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
The Evaluation Disaster: Why Your Staff Don't Know Where They Stand
In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, host Todd Rhoades discusses the fourth key discovery from their annual Church Staff Health Assessment, which reveals that church staff are more concerned with the clarity and fairness of evaluation and raise processes than with their actual salaries. Despite being satisfied with their modest pay, staff are frustrated by the lack of transparency and consistency in how salary decisions are made. The episode highlights four insights into this issue, emphasizing the importance of clear processes, regular feedback, and transparent communication to improve staff satisfaction and morale.• The assessment involved over 3,400 church staff members answering a 50-question survey.• The lowest-scoring statement was about the lack of a clear and fair process for evaluations and raises.• Staff satisfaction with their pay was higher than with the clarity of pay decisions (3.46 vs. 2.96).• Staff require clarity, not necessarily more money, to feel valued and motivated.• The lack of process leads to frustration and a feeling of powerlessness among staff.• Improving evaluation processes involves regular reviews, clear success metrics, and transparent compensation strategies.• Churches can address these issues without additional financial expenditure, focusing instead on communication and strategic planning.
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Hi there, welcome to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. I'm your host, Todd Rhodes, and today we are in the middle of a series based on our findings from our annual Church Staff Health Assessment. Over the last three years, we've had over 3,400 staff members, just like you, at churches all across the country, take our 50 question assessment and give us their take on where they are in their health at their church and on their church staff. These aren't guesses, these are real answers from real people, real staff members, and these are the trends that are backed by the real data. And each day we've been taking a look at one of our discoveries. We have 10 major discoveries that we found this year on our assessment. And we've done three so far. If you missed those, go ahead and you go back and listen to the podcast for sure. But today we're going to talk about discovery number four. Discovery number four. And uh here, let me set this up. So we ask 50 questions or 50 statements, seven different categories, three years of data that we've accumulated so far. Like I said, thousands, a little over 3,000 people have taken the church staff health assessment. And this is fascinating for me, and this is why it's a big discovery. One question, one statement actually, finished absolutely dead last in our assessment this year. And it's not about salary. You think maybe it's about salary. Nope, it's not about salary. About benefits? Nope, not about benefits. It's not even about workload. Okay, here's the statement that that we said that everyone responded to. And here it is. Okay. I feel like I need a drum roll. Here we go. Here's the statement. I feel like the church has a clear and fair process for evaluations and raises. Okay. Let me read that again. The statement is, and this is what the staff people, like you, answered, uh scale of one to five. Five being, yep, they do, one being, oh, it's horrible. I feel like the church has a clear and fair process for evaluations and raises. The average score? About 2.96 out of five. Okay. It was the only question across all of the entries, across all of the questions that scored below 3.0. The only question where more staff disagree than agree. Okay. So let me share with you four insights around this discovery that we're calling the evaluation disaster. Okay? Insight number one, this is not about money. This isn't a money problem. It's a clarity problem. Okay? And this is I find this fascinating. Staff are actually more satisfied with their actual pay than with how pay decisions are made. Okay, let me repeat that. Your staff, if they fall in line with the results of this national survey, your staff are probably more satisfied with their actual pay than with how their pay decisions are made. Their compensation satisfaction, 3.46. Their evaluation process, 2.96. It's a half a point gap. And most church staff have made peace with their modest salaries, to be honest. They didn't enter ministry to get rich. But what they have a problem with, and what they have a problem accepting, is not knowing, not having any clue how the system works. They can handle the lower pay. They're used to that, right? They might not be happy about it, but they're used to it. What they can handle is I have no idea how to get a raise around here. So that's insight number one. Insight number one is that it's not a money problem, it's a clarity problem. Okay. Insight number two, what no clear process actually looks like. Okay, annual reviews don't happen. That's one way where there's no clarity. If there's no annual review, or maybe they happen randomly with absolutely no rhythm. Maybe they only happen when there's a problem. Sometimes that is the case. But when there's no clarity, there are no annual reviews, or they're very sporadic. Maybe there's no job descriptions. Maybe, or maybe the job description you have is non is outdated, or maybe it just doesn't even exist. I've talked to a couple people in the past few months that say, I was told we don't have a job description, but that's one of the first things we're going to do when you get here. And guess what? It never happened. Okay. There's no clarity when raises appear or don't appear with absolutely no explanation. Sure, they'll take a raise, but they would love to know exactly why or how that happened, how the decision was made. There's no clarity when you say, hey, we'll talk about it when the budget allows. And that conversation never happens. Because guess what? Sometimes the budget never allows. Right? Sometimes staff learn about compensation changes through their paycheck and not a conversation. And that's a big no-no. You need to communicate those, especially if it's a race. You should want to be able to communicate that. And the bottom line here is that most staff are just operating without a map in territory where the landmarks just keep shifting. Okay. Insight number two is there's just no clear process. And I wanted to paint out for you exactly what that no clear process actually looks like. So you can say, okay, yeah, we've got a process or we don't. Most churches, honestly, don't. That's why this is the lowest scoring statement on the whole assessment. Insight number three. Let's talk about process and why this process matters more than pay. At first, when I thought about this, I thought I would think that they would, staff members would care more about the pay than the process. But it turns out it's just actually flip-flopped, right? They care more about the process than the pay. And here's what I think is happening here. I think, I think human beings can tolerate hard circumstances if they understand them and if they believe they're fair, right? So we can accept sacrifice, we can accept limitation if that's a big if, if we understand why. What we can't tolerate and what really drives staff members crazy at your church probably is the ambiguity and the apparent arbitrariness. Is that a word? Arbitrary? Everything is arbitrary, right? And they don't nothing seems to so I got a raise. Awesome. Or I didn't get a raise. Why not? It seems really arbitrary. And when staff don't understand how decisions are made, they really do feel powerless and they lose agency over their own career because they don't know what success actually looks like. And that uncertainty building on year over year is going to breed anxiety, and that anxiety can curdle into resentment. And the silence that they often hear says something really unintentional. I know most churches don't mean to be saying this unintentionally, but you are. Here's what it is, right? We haven't really thought about you. We haven't really thought about you. That smarts. That smarts when you're a staff person. All right, finally, insight number four. This is fixable. And you don't even have to spend a dollar. If you can spend a dollar, that's awesome. But again, we're not talking money here, we're talking about process and communication. So how can you fix this? Well, creating a clear evaluation process is really a leadership discipline and it's not a budget line item. It doesn't cost you a thing to have a process. Processes are free. But if you don't have one, it's going to cost you. Do scheduled, predictable reviews, an annual minimum with formal check-ins throughout the year. Don't wait for something to go bad to say, all right, we're going to do job evaluations here. That is a killer in and of itself. If you don't have written job descriptions with clear success metrics, now is the great time to do it. What does excellent look like? Make sure you put that on paper so you know it and the staff member knows it. And then make sure that there's some transparency about compensation and how compensation decisions are made. Is it performance-based? Is it based on tenure? Is it based on education? Is it based on budget? All of those things. How transparent are you with your staff members about how you're making these compensation decisions? And usually, this has been my experience is that usually we're not clear with them and we're not transparent with staff members because we're running by the seat of our pants as well. How much do we give? Should we give a cost of living? Should we did they this person did really well in their performance? This person didn't do really. Do we give them more? Do we give them less? What do they talk about? All those kind of things is a lack of strategy. So you need to have a transparency, but before you can be transparent, you actually need to have a strategy. And then get regular feedback throughout the year. No surprises in that annual review. Because really, as I said at the top of this podcast, staff aren't really asking for more money. Sometimes they are. In this one, this topic today, they're asking for clarity. They're asking for feedback. They're asking for a pathway, and they're asking for some dignity. And honestly, these are not unreasonable requests. They're pretty basic professional expectations. You may not be able to increase salaries this year, but you can have a conversation. You can define what success looks like and tell people how they're doing. The problem, again, is not primarily money. It's clarity and fairness and communication. Hey, if you would like to, matter of fact, I would love for to for you right now, whatever you're doing, unless you're driving, don't do it if you're driving. Go over to churchstaffhealth.com and you can download our free all of the 10 discoveries we're talking about here on the podcast, 200 pages of all the data, of all the narrative, of everything that we've learned. We want to give this to you freely, to you individually, to you as a church. And you can go download that for free right now at churchstaffhealth.com. If you're interested, we also have an individual report that you can you can check out and a report specifically on your church and how your church is doing if you'd be interested in that as well. I hope you'll go check that out at churchstaffhealth.com and uh drop me a line. Let me know what you think. Podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, that's discovery number four. It's one of 10 discoveries that we've made on our church staff health assessment. I hope you'll join me back here tomorrow. Tomorrow we're going to talk a little bit more about benefits and what we found out about church staff people and what they feel about their benefit package. You won't want to miss it right here tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel right here on the healthy church.
