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
More than a Job: Does Your Church Support Staff Well-Being?
Have you ever found yourself pondering how a church staff's well-being directly influences their work environment and overall ministry effectiveness? As we press on with our series on church staff well-being, we delve deep into the concerning reality that a staggering 41% of church personnel are grappling with feelings of dissatisfaction or indifference regarding their workplace wellness. Tune in for an episode that promises to equip church leaders with five transformative strategies to enrich the lives of their teams, making their well-being an undeniable priority.
Join me, Todd Rhodes, on a journey through the crucial steps for nurturing a positive work culture within church communities. We kick off with the indispensable strategy of enhancing communication, ensuring that every staff member is both informed about and able to access existing support systems. Additionally, we spotlight the significance of impartial advice and coaching available through external services like Chemistry Staffing. The conversation doesn't stop there; we tackle the importance of gathering targeted feedback to further hone in on the needs of church staff. This episode is replete with actionable insights designed to make your church staff feel more appreciated, supported, and fulfilled in their roles.
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Hi there and welcome to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, episode 103. Believe it or not, we're 103 episodes in. If you've been here for the whole journey, thank you so much. If this is your first, or maybe one of your first, episodes of listening to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, I urge you to go back and listen to all 102 previous episodes. How's that for a daily assignment? You're welcome. My name is Todd Rhodes. I'm your host here at the Healthy Church Staff Podcast.
Speaker 1:We have been in a series over the past few weeks unpacking all of the things or some of the things that we learned in our 2023 church staff health assessment. This week we've been working our way through the topic of work environment how do we create a great work environment for our church staff. So this week we've been talking about how to create an effective work environment and today we talked about how to make your offices good, how to support your staff, and today we want to talk just about kind of overall church health how do you help make sure that your staff is just that, the well-being of your staff is good, and we asked last year on our church staff health assessment how staff felt about their own well-being of your staff is good and we asked last year on our church staff health assessment how staff felt about their own well-being, and about 58.9, almost 59 percent of staff feel that their church makes their well-being a priority 59 percent but that leading means that 41 percent are either dissatisfied or neutral when they were asked about does your church foster a community and an environment that keeps you well? And in this episode we're going to look at some practical strategies and I hope for addressing some of these concerns, because four in 10 people if your church is normal, four in ten people feel like it's just not the healthiest place to be. So let's talk about five strategies that could help you, if you're in charge of a staff, to help increase those numbers so that more than six out of ten people at least feel like you're making some good progress and your church is a healthy and a good place to work.
Speaker 1:Okay, strategy number one it all goes back. We did a whole week in this first series back about a month ago talking about communication, and the first strategy is communication. Just enhance your communication and your visibility. This is just communication. Just about everything in church staff health we found last year comes down to communication. A lot of it is implementation, but a big part of it is communication. So, however, you can regularly showcase any kind of health or wellness programs anytime you can share success stories and provide some clear guidance on how to get to those resources. We talked about providing resources a couple of episodes ago.
Speaker 1:Ensure that all the staff are aware of all the different support systems that you have in place. And if you don't have, particularly in the area of wellness, if you don't have, if you've not contracted with somebody outside the church to offer advice and coaching when it's needed, if you've not done that, I would encourage you to do that so that your staff, when they have an issue, when they have a concern that they don't want to come to their supervisor about, but they still need to get some advice or some coaching from someone. If you don't have kind of a service or someone outside the church that is doing that, I would encourage you to find someone or a service that could help you with that. We do that at Chemistry Staffing. This podcast isn't a sales podcast by any means, but if you would like to find out more about what we do to help mentor and coach or advise staff people confidentially throughout the year. I would love to talk with you about that. You can always reach out to me at podcasting at chemistrystaffingcom. Just having an opportunity or an outlet for your staff to be able to talk with someone that doesn't have a dog in their fight is incredibly important in church staff health. We found that out from our survey last year. So that's strategy number one. And if you don't want to do it with chemistry or with me, there are a lot of places, a lot of really great resources out there for connecting with people that can coach and assist your staff in kind of their health and wellbeing. Okay, enough said about that one.
Speaker 1:Strategy number two gather targeted feedback. Focus groups, one-on-one conversations, is what I like more than anything else, to just try and understand where are the holes, what specific needs are there that aren't being addressed, what concerns do your staff have, how well are you addressing them? How horribly are you addressing them? You need to gather that feedback. A lot of times we've said do an audit of what you're doing currently, and this is do the audit step. Use the feedback to identify areas that you can improve in and inform future, kind of areas of growth and initiatives that you can do. Category number three is just expand information.
Speaker 1:Mental health support goes back to what I said in strategy number one. If you can offer some confidential counseling service, some coaching service, even some stress management type offerings, some resilience training, offering some time off we talked a couple episodes ago about offering maybe some self-care days or mental health days or family days Some of those things really contribute to a great healthy environment and a great place for well-being for your staff. So normalize these kind of conversations and provide resources for some self-care and some boundary setting and again, if you need some help in this area, I really recommend kind of an outside source that can be available on request. And again, reach out to me if you would like information on how we might be able to come alongside and help that. Strategy number four is just to promote work-life health. A lot of these things that we've been talking about. They all interact and interchange with each other and we just did an episode on how to help promote work-life balance.
Speaker 1:But again, in this area it's really important. It might be a flexible work option, it might be encouraging the use of vacation time we talked about that. It could be as simple as you as a supervisor or as a pastor or as a lead team member, kind of modeling those healthy habits from leadership. Because, honestly, if the leadership doesn't model this kind of behavior, the staff will never get it, because it does come from the top down. So foster a culture, create a culture that values rest and rejuvenation and personal fulfillment outside of work, encourage hobbies. That whole work-life balance is incredibly important. If you don't have the work-life balance as a staff member and as a leader, if your staff doesn't have that work-life balance, you're going to get some really tired, burned out, ineffective staff members over a period of time. You can be all in and not have that work-life balance for a short period of time, but in the long term and I've been there, I can tell you from experience it'll kill you. That's strategy number four. And then finally, number five create some peer support networks.
Speaker 1:This is one of the things that we did at one of the very first churches that I served is that we had it was through our denomination, through our conference, but we had a support network. We would get together Boy, I don't remember it's been a while back, but it was like once every other month, I think that we would get together just for a half a day, all churches within an hour of each other, and we would get together just for kind of support and to connect with our peers. And so I was the worship guy at our church. So we would take our staff we had four or five people on our staff we would go and we would all meet together for a meal and then we would go into our subgroups so I would meet with the other four or five worship pastors that were there. The churches that brought their youth pastor, the youth pastors, student ministry pastors would go, and it was just.
Speaker 1:It was a way to create some health and some well-being, and some outside. We talked about some of that outside coaching and mentorship. This can happen organically as well. You don't have to pay for this to be done, but it can be through a peer support network. This sounds a little weird, but some wellness buddies to just some people, to bounce ideas off of, some people that you want to bounce your idea off of and say, is this a stupid idea or is this a really good idea? And just, it provides connection, it provides encouragement, it provides some accountability and even, most importantly, it can provide some friendship that a lot of staff really need. So consider creating, if you don't already have one, maybe with some local churches in your local denomination or conference, or just in your city or your region, some churches that you're friendly with and share some values with. Consider creating some kind of a peer support network.
Speaker 1:Remember, change has to start with leadership. So you have to model that self-care, you have to openly discuss well-being, you have to consistently reinforce that value of the healthy work-life balance and if they don't see it in you as their leader, it's going to be hard for them to model as well. So as you champion staff well-being, you'll have to cultivate our culture of compassion and resilience and really shared purpose. And if you model that leadership, it will permeate into your staff and eventually, over time, it will permeate into your staff and eventually, over time, it will permeate into every aspect of your church's mission. I hope this has been helpful as we talk about staff well-being and we are going to be back tomorrow for another episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast.
Speaker 1:There's just a limited amount of time. Just a few days left if you have not taken the 2024 Church Staff Health Assessment time. Just a few days left if you have not taken the 2024 Church Staff Health Assessment. It's absolutely free and you can take it by just going over to churchstaffassessmentcom. And you can reach out to me anytime, from anywhere. Just send me an email at podcast at chemistrystaffingcom. I'd love to hear from you, tell me what you think of the podcast, give me some criticism, give me some advice, ask me for advice. I'd love any of it. So reach out to me anytime. Podcast at chemistrystaffacom. Again, thanks for listening. Hope you'll join us again tomorrow here on the Healthy Church Dad Podcast.
