Imagine trying to motivate your best employees while knowing you can’t offer them a raise. Traditionally, church tech employees aren’t hitting the salary ranges of their non-church peers. The tension is real, and the challenge is common, but there’s good news: you can inspire and motivate your team beyond their paycheck, which could mean the difference between them staying or leaving.
Over the last four years, I’ve reduced and restructured my staff team twice, only giving pay increases once. Yet today, we have the strongest team culture we’ve ever had. People are leaning in, excited for the future and ready to play their part.
Why? Because money isn’t the only motivator.
Your job as a leader is to understand what motivates your team, encourage them, and provide development opportunities that are valuable to them.
But first, before you jump to motivating your staff, you must know them. Giving one person added responsibilities may make them feel valued, while it might make another feel taken advantage of.
Steve Stroope developed a list of 12 items that could encourage a team member. He asks people to rank them by importance so he knows how to motivate that person uniquely. They are:
- Private affirmation
- Public affirmation
- Opportunity to give input
- Money
- Access to supervisor
- Increased responsibility
- Empowerment
- More tools and resources
- Increased training and knowledge
- Perks and bonuses
- Flexible work hours and locations
- Significance (connecting their personal why and the company’s why in the role they occupy)
Asking your team to identify what’s most important to them will equip you to serve them! I also like to ask:
- What’s your dream job? / What aspects of that could we integrate now?
- What’s something you love about working here?
- What’s something that would make you leave your role?
- How can I make this the best working environment for you?
Those questions may feel scary—you risk someone leaving—but we’ll all go at some point, so you might as well learn what could keep them!
Once you know your team, lean into what matters most to them. Here are four strategies I’ve found that have fueled my team members:
Maximize your current benefits.
Most organizations offer benefits, but few staff max them out. On average, a company pays anywhere from 20–40% of the staff member’s salary in added benefits. Does your team know it? Make sure you highlight their existing benefits and encourage them to use them. This could include:
- Retirement matching
- Gym memberships or discounts
- PTO/Development time
- Tuition reimbursement
- Mental health reimbursement
It’s easy to focus on what you don’t have (a bigger paycheck), but make sure people know and utilize what they do have.
Develop them.
Skills and leadership development are some of the most valuable things you can offer your staff. Maybe you’re a sound engineer, and your lighting director wants to become more well-rounded in other areas. Spend time weekly training them in what you do! Having frequent and intentional conversations about your team members’ development will not only show that you care but also build up their skills and confidence wherever they go next. Development, coaching, and mentoring are often overlooked—so lean in and raise your team up!
Be flexible.
The pandemic threw us into the work-from-home life, and the rush back to five days in the office wasn’t met with open arms (for most). In my experience, when my staff are productive, performing, and communicative, I can be more flexible on when and where they work. Many people are juggling a lot outside of work, so allowing them to work from home when they have a parent-teacher conference or leave early when they have a doctor’s appointment shows them that you trust them.
Our team developed a few rules of engagement to make this work. For example, I’m a morning person, so I come in at 7:30. My graphic designer…less so. We have core working hours from 9 to 3 and allow people to flex around that based on what works best for them!
Cast vision.
Last but not least, I believe a key to motivating staff is casting vision and naming their unique contribution to fulfilling it. Bringing clarity to what a win looks like for your team members can help them avoid spending time on the wrong things and help them find fulfillment in hitting the mark.
A 2021 survey from the College Group captured a snapshot of American generations’ priorities in life. Only 13% of boomers said having a job they love was important to them, with good health (86%) and financial stability (77%) taking the top spots. Millennials began to equalize those, increasing job importance to 33%. Gen Z, however, shifted the order, putting good health at 57%, financial stability at 52%, healthy relationships at 53%, and a job that I love at 39%. Here’s what this tells me: What you do and who you do it with can be just as important as a paycheck.
So, what’s your vision? For your church, team, and the individual? Does their job mean something important? If you’re working at a church, you likely believe in the vision of the Gospel, but have you connected the dots to your individual team members’ roles?
The team I lead isn’t on the “front-lines” of ministry, but our team knows the potential impact we have in bringing the Good News to those in need. They see how photography, email strategy, communications, design, advertising, project management, and operations all connect to that vision. Not only that, they know I believe they can continue to grow and have greater impact for our Kingdom beyond their current abilities. Having someone who believes in you and calls out your unique contributions? That’s invaluable.
So the next time budgets are tight, staff are reduced, or raises are slim, ask yourself how you can better invest in your team. Take some time this week to ask your team members what motivates them most. What small steps can you take to create a more engaging work environment right now? There’s often a lot more to it than a paycheck!
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Next, move into an evaluation phase. I always have to be careful here because I tend to believe I have things figured out pretty quickly. Be patient in this phase, and continue to ask more questions. One of my favorite things to do at this point is to gather the team (staff, volunteers, or sometimes both) and let them talk. Get a whiteboard out and ask them what things are going well and what we want to continue doing. Write down everything they say, and don’t interrupt unless it’s to ask another question for clarity. Sometimes the hard part is writing down items you don’t see as a positive, but they do for some reason. Don’t worry about that right now Then, ask them to list things that aren’t going so great or that we want to change. You might be surprised how long this list gets and how many items contradict what was on the other list! 
The third phase of starting to change the culture of your new team for the better is to communicate. If they don’t already exist, establish a mission and core values for the team. Sometimes it can be beneficial to generate these as a group. This helps to rally everyone under one common purpose and hold each other accountable to agreed-upon values. 
