4 Easy Ways To Boost Your Church Staff Culture

Your church staff has a team culture whether you know it or not. You can have a positively contagious culture where your team is thriving and propelling your vision forward, or you can have a negatively contagious culture where ministries are siloed and mistrust runs rampant through your staff.

Your staff culture can make or break the long-term health of your church.

Culture shapes how you recruit, keep, and develop the leaders on your team. Here are four ways to infuse positive culture into your staff. 

1. Emphasize your core values in staff meetings.

If your church has already identified its core values, you are ahead of the game. Further, if those values actually reflect your staff culture and environment and your staff can name them, you are likely in the top percentiles of church staff cultures. However, the true test is being able to push these values in the different aspects of your ministries, staff interactions, and business activities. As daunting as this sounds, if your values are solid, it can be done slowly and surely.

One way to bring in some personal ownership and celebration of your staff values into staff meetings is to ask someone (preferably ahead of time) to identify how they saw a particular value lived out by another team member. The intent here is to highlight the value; the individual getting praise is the byproduct of the exercise. Rotate this job from week to week. Your staff will appreciate the opportunity to lift up their coworkers and be recognized for their efforts.

2. Provide snacks.

Some of the companies that tout the best culture provide full meals multiple times a day for their employees. Churches obviously can't do this while still continuing to reach out and feed the homeless and underprivileged in the community. However, churches can up their game in this area pretty easily and for very little cost.

For a few hundred dollars a month, you can stock a break room with snacks and items that will keep your staff full, on campus, and engaged rather than leaving to scrounge around and satisfy the afternoon blood sugar lull.

Providing snacks for employees will end up saving money through added productivity.

Snacks can also visually make a break room look more fun and inviting. Ditch the bags and boxes and cheaply purchase clear, acrylic sealing jars to fill with popcorn, granola, candy, or other small items that will keep. Your staff will love the way they look and love the inviting nature that it will bring to this company public space.

3. Use TVs & graphics.

We live in an age where technology has advanced so far that you can do some very cool things with it for a relatively low cost. All you need is a flatscreen television, an apple television, and a free Flickr account. Even flatscreen LCD televisions can turn any space into a culture driver under $500. These can also double as a great presentation space with wireless streaming if you have something you want to share or collaborate on with other staff.

Here at Vanderbloemen, we have placed television monitors in our lobby, break room, and conference rooms. We use these televisions to rotate spotlights on our core values, as well as pictures from over the years of company events and other fun staff happenings. The history of your church and staff is something that should be known by all employees. Reminding them in this manner will help create a sense of buy in and unity with the vision of the church - as well as remind them of all the fun times they've had together serving the kingdom.

4. Celebrate your employees.

"Employee of the Month" awards are often cheesy and meaningless in some organizations. What would be more beneficial is finding a way to make an award more fun and meaningful to the recipient. Here at Vanderbloemen, we recently started a monthly H.E.R.O. award. Once a month during our staff meetings, we celebrate one individual that has gone above and beyond. This individual is nominated by their peers, and examples of their stellar work are announced to the whole team. We present the employee with a giftcard to their favorite store and take them to lunch at a place of their choice. One of the fun perks of the H.E.R.O. award is the graphics of the individual that rotate through our company monitors with all kinds of funny and interesting facts about them.

What if churches did more of these types of thing for their staff? The staff morale boost that it brings is overwhelmingly more valuable then the funds spent, and in the end, a happy staff means a growing church.

How can you begin to boost your church staff culture?