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
Frustration Fatigue: When Staff Just Stop Caring
In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, Todd Rhoades explores 'frustration fatigue' among team members. He identifies signs of decreasing engagement, such as missed deadlines and low ownership, and discusses strategies for revitalizing team motivation, including enhancing clarity and collaboration. Todd emphasizes the importance of celebrating progress and rebuilding trust to overcome disengagement.• Frustration fatigue is a gradual loss of team motivation and engagement.• Signs include missed deadlines, fewer questions, and a decline in ownership.• Causes include poor communication, lack of clarity, and unaddressed conflict.• Solutions involve improving clarity, collaboration, and celebrating progress.• Rebuilding trust is crucial for overcoming frustration fatigue.
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It doesn't happen all at once. But one day, you look around and you realize that your staff just doesn't seem to care like they used to. There's no major moral failures, there's no walkout. It just feels like a slow drain of energy and passion and ownership. What do you do? Today on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, we're going to name the signs of frustration fatigue and show how you can restore some health and clarity and motivation to your team. Hi there, my name is Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffing.com and your host right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. All right, today we're going to talk just it's just you and me here. So let's talk about this, right? You didn't lose people on your team to a scandal or to a resignation letter. Truth is you lost them to silence. The shrugged shoulders, the low grade apathy, and this is what I like to call frustration fatigue. And if you lead a team, you need to know the signs and you need to know how to turn it around. Alright. Let's talk about frustration fatigue. It's the slow burn of disengagement. And frustration fatigue, it builds quietly over time. There's missed deadlines, maybe there's some lukewarm ideas that just aren't as sharp as they used to be. Maybe there's fewer questions, less pushback, less ownership, more task checking. And you might just chalk it up to busyness, but under the surface, your team could be drained or discouraged or just starting to get disconnected. And they're still showing up. You're still in the office, they're still on your team, but their hearts just aren't in it like they used to be. So what fuels this? Constant change without clear communication is one of the prime factors in frustration, fatigue. Maybe decisions are being made without staff input. Maybe there's a lack of clarity about priorities, all of these kind of things, repeatedly shelving good ideas. Maybe there's some toxic tolerance. Maybe you're letting unhealth kind of linger, unchallenged. There's some conversation, some conflict that needs to be addressed, but it's just not being addressed. Most of these things are fixable, but you have to recognize them. If they just go unrecognized or they go just they don't bother you, that's gonna lead to frustration, fatigue. And what you need to do if you're suffering from this is you need to find a way. You gotta find a way to reignite your staff motivation and retake some ownership. And that begins with clarity. What matters most right now? You gotta bring clarity, you've got to bring some collaboration, invite staff back into decisions that affect their world. Don't just make the decisions out of roteness that you just make a decision because you gotta make a decision. Include people in that. And then we talk about this quite often on the podcast. Churches, man, we just don't know how to celebrate. And if you've made some progress, if you've made some traction, if you've gotten an outcome that you've been striving for forever, stop. Stop for just a moment and take time to celebrate that progress. You need to protect your staff's voice when they speak up. Don't punish that vulnerability. Rather, celebrate the progress when it's made. Now the goal isn't hype, okay? We're not asking you to hype up anything just to get some false excitement. The goal is trust. If you can rebuild trust, that engagement is gonna follow, and that frustration fatigue is gonna go away a lot quicker than what you think it will. Alright, here's the final thought for today. Here's the big idea. Frustration fatigue is not inevitable, but it is contagious. Catch it early, lead with empathy, restore the passion that your team once had, and you will kick frustration fatigue in the butt. I hope this is helpful today. I'd love to hear from you. What's one thing you've seen help reignate re-engage a discouraged team? I'd love to hear from you. Send me your comment, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, we'll be back here again if you're listening to this on Friday. Hope you have a great weekend. Otherwise, we will be right back here. Come and join me for the next episode right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast.
