When Your Church Staff Becomes a Revolving Door

In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff podcast, Todd Rhoades discusses the issue of high staff turnover in churches and how it is not just a matter of bad luck. He explores the hidden costs of turnover and provides actionable strategies to build stability and reduce the revolving door phenomenon within church staffing. • High turnover in church staff leads to loss of skills, relationships, institutional memory, and momentum. • Common mistakes include hiring for roles without understanding why past hires failed and not conducting exit interviews. • Effective strategies involve conducting postmortems, improving onboarding processes, hiring strategically, and setting clear success metrics. • Stable churches hire slowly, with intentional onboarding and clear early wins. • Revolving doors in staffing are fixable through honest assessment and addressing identified patterns.

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Transcript

When Good People Keep Leaving

0:07

Has this ever happened to you? You're really excited. You hired somebody to do it. And six months later, they're gone. So you hire their replacement 18 months later. Same story. Pretty soon. You're the church that's known for where good people just don't stay. Your staff knows it, your board knows it, your congregation knows it. And you start wondering if it's you. Is it me? Or maybe you convince yourself that it's just bad luck. But here's the thing that we're going to talk about on the podcast today. Revolving doors don't just happen. Hi there, my name's Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders over ChemistryStaffing.com, along with my good friend Matt Steen. And we are here every weekday on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. I am so flat that you're

The Hidden Cost Of Turnover

1:01

here. First today, let's name what chronic turnover actually costs you and your church. Because there's a hidden cost with every turnover. Every time someone leaves your church staff, you lose more than their skills. You lose their relationships, you lose their institutional memory, you lose the trust that they built with their volunteers. And here's what most leaders miss. You lose momentum because you're always rebuilding instead of building forward. But here's where it gets a little trickier because there are some patterns that you're not even seeing. You keep hiring for the same role the same way, but you never ask why the last three people couldn't succeed at it. Blame culture. You blame culture fit, but you haven't really defined what your culture actually is. You say people leave for better opportunities, but you never exit interview to find out what actually better might mean. You keep hoping the next hire is gonna be different and that they'll stick around, but without changing anything that broke the last time, you're probably not gonna have any better success this time. I get it. I get it. We're not trying to create turnover. We want people to stay and to thrive. And we all want stability. And I think that stability is something that you can build, but it takes some effort. I've been doing this staffing thing for a long time. Stability is something you can build, but it definitely takes some effort.

Patterns Leaders Often Miss

2:37

So here's some pointers. First of all, start with honest postmortems on every departure. I tell everybody that you should do this postmortem. You should dig in to see after everybody leaves. Do an autopsy. And see exactly what happened there. Maybe it was totally on your staff member. Maybe it was totally on you or your church. Usually it's not either or, it's both and. But do that autopsy, do that postmortem after every single departure, not to assign blame, but to identify any patterns that you can. Ask the hard question: what would have had to be different for them to stay? Second thing you can do is look at your onboarding process. Are you setting people up when you hire them, when you bring new people onto your team? Are you setting people up for them to succeed or just merely survive? Define what success looks like in that first 90 days, that first six months, that first year, and stop hiring and not setting people up well. Here's another thing you can do. Stop hiring urgent and start hiring strategic. Build systems that help people win, not just work. Stable churches. I'm finding this. We work with churches, I think we're doing 85 searches right now for churches all across the country. Here's what we find about stable churches. Stable churches, and by stable church, I mean that don't have the revolving

Postmortems And Better Onboarding

4:12

door of staff. They have a stable staff, they have a healthy staff. Here's what stable churches do differently. They hire slow, they hire very slow, and they onboard over a longer period of time. And it's an intentional onboarding process. They create clear wins that people can achieve early, and they have honest conversations about fit before it ever becomes a crisis. They admit what a role needs to be redesigned, not just refilled.

Hire Strategic And Redesign Roles

4:45

Here's your bottom line for today. Revolving doors aren't badlocked, they're not broken systems, and they are fixable. Revolving doors are fixable, but they take some work. So here's your challenge this week. If your church is made, is just known as being a revolving door, we're a church where you're not known for longevity

Weekly Challenge And Get Help

5:06

on your staff. Most of your staff have been there three years or less. And if this is your church, you know who you are. Here's your challenge. I want you to look at your last three departures, which if you've got the revolving door, that shouldn't be too hard. Look at your last three departures and write down just one pattern that you see. Only one. Just one. And then ask yourself, What would I change about our process to address that one thing? One pattern. I firmly believe I've been doing this a long time, guys. Stability is possible, but it starts. It has to start with honest assessment. You have to assess where you are, what's gone wrong, and what you can do differently. If you don't, you're gonna get the same thing over and over. And that six months, that person you hired for six months, the last next one might last for six months or a year. But they're not gonna last for five years if you don't take care and know exactly what's going on. I hope this has been helpful. Maybe you're like, Todd, I what you're saying today is resonating with me, but I have no idea where to start. I have no idea how to stop this revolving door. Maybe it's a revolving door, you've been there 25 years, and it's something that over time has just happened. Maybe you're in a new position and you're at a new church, and you're trying to stop this revolving door, you're trying to slow it down, you're trying to rebuild a staff, rebuild trust, rebuild health. This is something that we love to help churches with. So if there's any way that I can help you, any way that I can serve you, please reach out to me. You can reach out to me, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. Either myself or someone on my team would love to sit down, do a Zoom call with you, find out a little bit more about what you're looking for, and see if there's any way that we can help you. Again, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. We're here every Monday through Friday on the podcast. I hope you'll join me tomorrow. Tomorrow we're going to be talking about. Ooh, this will be good. Oh, I've lived this one. Both as a board member and as a worship pastor. What do you do? What do you do when your worship pastor and your senior pastor keep clashing? Good topic. I hope you'll join me right back here again tomorrow on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Have a great day.