The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
We're all about helping create a healthy, positive, and spiritually positive environment for church staff members and leadership teams.
The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
Your Church Workspace: Does It Help or Hinder?
Embark on a journey with me, Todd Rhodes, as we venture through the transformative power of a well-crafted workspace in nurturing church staff wellness. In our latest conversation, we unveil the pivotal findings from the Church Staff Health Assessment of 2023. Discover how a simple workspace audit can lead to profound improvements in ergonomics, lighting, and noise control. We're not just talking about a fresh coat of paint; we're reimagining the very spaces where ministry comes to life. Together, we'll dissect the strategies that ensure your staff's work environment is more than just satisfactory—it's a source of energy and inspiration.
Join the mission to create offices that resonate with creativity and collaboration, where every chair, desk, and light bulb plays a role in staff well-being. Throughout this discussion, I'll share insights on fostering a sense of community, personalizing workspaces to reflect individual flair, and the profound impact of regular breaks and stress management techniques. By integrating the collective wisdom of our teams through inclusive decision-making, we craft spaces that aren't just functional, but truly transformative. As we gear up for the release of a comprehensive report this summer, I invite you to add your voice to the Healthy Church Staff Assessment, shaping the future of church work environments nationwide.
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Hi there, welcome to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Happy Monday to you. Hope you have a great weekend and thanks again for joining us. My name's Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffingcom and also your host here at the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. We've been in the middle of a series for the last oh boy three or four weeks, I think. Yeah, four weeks. I think this is our fourth week talking about some of the results from our annual church staff health assessment that we did last year and that we're currently in the process of doing, and we have talked about different areas of church staff health. We've talked about compensation and job satisfaction. We've talked about leadership. We've talked about team dynamics and compensation. This week, we're going to talk about work environment. The next week, we're going to talk about what we call future stability, which is really important to church staff health as well. And you know what? I missed a milestone on Friday Last week. Friday, we hit episode 100. This is episode 101, believe it or not. We started the podcast in January and forgot to mention on Friday.
Speaker 1:For those of you that have been with us and listened, I hear from a lot of you that you listen every day. You're faithful listeners. And to those people that are faithful listeners and have listened to 100 episodes of this podcast, I say, man, what are you doing with your life? You need to rethink your life decisions. Just kidding, but no, seriously. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be able to call you my friend and my listener here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast and here's to at least a hundred more podcasts.
Speaker 1:Okay, we're talking again about church staff health and we are talking this week specifically, kicking off today, talking about work environment and what we found last year the 2023 Church Staff Health Assessment. When we asked about how your church does your church provide a healthy and reasonable work environment workspace, 71% of staff said they're satisfied with their workspace. About 29% almost not quite a third, but almost a third are either dissatisfied or neutral. So in this episode, what I want to do is unpack and explore some practical strategies for designing a workspace that meets the needs of all of your team members. So I'm going to go through five kind of key strategies here, and some of these might not seem like rocket surgery to you, but they're very important to your staff and if you are in charge of staff and you're listening, I think this will be really helpful to you If you are a staff member and you're just listening to the podcast and wanting to hear some of these strategies as well. There are some things that you can do as a staff member to make your office, your workspace, better. So we're going to talk about that. Hopefully you'll find this interesting today.
Speaker 1:The first strategy or first idea I want to give you is to conduct a workspace audit. Okay, just assess your current workspace. If you're in charge of your staff multiple staff and the offices walk through your offices and just do an audit. What are you finding about your workspace? Identify maybe some areas for improvement. Here's some things to consider Ergonomics, how does it look?
Speaker 1:What's the atmosphere? What's the atmosphere? What's the lighting? What are the noise levels? Are there collaboration spaces, those kind of things?
Speaker 1:Write down what you observe. So often we are entrenched in our work that we never look around to see what our work environment actually is. So the first key is just take a half hour and walk around your office. Write down what's the good, the bad and yeah, but there's a couple of ugly things in there too, ok. So that's first strategy.
Speaker 1:The second strategy is do what you can to prioritize? That's a big word. Prioritize Four syllables that's a big word for me. Do what you can to prioritize staff well-being. You might think, todd, you're just crazy, you're grasping at straws here, but I'm going to tell you okay, ideas like this are insane, maybe, but invest in adjustable furniture, standing desks, maybe comfortable chairs other things you can do to prioritize staff well-being, you know. Encourage regular breaks, provide resources for stress management, self-care All those are really important things as you prioritize, just looking at that whole workspace as being a place where somebody can really feel comfortable and productive and hopefully you identified some things in that workspace audit that you did, and now's the time. If you're sitting in a chair a long time, a comfortable chair is really important and those kind of things just work. Atmosphere is really important. So learn what you can from the audit and then put that into place as part of strategy number two.
Speaker 1:Strategy number three, however you can foster some community and some collaboration. Do you have, for example, any dedicated space for team meetings and maybe a conference room or some informal gatherings? Encourage staff to personalize their workspaces and to build connections with colleagues, and churches are all over the place. I've been in churches where all of their offices are in one big room. It's one big collaboration space. I don't know that's necessarily great. It was a fad for a long time. I don't see a lot of churches doing that anymore, but other times I see churches that have hallway of offices and you go in there during the day and every door is closed. It just feels. It feels dead. I think if I had to work here I would likely not work here long because the atmosphere is dead. So any way that you can foster some collaboration and community, make those dedicated spaces for your team meetings and informal gatherings comfortable and inviting and encourage staff to make their own offices comfortable for them. Okay, number four.
Speaker 1:Strategy number four is just to optimize the environment and again this kind of goes back to some of the ergonomics and those kinds of things that you learn in strategy number one. But ensure this sounds so simple but ensure that there's adequate lighting, ensure that the rooms, that the offices and your meeting space has comfortable temperatures. Make sure the air quality is good, make sure that the workspace is inviting. Maybe incorporate some plants or some natural elements to boost the mood and productivity. But make your space a fun space but a professional space and a space that people can actually get a lot of productive work done. Okay, so that's strategy number four.
Speaker 1:And then, finally, I would encourage you to engage staff in these improvements. Ask staff, hey, what could we do? What if we did this? Hold some brainstorming sessions, empower kind of the group collective thought on how can we make our office space better. It's just really important and I'm telling you, creating a workspace that not only inspires and supports your staff. It's not a once and done process, it's a continuing process. But by prioritizing just the workspace environment, you're going to be helping the well-being of your staff, you're going to be helping foster collaboration, you're going to be optimizing the environment and engaging your team and the results of the work that gets done is going to be better. I'm telling you, it just will be If you need to start small, build some momentum, make small changes to begin with, but stay committed to continuous improvement and little things, even the little things, are going to be noticed by your staff, particularly if you've not done anything in this area before. That's my two cents worth on creating a good, healthy workspace.
Speaker 1:We're going to continue to talk about work environment and some of the other things that we learned on last year's Healthy Church Staff Assessment for the remainder of this week.
Speaker 1:I hope you'll join us, but if you have not taken the Healthy Church Staff Assessment for this year, it's open for just this week and next week, so we're winding down on it. If you've not taken that yet, head over to churchstaffassessmentcom. Churchstaffassessmentcom. You can take it over there for free. I think it would be insightful for you as you learn more about how healthy you are as a church staff person. But it would also help us as well as we compile our annual report on church staff health in America. That'll be out early this summer, and by taking the assessment, you will also get a free copy of that report when it's released. If you would like any information about what chemistry staffing offers, either to you as a candidate or a staff member or to you as a church, or either coaching or staff search or any of the things that we do, you can visit us at chemistrystaffingcom, or you can reach out to me at podcast at chemistrystaffingcom as well.
