasm or an uncooperative spirit in your staff as a whole?
Do people assign blame when things don't go well?
Does it seem like some people on your staff just aren't putting in the effort they once did?
And what's the tone in the office? Does the tone seem discouraging? Is the overall atmosphere positive or negative?
If the answers to the above questions have you thinking there may be a problem, the look at some of the underlying causes that might be causing low morale:
- Poor communication - staff feeling left out
- Over-staffing
- Unclear expectations and changing goals
- Change seems impossible, no one will listen
- Allowing politics and gossip
- Lack of coaching, development, evaluation, and feedback
- Micromanagement and lack of true empowerment
Each week I talk with staff members that are disillusioned. I also talk with leaders that complain about their staff because of the reasons above.
Low morale on a church staff is pretty easy to spot. It can be much harder to remedy.
Start with the diagnosis. Read the questions above. How are you doing on a scale of 1-10?
If you find your score is 5 or higher, move on to the causes.
How many of the causes of low morale are present on your staff currently? What can you do in your power to make a difference in these areas?
Low morale can rear its head out of (seemingly) nowhere. Sometimes it's one bad staff apple that infects the culture like cancer. Other times it is a leadership team that pushes too hard, micromanages, or cuts corners in the area of integrity.
Regardless, low morale can kill a church staff, and eventually, a church. Do what you can do today to make your section of church staff culture better.
At Chemistry Staffing we work hard to make sure the churches we work with are healthy. We ask lots of questions to try to get the best glimpse possible into what it would look like to work there.
We also are pretty rigorous on the candidate side of things. We want to make sure that each candidate is healthy and ready to enter into a new phase of ministry for the long-term.
In fact, we won't work with every church that wants to hire us. The last thing we want is to place a candidate in a church that we know is not healthy. And we won't recommend candidates if we know that there is baggage that they're still working through that would make them ineffective in their new role. If we did, we'd just be adding to the problem of unhealthy staffs and morale in the church.
So... how's the culture at your church? I'd love to hear your story. Just email me.
And if there's any way that we can help with your staff or team, please let me know.