The Three-Year Drop: Why Your Best Staff Members Are Walking Away

The podcast episode discusses the findings from a three-year Church Staff Health Assessment, revealing a consistent decline in church staff health scores. The host, Todd, shares key insights on the trends observed and the implications for church leadership.• Three-year trend shows decline in church staff health.• Scores have decreased each year from 2023 to 2025.• Exceptional staff category decreased from 18.8% to 14.7%.• Increase in staff falling into the 'fair' category.• Middle categories, 'strong' and 'good,' are holding steady.• Staff in critical condition tend to leave rather than improve.• Churches should continuously assess staff health.• Encouragement to address staff health proactively.

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Transcript

Framing The Three-Year Trend

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Alright, so one year of data is just a trend, right? Three years, though, is more of a trend. And that's what we're starting to discover. This is the third year that we've done our church staff health assessment. Three years in a row where we ask the same 50 statements or questions and get response. We've had over three years, about 3,000, over 3,000 church staff people take the assessment in 2025, 2024, and 2023. And here's what we found. And we're in the middle of a series here on the podcast, Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Hi, I'm Todd. Thanks for joining me. We've been doing a series where we've identified the 10 top discoveries from our church staff health assessment. And today's is number nine, and we're calling it the three-year decline. And here's the gist of it. Church staff health has declined every single year. 2023, 2024, and 2025. Health has declined every single year since we started measuring. 2023, the average score was 185.4, and in 2024 it was 184.2, and in 2025, it was 183.4. Now, two points doesn't sound like a lot, that's out of 250. But here's what's underneath that number, okay? And this is why it's one of our top 10 discoveries. Exceptional staff, our healthiest category dropped from 18.8. 18.8% back in 2023 fell into that exceptional category. And that has dropped from 18.8 down to 14.7%. Okay. So that's a pretty significant drop. Meanwhile, the fair are what we call our struggling category. Some things are good, some things are bad. Everything's just eh, it's okay. It's fair. Grew from 14%, 14.4% to 19%. Okay. So the needle is moving, and we've seen this trend happen each of the last three years. It's small, it's small, but it's not insignificant, right? The needle's moving and it's moving in the wrong direction. It's moving slowly, it's moving consistently, but it's unmistakably moving. So I want to unpack that a little bit. I've got four insights for you today based on this, what we're calling the three-year decline. Okay, it's not a random fluctuation. This is insight number one. What we're finding is it's not a random fluctuation, it's trajectory. Okay. It might be slow, but it is trajectory, and we're seeing things move. Scores have dropped every single year, not up and down, just down. Okay, that's not noise. If it was just one year, we would say that might just be an aberration or something. It's not noise, it's a pattern, and the pattern isn't uniform to the pattern isn't uniform decline across the board. The middle categories, the strong and the good, are holding relatively steady. Okay. What's actually happened is it's a bit of a hollowing out at the top. Okay, so the strong and the good are they're holding relatively steady. The exceptional has declined, and the fair, those that are on the fence, that is actually increased. It's a little bit of a hollowing out of the top. And what's happening is slowly, but over time, consistently, we're starting to lose our healthiest people and accumulating more people out of the exceptionally healthy and down into the danger zone, the fair zone. All right. So what happens here is maybe someone was exceptional last year, and maybe they're they moved down to strong, and maybe somebody that was strong moved down to good, and maybe somebody that was good moved down to fair. There's just some movement happening there, but it's not in the right direction. As I said, the this insight number two, the top is eroding, okay, a little bit. In 2023, near nearly one in five staff members were exceptional. And that by exceptional, what we're saying is, hey, across all those seven categories, hey, most of them, they're thriving across the board. It used to be 18%, almost 19%, now it's 14.7%. But that four per four-point drop represents literally thousands of workers, if you extrapolate that out across the country at all the churches. People who were thriving have slipped into merely surviving. And so the question is, where do they go? Some, as I said, mentioned, move from exceptional to strong or good. Others slid into fair. But the ceiling is lowering, and our best and healthiest are becoming less healthy. Okay? Not everybody, but numbers are not moving up and to the right, as old friend Bob Buford used to say. Right? Insight number three, the bottom isn't rising, it's leaving. That's an important one. The bottom isn't rising, it's leaving. Here's something that maybe feels a little counterintuitive, right? The critical and needs improvement section actually shrank a little bit. Okay. So you would think the people that are critical and the need improvement, they're lower. So that's good. That seems like good news until you start to understand why. And it's not because we got better at supporting struggling staff, it's a survivorship bias. Staff in crisis don't tend to stay. They resign, they burn out, they let go. So the floor hasn't risen because we fixed anything. It's probably contracted because the most struggling people have already left. Now, we don't know that for sure, but that's our hypothesis. We're not getting healthier. The numbers do show that. And probably losing some of the sickest patients before we can treat them. Okay. Lastly, my insight number four today. What does this mean for your church? All right. So the net I want you to understand this. The national trend doesn't determine your church's future. And the national trend doesn't say exactly where your church is at. Your church could be doing much better or it could be doing much worse. This is these are just the national averages from, like I said, about 1,200 people, staff members that took it this past year. So it doesn't determine your church's current or its future, but it should inform your urgency because the slow erosion is easy to miss just because it's gradual. Your staff might seem fine this year, they might seem fine next year and the year after, but fine is increasingly fragile across the American church. The almost 75% in healthy territory are not immune to the pressures. They're one bad leadership transition, one conflict mishandle. We just talked about leadership and conflict yesterday, one realistic expectation away from joining the 25% that are really struggling. So now listen, that doesn't mean that I'm trying to create panic here. If you know me, I'm not, I'm a glass half full kind of a guy, not a glass half and empty kind of a guy. Not trying to create panic, but I do want to create some attention here. The churches that will thrive are the ones that are paying attention to your staff and making sure they're healthy and making changes before any kind of crisis hits. So here's the bottom line for today on this discovery. Three years, three consecutive years of decline. The trend is starting to become really clear. We're not losing staff to one catastrophic event. We're losing them slowly and quietly and consistently over time. The question isn't whether this is happening, it's whether we're going to notice as the big C church and whether you're going to notice as the leader in your church before it's too late. So, what do you do about it, Ton? It seems like thanks for being Debbie Downer. I'm not Debbie, who would I be? Dan Downer. Don't be Dan Downer. What can I do about it? Stop assuming that your staff are fine. The old I think came from the odd couple. What happens when you assume? Don't assume that your staff are fine. You need to ask and assess and measure constantly. This should constantly be on your radar. And look at your own three-year trend. Who have you lost? Who's not on your staff now that used to be on your staff three years ago? Who's slipping? Why did people leave? Identify one staff member who was thriving a couple of years ago, but now it seems like they're maybe not striving or they're not doing near as well. And maybe you just need to have a conversation with that person. Don't wait for the resignation letter to tell you that there was a problem. Just one of ten discoveries, as I said, this one is on leadership and conflict. Tomorrow we're going to talk about the three-year decline. And that will be no. Boy, I'm all goofed up here. I just talked about the three-year decline. Yesterday we talked about leadership and conflict. I just mentioned that. Tomorrow we're going to end the series, though. And tomorrow we're going to talk about, and this is all coming down to this last discovery. It is what separates thriving from surviving when it comes to church staff and what we've discovered with that. So I hope you'll join me again tomorrow. But before I let you go today, you're going to want to download all of our findings, all these 10 discoveries. We put it, it's almost a 200-page PDF free report that you can download. Didn't cost you a thing. We want to give away an open hands on all of this information that we gathered from this year's Church Staff Health Assessment. You can get it right now. Just go over to churchstaffhealth.com and you can grab that free download now. I'd love to hear what you think. Send me an email at podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right. I went a little over today. Sorry about that, but I hope it's been helpful to you. And join me again tomorrow as we close out the series tomorrow talking about what separates driving from. Talk to you then.