Welcome to the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Krista Neidig, Manager of Marketing and Business Development here at Vanderblumen. In today's podcast, our COO, Jennifer Paulson, sits down with Gail Mays, our director of People and Culture. They discuss how to rebuild a healthy culture after going through crisis. Gail shares tangible tips that our own team does on a regular basis to maintain our people and culture. We hope you enjoy the conversation.
SPEAKER_02Hi everyone, I'm Jen. Hi, I'm Gail. So, Gail, I would like to talk to you today a little bit about rebuilding culture after crisis. So I've got some questions for you. You're Vanderblumen's director of people and culture. So this is something that you have a lot of experience in both in your role at Vanderblumen and in your previous roles that you've held in other organizations. So just to start out, can you give us some examples of crisis that you've either seen happen at other churches, in organizations that you've worked with? What are some examples of crisis that can potentially be damaging to uh an organization's culture?
SPEAKER_01Wow, at Vanderblomen, we see a lot. So we see a lot of crises. We see a lot of great things that happen in the church, but we also see a lot of really hard times that churches have gone through and that we walk with churches through those times. Um, so some of the hard times uh I that we have seen at Vanderblomen are pastors leaving unexpectedly, um, pastors dying like um or getting very ill and having to leave their position. Uh, we've seen uh crises, pastors leaving abruptly because of um internal and external crises, maybe mental health crises, but also um sin uh having to leave the church because um they've been asked to leave because they've violated the standards of the church, uh, or stepping down because they realize that they have or um have uh violated those principles. Um also um other hard times that churches have experienced are financial hard times. So maybe they have just uncovered a financial scandal or misrepresentation, or um they realize that they've lost money somehow. Um so those are some crises that we walk uh churches through and that um we've seen.
SPEAKER_02That's great. And I think um you and I've discussed a little bit before, it can be serious when you're talking about a crisis. It could also just be that you've got the wrong person in the role and potentially they're not, they're hurting the culture rather than helping. So it might not be quote unquote a crisis, but it is still something that's damaging to an organization's culture.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. We talk about bad hires. So if you've had a person in a role for six months, a year, two years, and you realize pretty quickly on that this person was not a fit for your organization, but yet you keep them on because you're hoping to try and fit them in, or they're a great person, they're just on the wrong seat on the bus, or you and then you realize wait, we don't have a seat on the bus for this person. That is a crisis because not only do you have to um walk this person out of your organization, but then you have to go back and redo the work that they've done, or maybe fix some things that they've broken, or relationships that they've strained within your congregation or organization, like that I would consider a crisis as well.
SPEAKER_02I think that's a that's a great point. So, Gail, on along that same line, what what have you seen that crisis can do to employees? So let's say you've witnessed a church that's gone through crisis, an organization that's gone through crisis. What is the toll that it takes on the employees in that organization?
SPEAKER_01Well, first I would say that the emotional toll toll is real. Um, maybe the employee had a real had a friendship or a good working relationship with a leader who just had a moral failure. And so then they're processing that disappointment. Um, it it's um discouraging, it's just really sad and couldn't can be spiritually impactful for that employee. Um, the second is increased workload. Um if there is a loss of a staff member, if there is a hard falling out of an organization, man, you're just gonna have to do more work. If if a person leaves, you inherit their their cases, you inherit their work. So that's a second thing. The third thing is uh that goes along with that is in increased work outside of their gifting. You know, if an employee leaves and I'm taking half of their workload, I may not like what I inherit. Uh and it goes outside of the things that I normally do, outside of the things I like to do. And you an employee can do that for a period of time, but we're talking over the long term, we're talking weeks and months. That's just discouraging. It's not fun. Um, and then the fourth thing which goes along with all of these things is just it's bad for morale. People become employees become discouraged, employees become uh drained. This is what they talk about when they go out for lunch is man, I'm doing more work or I don't like what I'm doing now. And then it's like a virus, it's it's contagious. People with low morale just spread that and then they get other people thinking, oh, I don't like my job, I don't like what I'm doing either. Um, and so that's um one of the things we see when hard when hard times happen to companies and churches.
SPEAKER_02Something a little bit tangentially related to that is then even if you do hire in good people, if you already have that low morale in the office due to that crisis and due to the emotional toll that it's taken, then that can that can ruin it for the new good people. And it can become like a disease, like you're talking about, where it continues to the morale continues to decrease and it takes the positive away from some of the new hires that might come in with an open mind. Absolutely. Gail, how do you know if you have a problem with culture in your organization?
SPEAKER_01The first the first way that you have a problem is people don't like coming to work. That that's your first culture problem, uh, cultural indication uh is that people don't want to come to work. They maybe are coming in later than they previously were or are leaving early. Um they take longer lunch breaks. Maybe when they used to eat lunch in the break room, they are now going out, which we have no problem with. We want employees to enjoy their lunch break and to leave campus if that's what they want to do. But that could be an indicator of uh your culture going south quickly.
SPEAKER_02Do you also see sometimes where maybe the office base was happy and laughing and there's maybe less communication, maybe just the energy in the office is a little bit more negative? Absolutely. What do you think is most critical to creating a good culture? So we've talked a little bit about the warning signs, you know, what to look for, what might be a bad culture. What are some of the things that are critical to creating that good culture in an organization?
SPEAKER_01Well, of course, the first step would be making sure that your employees are aligned with your vision and values. Um, do you have clear, a clear vision? Do you have clear values that your employees can um communicate both to themselves and both uh internally and externally? Having those vision and values are so important. Um, next step is um hiring to fit those vision and values. At Vanderblemen, one of our values is ridiculous responsiveness. And so we want it to hire employees who will respond to our clients and our candidates and also to each other in a timely fashion. And so we look for that in our candidates. Hey, how long did it take this person to book an appointment with you? Did this person respond to your emails? Um, when you asked them a question, were they able to get information to you quickly? Um, the second answer is a little harder, and that is getting the wrong people off your bus. If if part of the having a healthy culture is having the right people in the right seats, having an unhealthy culture is having the wrong people in the wrong seats. And so um that takes time and it takes some care to do well. Um, but that's two steps that you can take to having a healthy culture.
SPEAKER_02I think that's great, Gil. Um, a lot of many studies have shown that people work harder for a company that they believe in the vision of. So you were talking about Vander Blumen's vision. I think connecting people with the vision and making sure that they see how what they do on a daily basis actually impacts the organization. That's going to make a person feel more connected. So, in terms of building a good culture, that's a critical part. When you're talking about the wrong people off the bus, that's a that's a challenging thing to do. And I think it's important in those situations to be patient and to give it time. It might not happen overnight. And there's ways we talk about sunsetting and sunrising, but getting the wrong people off and the right people on. And I think it's a lot of difficult conversations. So maybe, maybe the morale at an organization has decreased, and maybe that has become like a disease for some of the people that it's unrecoverable from. But I think other people, once new good leadership comes in, they can be kind of swung back to the right side. So it doesn't necessarily mean everyone that was involved in the past has to go. It's a matter of who's resilient, who do you think can be part of the building blocks as you move forward?
SPEAKER_01And some people are self-aware enough to know, hey, this organization, maybe at one point in time it worked for me or I fit in with the culture and now I don't. And so some people are self-aware enough to see that, and other people need to be brought into that self-awareness through conversations with their managers. That's that's a very great way of saying it, Gil.
SPEAKER_02How do you know if you've created that successful positive culture? What does that look like?
SPEAKER_01I think it looks like uh employees who want to come into the office or want to be working with each other, uh, who spend time with each other in the office and outside of the office. Again, we want to guard our employees' time and we don't want to require them to spend time with each other outside of the office. But you're you're gonna want to have relationships with the people you work with and you're gonna want to either do things with them or um maybe share a meal together. For me, that's a sign of a positive work culture.
SPEAKER_02Gail, you've been in the people and culture role here at Vanderblumen for about nine months, maybe 10 months right now. Can you talk talk about some specific things that you've done at Vanderblumen over the past nine to 10 months that you and the team have done to improve the culture in your tenure here? I can think of one thing that you've done. Yes, what have we what have we done? Well, I there's multiple, but the one that's immediately coming to my mind is Terrific Tuesday. Yes. So we noticed that something that Vanger Bloomen could be better at is actually connecting the office team with the vision. We've got a team of excellent consultants and they're connecting with the vision on a daily basis. They're going out to churches, they're interacting at a lot of different levels, but the office people are supporting those consultants and aren't necessarily connecting with the vision. So that's one thing that you've really focused on.
SPEAKER_01Yes, we had a staff that loves working uh towards building the kingdom and loves serving churches and organizations, um, but they weren't feeling that connection. And so we started something called Terrific Tuesdays to share and have teams share and have individuals share how they were in their role as in office staff serving the kingdom. And so when we asked people questions of um, what is a win for you today? How did you serve the church this week? They could give an answer. And people really jumped on to that. It was encouraging to them. It was a morale boost. We have tons of laughter, we call it terrific Tuesdays. Sometimes we bring treats, um, which our office staff really likes. It's a it's a 15-minute meeting. It's not a long part of our week, but it gives the team members an opportunity to share how they are um fulfilling the vision of Vanderblomen to serve the kingdom by not even leaving the office.
SPEAKER_02That's great. Another thing that you've done, I've I wrote three things down on my notepad, other things you've done, Gail. So at we have a weekly all-staff meeting. So we have terrific Tuesdays on Tuesday, and then on Friday, uh Friday mornings, we have an all-staff. And one section of that is consultants on the road. So the consultants get the opportunity, you know, they're traveling around and they get the opportunity to speak in to the office team about maybe experiences that they've had so that everyone can feel part of the win. Yes. Something else that um that we that we did at Vanderblumen under your direction, Gail, is a culture survey. So we sent out a survey.
SPEAKER_01Do you want to talk a little bit about that? We sent out a survey to employees uh to elicit honest feedback. What are we doing well? What are we not doing well? How can we help employees feel connected to the vision? We also have had listening tours where we sit with uh every employee uh individually and ask them those questions to get honest feedback. Um I did a listening tour in the spring. You did a listening tour over the winter, and um, employees will tell you how you can help them enjoy their workplace, enjoy the culture, how you can improve culture, what they see as uh things that are broken, and maybe give you ideas on how to fix them.
SPEAKER_02An expression that I like to say a lot is weigh in equals buy-in. So on these listening tours, it's allowing the people to weigh in on what's important to them and the company, and then they really feel heard. And especially then when they see the lead team take start taking steps toward those, toward improving things that they brought up. That's when you really hook the employees and make the employees realize they care about them.
SPEAKER_01Yes, I would agree.
SPEAKER_02So another part of that culture survey that you sent out was talking about the motivation. So asking employees at Vanderwoman, what motivates you? What are things that we could be doing better? Actually, listening to them and actually kind of coming up with a list. And it was really interesting. So when we got the responses back, kind of fell into two different categories. One was more flexibility, and then one was related to kind of things in the office, such as the break room, food that we would have, things like that. But flexibility, I think we kind of thought that it was important, but we didn't necessarily know how important it was until we gave that survey.
SPEAKER_01Oh, it's absolutely listed as number one employees today, because they went through the COVID era when they had more flexibility in the workplace than we've ever had. Uh, and then coming back into the office, employees want to have that flexibility and they want to work towards it. So, yeah, we didn't expect it would to be number one, and it was.
SPEAKER_02No, I and actually I think flexibility even beat pay. So we were talking about terrific Tuesday. Another thing that Gail implemented was reward Wednesday. So that's something that we we were trying here. We I think we got it from one of our clients is something that they had done. But we have KPIs, key performance indicators for each of the teams. And then if they achieve those goals, those financial or the metric goals, then the next month they get to work from home on Wednesdays. So those are called reward Wednesdays. And that's just a little thing. It doesn't cost the company any more money. But I would say that that's really been a big part of making people feel engaged, rewarded, and valued, don't you think? Absolutely. Yeah. Another thing that we have at Vanderblumen is a culture tool. And you can find that on our website. We have a really neat thing that you can give to your team members in your organization, your church. They the employees can fill it out and then it gives you a report as to the health of your culture and the specific things that you need to work on.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. You may feel that your culture is great. You have a perfectly good culture, perfectly fine, everyone is happy. Well, then it sending a survey to your employees is only going to confirm that. However, if you get those survey results back and they are not what you're expecting, then it gives you some opportunity to make changes within your organization towards having a healthy culture.
SPEAKER_02I think it's important with culture to not bury your head under the ground and just think, oh, it doesn't matter. You know, we're paying them, that's all we need to do. Well, we're in a different day and age. It's not, you know, it's not your grandfather's organization anymore where people just stayed in the same job for year after year. We are seeing a lot of turnover in churches and organizations in our organization. And so it's incumbent upon the leadership of organizations to make the work environment pleasant and make the employees feel valued. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01It's going to cost you money if you have turnover. Uh, your profit margins will be lower if you're a church, your ministry will not be as successful. Um long-tenured employees are a key part of the growth of your organization.
SPEAKER_02Gail, have you flipping it on the other side? Have you tried anything either at Vanderblemen or other organizations to improve culture that you've seen did not work, that either had the wrong, wrong end result, or maybe you've seen something in other organizations where they've tried to do it, but it hasn't improved? I actually just thought of an answer to this question as I asked you. I think I'm I think we can you guys cut this out. But what I think I would say is you were basically saying, you know, even if your culture is good, send it out, it's not going to harm. I feel like anything that you try shows the team that you value them. Yeah. So I don't think you can actually make a mistake in culture. I think if you're if you're telling your team it's important and you're trying anything, they will see that as a leadership team that cares about them. So it's a situation in which you can't really make a mistake.
SPEAKER_01Any effort is good effort. Um as long as it's done in good faith. Yep. If you are working towards um your vision and values and you are encouraging employees along the way, they will appreciate that effort. And this is where you want to have open and honest communication with your employees, uh, where you can say, hey, that terrific Tuesday thing that you implemented actually was pretty discouraging. Um that's something you want to hear. If you think you're gonna start something and and it's gonna be successful, but employees come to you and say, actually, that had the opposite effect, uh, you're gonna want to hear that and you want to have that communication with your employees anyway.
SPEAKER_02I just wrote down transparency. I think something that Mandelblumin does really well, and it's under your direction here, Gil, is that we're very open and honest. I would say that the communication to the team is very um, it's it's basically we don't hide anything. We are open and honest, we're communicating with our team at all times, and people feel like they're part of part of the solution in almost every situation.
SPEAKER_01And of course, you can only communicate, you want to keep your communication within the bounds of HR HR practices and good HR practices. You don't need to be sharing your employees' information with everyone. But um, transparency is important to to this generation. It also um the Bible talks about that, bringing light into darkness. Um, and as Christians, we are supposed to be lovers of truth and lovers of light. And so the more uh transparent, the more light you can bring into your organization, the better.
SPEAKER_02Something that Vanger Blumen always embraces is constant improvement. We had an uh kind of a company meeting a few weeks ago, and the spirit of it was constant improvement. It was talking about what are we doing well, but then what can we continue to do even better, even better? And that brings everyone in. And I think that that shines a light on the things that could be better, but it also again shows the employees that you value their solutions.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Uh constant improvement acknowledges the fact that nothing is 100% all the time, and that there's always ways to make things better. And so by eliciting that uh information from employees on how you can improve, getting a list of their ideas, getting their feedback. Maybe that is by them coming up to me as director of people in culture and telling me some ideas that they have, and maybe it's coming from their managers, from the one-on-one meetings that they have with their employees. But you always want to be open to hearing that, acknowledging that, hey, I might have done something wrong or we might have taken a misstep uh within our organization and acknowledging that and improving down the road.
SPEAKER_02The worst thing that you can do is um hide, hide anything bad, cover it up, you know, not address it, push it aside, hope it'll get better. That's the worst thing that you could do.
SPEAKER_01I think scriptures are pretty clear that that that that is not a solution and is in fact uh the worst thing that you can do.
SPEAKER_02So, Gail, you're our director of people and culture. My last question for you is how do you know? Let's say you're a pastor listening to this, you're a COO listening to this, how do you know if you how do you know if you're Your organization could use a director of people and culture?
SPEAKER_01Well, that's a great question. So uh obviously part of my role is human traditional human resource management, um, payroll, benefits, uh, working with it with employees to make sure that uh we are handbook and works well and that they got their money on time and that our um managers are equipped to do their jobs. Uh, but the culture part of my role is just I'm an employee that loves this organization and that that sees the value in uh what we do and who we serve and how we serve the church. And so that could be any employee, doesn't necessarily have to be a director-level uh person or employee, but that can be someone who you recognize as the lead pastor or COO or executive pastor that, hey, you have someone within your organization that you feel embodies the vision and values of your company or your church. And so talk with them and see if they'd be willing to step in as a uh culture whip or a culture, a culture manager.
SPEAKER_02I said I wasn't gonna ask you any more questions. So I'll so I'll state the last, I'll state this in the in the form of a statement, Gail, but talk about budgeting for culture. Budgeting, yes.
SPEAKER_01Um it can culture, the culture umbrella, things like training can go under the culture umbrella. So taking uh employees to conferences, taking your staff to um uh uh conferences, trainings, and the like. Uh, it can also fall under terrific Tuesday treats. Um, today for our terrific Tuesday, we had popcorn. Uh employees loved it. It doesn't always have to be, but if you're pinching pennies, if you're on a church and you're saying we don't want to spend tithe money on snacks for staff, have a snack signup sheet. Employees could bring in homemade cupcakes or uh a snack of their choice if they wanted. It's small things, um, doesn't have to be big things. I think uh every employee here at Vanderblomen has a list of our values um on their desk. And each one of those cost one dollar to create. Um, one of our Krista, our marketing manager, um, took it upon herself to create those with frames that she had purchased from Hobby Lobby. So this was not an expensive culture improvement, but I think everyone on the team would say that it um it's great.
SPEAKER_02Well, I will say, Gail, I started at Vanderblumen in January, and from January to now, about the end of October, the culture has just grown in leaps and bounds, and that's largely thanks to you, Director of People and Culture. Well, thank you, Jennifer. You're welcome.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for listening to the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. At Vanderblumen, we help Christian organizations build their best teams through hiring, succession, compensation, and diversity consulting services. Visit our website, Vanderblumen.com, to learn more, and subscribe to our Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts to keep up with our newest episodes. Thanks for listening.