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 Information Vacuum: What Happens When Staff Stop Hearing from Leadership
In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, Todd Rhoades discusses communication breakdowns within church staff, derived from their annual church staff health assessment. The conversation focuses on ensuring effective communication to prevent misunderstandings and anxiety among church staff.• 36% of church staff feel uninformed about important decisions.• Communication breakdown can cause anxiety and misinformation among staff.• The 'vacuum effect' occurs when lack of communication leads staff to fill in information gaps with assumptions.• Recommendations include over-communicating even obvious details and creating regular communication touchpoints.• A healthy flow of information builds a connected and confident team.• Communication should be proactive, not just during crises, to foster trust and assurance.• A detailed survey over three years shows trends in church staff communication.
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Hi there, welcome to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. My name is Tom Road, I'm one of the co-host. No, I am not just a co-host, I'm one of the co-founders over at Chemistry Staffing.com. And I'm your host right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Often as I say that little spiel there at the beginning of the podcast, I still have a 10 minutes to be for the GoPro. Hey, it all has to do with communication, right? And that's what we're talking about. How's that for a segue? That's what we're talking about here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast today. We're in the middle of a series of the things that we have discovered from our annual church staff health assessment. 10 different discoveries. We started last week. We're doing one different discovery every day. And today we're talking about communications breakdown. Okay? Here's what we found 36% of staff don't feel that they're kept informed about important decisions affecting their church. 36% feel like they're not kind of kept into the loop. So we're going to talk about that today. So here's kind of how it happens in a lot of churches. You know, you're the senior leader, you're the executive pastor, I don't know. Whatever role you're in, you know, you your worship pastor hasn't heard from you in three weeks. You're your children's directors making decisions based on a conversation from a couple of months ago. Your administrative assistant fielding questions she can't answer because she doesn't know what you're thinking. Meanwhile, you're you're in back-to-back meetings, you're putting out fires, you're assuming everybody knows what's happening, but here's what you don't see. Everybody's just kind of filling in the blanks themselves, and the stories that they're creating aren't the ones that you'd necessarily want them to tell. And it's all because the communication somewhere along the line has broken down, or it's not nearly as clear as it used to be. Does that sound familiar? Yeah, we're going to talk about that today. The vacuum effect is what I would like to start off with in communication, the vacuum effect. Information just doesn't disappear, it gets replaced. Now, when our staff don't hear from us, from the leadership, they don't sit quietly waiting. They start trying to connect the dots that they may not actually be able to connect. They assume that if you're quiet or you're silent, or you know, you you had a big initiative and all of a sudden you're silent about it. They they kind of just assume that your silence means something that it really doesn't. You know, that budget conversation from last month that was a big deal. They're still wondering if their position is safe, right? I put it out there, the finances were were tough, and and a month later nothing, nothing's said about finances, and they're sitting back there wondering, hmm, I wonder how finances are. Wonder if if I'm if I still am gonna have a job in a couple months, right? That casting, vision casting meeting that you had, the staff meeting from January of last year, you know, they're still not sure if that's the direction because not a lot happened last year and nobody said anything about it after the meeting. And this is where this is where it gets dangerous, right? Because if there's a vacuum in communication, a lot of times they'll start writing the stories themselves. You know, if it was important, they would have told us, you know, must not trust us with the real information. You know, may maybe the church is in worse shape than what we thought, and staff start to have these conversations. You know, I wonder, I wonder if they're working to cut staff. No, they're not being dramatic. They're they're being human. And silence, a lot of times, this is what we heard from staff in their narratives that they sent to us after they took their assessment. Silence in communication feels like secrecy, even when it's just busing us. Okay, now listen, you're not you're not trying, most of the time, you're not trying to keep people in the dark. I'm sure there are some there are some dark leaders that try and keep their staff in the dark and only allow as much information to get out as they absolutely need to get out. But most most leaders are not trying to keep people in the dark. The reality is, as a leader, you're you know what, you're drowning in decisions, you're drowning in details, and you've got really good intentions when it comes to communications. But your good intentions don't change their reality. Their reality is they've not heard from you. So here's what I would suggest. I call it the information flow fix. Okay. Overcommunicate the obvious stuff. Let me repeat that. Let me over-communicate that point, okay? Overcommunicate the obvious stuff. What feels repetitive to you feels reassuring to them. What feels repetitive to you is going to feel reassuring to them. Share the why behind the decisions, not just the what. Give them intel on what you're thinking about, even if it's not final. You know, just say, hey, here's what here's what I'm thinking, here's what we're thinking, here's why we've decided to do this. Hey, team, I'm exploring some budget adjustments. Nothing's nothing's firm, nothing's decided. I just wanted you to know what's on my radar. Something like that. Create predictable touch points where that information can flow out. Maybe it's a weekly email, maybe it's a monthly huddle, maybe it's the staff meeting, maybe it's a quarterly vision check. Pick something though. Pick a couple things where you can constantly and regularly communicate and then stick with that. Because here's what healthy information flow actually creates. It actually creates a connected team. Here's the reality: staff who know what's happening make better decisions. They make better decisions, they can anticipate needs instead of reacting to surprises, and they can feel trusted with the mission, not just with their job description. Staff, when they're in the know, they can stop spending all that mental energy on all the uncertainty, and they can focus it on their area of ministry. Information isn't power that you hoard, it is fuel. Information is fuel that you can distribute. So here's the bottom line I wanted to share with you that came out of the survey this year on communication. Silence from leadership does not create peace, it creates anxiety, and anxious staff make decisions from fear, not faith. So if you want to rise or raise the scores for next year's assessment from your staff on the area of communication, it's really simple. You just need to communicate. You need to communicate more things, you need to communicate more often. When you can communicate, communicate. Do it in a group setting, do it in an email, do it one-on-one, but communicate. And here's your challenge this week. I would love for you to identify the last time that you meaningfully updated your team on either your vision or your budget or your direction. And if it's been more than a couple weeks, schedule 30 minutes just to give them kind of an information download. Not because there's a crisis. You don't want to wait to communicate when there's a crisis. You want to communicate when times are good. You want to create do it because it's a Wednesday for crying out loud, right? But communicate because connection does require that intentional, that intentional communication. You just have to. Your team wants to be on mission with you, but they can't follow a leader that they can't hear from or that they don't hear from. So keep that information flowing. That's going to increase the communication level and the communication satisfaction on your team and in your church. You'll watch, you'll literally be able to watch how it can transform not just your staff's confidence, but also their contribution. Hey, this is just one of the discoveries, the communication breakdown that we identified in this year's healthy church staff assessment. Matter of fact, we've been doing this assessment. This is our third year. So we've had over 3,000 people take the assessment over the three years. And we've compiled all of our findings, all the trends from the last three years and everything from this past year, 2025, into a 200-page download that you can see. It's got all the trends, all the numbers. If you're a Church Geek, you're gonna love just diving into all the numbers. You can get it absolutely free. And Todd, I don't have time for 200 pages. That's fine. We've got an executive summary that you can read at the very beginning of it. It'll give you the gist of everything. And then when you get time, or if you decide you want to, you can drill down into the numbers. But you can download that for free, absolutely free, at churchstaffhealth.com. Churchstaffhealth.com. All right, and I would love to hear your comments if you download it and read it, have any questions, any comments, any any praise, any pushback, any criticism, I'd love to hear from you. My email address is podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, that's it for today. Thanks so much for joining me. We'll be back tomorrow. Tomorrow we're going to talk about discovery number eight and it has to here's a teaser for tomorrow, okay? It has to do with leadership and conflict. Let me just give you an old teaser here. We found in our assessment that only 54% believe that leadership handles conflict well. Just a little over half. So if your church is representative of everybody that took the assessment, almost half of your staff don't think you communicate really well when it comes to conflict and leadership. We're gonna talk about that tomorrow. We'll unpack that tomorrow. I hope you'll come back and join me right here on the LV Church Day. Have a break.
