In my current role, I am helping my church to communicate. Over the years, both as a church staffer and consultant, I have seen churches put a lot time and effort into how they communicate externally, and many do it pretty well (with a couple of major exceptions that I’ll discuss tomorrow). However, I have seen many church struggle seriously with INTERNAL communications…
First off, let’s talk about “the loop.” As in “inside the loop” or “outside the loop.” There are some areas where the majority of staffers really do need to be outside of the loop. Counseling, individual financial giving amounts, etc… However, in the vast majority of cases, the more people are looped in, the better. The problem I often see is that churches don’t have a system to disseminate information. Info passes between staffers haphazardly, based on the whims and personal preferences of those involved – often in meetings, which are very inefficient and costly tools if you’re using them to simply tell people things. Worse yet is the hallway conversation, half of which is forgotten by the time you get back to your desk…
Something IN WRITING needs to go out weekly (better yet daily) to bring people up to speed on big picture items, and it needs to be accessible so everyone can go back to it, as needed.
For day-to-day project-based items, I’d suggest the following:
TEXT – for emergencies or “need info NOW” situations
SLACK, TEAMS, etc… – for general internal conversation
E-MAIL – for external conversation (i.e. the outside world)
ASANA, WRIKE, SMARTSHEET, TRELLO, etc… – for project management involving multiple staff
Ultimately, simply defining how you are going to get things done and communicate goes a long way towards keeping things on track and making sure everyone is on the same page.
And – ideally – boosts staff satisfaction.
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