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The podcast episode discusses how the 'other duties as assigned' clause in job descriptions can lead to role ambiguity and overburdened staff in church environments. This situation is illustrated with examples of worship pastors and children's directors assuming additional roles like facilities management and communications, often without changes in job titles or compensation. The episode stresses the need for clarity in job expectations and encourages church leaders to assess and adjust roles to prevent burnout. • Job roles often expand beyond the original description due to the 'other duties as assigned' clause. • Examples of staff taking on multiple roles include worship pastors managing facilities and children's directors handling communications. • These additional duties can lead to staff feeling overburdened and undercompensated. • Church leaders are encouraged to reassess roles and responsibilities to align duties with job titles and compensation. • Staff should have open discussions with supervisors if they feel overwhelmed by their workloads.
You hired a worship master, but here's the thing, you've also got a facilities director who also leads worship sometimes. And at the bottom of the job description, everybody's job description, it still says other duties as assigned. That's the bottom line, and everybody just laughs at that because it's that line, other duties as assigned, that sometimes actually swallows the actual role. Your kids director was hired as a kids director, but now does kids and communications, and nobody updated the title. Nobody named what they can stop doing. They just have extra stuff to do. If that sounds familiar, you're in the right place. We're talking about that today, here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. My name's Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders at Chemistry Staffing. I'm glad you're here. Now, this we're not going to talk today about rewriting every PDF job description that you've got in your drawer or in your filing cabinet or on your computer.
This is about what I call the sentence that ate the work. And most job descriptions have something like this at the very bottom, almost in small print, something like perform other duties as a sign. And you and really, if you're the one doing the hiring, you put it on there so you don't get trapped, right? It was supposed to be the exception to the rule, hey, things change. We might have you do some other things. And if we need you to do some other things, we'll ask you to do other things. But over time, that exception became the job or another job. The top of the page is a title, the bottom of the page is what they actually
do. And you can see it in two chairs on your team right now: the worship pastor and the building person. Same person, you hired them to lead worship, and then the facilities guy left, or there was no one to do it. So guess what? They got the facilities keys. They're now locking up on Saturday. They still have the worship title, but now they run the building as well. And you assign the building to the person that's already there on Saturday, and it just seems to make sense. Other duties as assigned. But the songs still have to happen, and the roof still leaks. And guess who's getting the voicemail? It's the person with the worship pastor job description.
Kids ministry is running the same play with a different hat. Kids director, now doing communications, started with a little bit of communications, but now is the full-bone communications director. You hired him for check-in and curriculum and volunteers and parents. And then the communications person left. So now your kids person is writing the newsletter and they post the Instagram reel. The job description still says children. The salary still says children. The week says captions and Instagram reels. Nobody really sat down and said, This is now two jobs. You just added stuff on. Additional responsibilities request. They cannot do both at the level that you still expect from the title on the website or on the job
description. You still expect that they're going to do both, right? Now you didn't dump the building and and the grid on them to be cool cruel, talking about the worship guy. You were in a pinch. And it happens. And you asked the person who wouldn't let Sunday fail. And that's decent. That makes sense. But it's also how a really good hire becomes the leftover work. They said yes because they love the church. You heard yes as capacity. Yeah, I can take care of some of the facility stuff for a while. And capacity is not love. Love will keep saying yes until the role you hired is a hobby that they do after the real job. And you never changed what you put in their job description, the work changed, the title should have changed as well. What they can stop and should have changed as well. You can't expect a full-time children's person to be a full-time children's and a full-time communications person and not have both of those suffer from having one person full-time in both of those. And this is not a math episode. Okay, I'm not asking you to open the budget tonight and say we need to hire four more people because we've changed job descriptions. I'm not asking you to do that, but I am asking you to stop pretending that the job description is still true. If they run the building, stop introducing them as only the worship pastor. If they own communications, stop acting surprised when kids' follow-up slips because it will. A title that lies is not humility. It's not a cover for work that you won't name. If the pay stays the same, at least stop adding new things. The cruelty is the extra task that you put on top of someone without taking anything off of the task list.
So here's the gut chat. Sit with one person this week, not a review, just a list. Three things that they do that are not in the job description or not what you hired them for. It might be the building, it might be the newsletter, it's the leftover, it's the other tasks that put at the bottom line of that job description. Write them down and where you can actually see them, and then pick one that they can stop doing this month. Not we'll get to it, just stop. Someone else, maybe a vendor, maybe a volunteer, maybe it's you that takes that off of their plate. Or the church lives without it for a month and finds out that it was never really the hill that we thought it was. And if you can't name a stop, you're not managing a role, you're managing a big fat pile. Other duties as assigned is the sentence you hide behind when that pile
grows. Alright, here's your bottom line for today. Other duties as assigned might be eating your whole job description. You hired a worship pastor, you got a facilities director who also leads worship. Update the work or name what they can stop. I know this is a hard one, but I also know that you actually hired them for a real job, not a leftover pile. And we saw this happen all the time during COVID. People doing jobs that weren't their own, and they started and they knew, hey, this is a tough time. I gotta chip in, I gotta do it. But guess what? It's six years from there, and they're still doing that same job. Their salary hasn't changed, their job description hasn't changed, their title hasn't changed, their pile has just gotten a lot bigger. I know it's tough, but that's why you're listening to get advice on how to make things better. And I hope that this helps you rethink some of those things. And maybe you're a staff person that's had a lot piled onto you, and you're just, man, you're tired. You're almost burned out because there's just more and more things that happen. More and more things. Another person leaves, and something else gets put on your plate, and they put it on your plate because you're a good staff member, you love the church and you're very competent, but you can't continue
to do that. So maybe you need to have a conversation with your supervisor. And this is a tough one, too, because you don't know how those conversations were gonna go, but maybe you need to have a conversation with your supervisor. And say, I love my job, I love my church, I love my community, I love my small group, I love everything about being here. However, I've got a lot of stuff on my pile right now, and I don't think I don't feel like I'm doing any of that well. Most supervisors, most pet most pastors, most bosses in the church are gonna understand that and see what they can do to help you. And if they don't, there's your sign or a sign. All right. I hope this has been helpful for you today. You're listening to the Healthy Church Staff
Podcast. Hey, we just started our Healthy Church Staff Assessment. I guess it's really called the Church Staff Health Assessment. It's absolutely free. I'd love for you to take it right now over at churchstaffassessment.com. It's absolutely free. Your input helps us as we write our report in early 2027 on the state of church staff in America. So it'd really help, would really help me out, be a great favor to me. I would love it if you could take that church staff assessment. If you never need to reach out to me for anything, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, that's it for today. Hope you have a great day. We'll be right back here.
