In churches across the country, leaders are inspiring teams to accomplish their God-given visions. Although we are all seeking the same end goal — helping people find lasting relationship with the living God — how we reach that goal matters. Leaders sometimes allow their vision to blind them to the well-being of their team members. When leaders fall out of touch with the holistic needs of their teams, morale suffers.

Have you stopped praying for your team and their families? Do team members consistently display critical attitudes? Have they lost excitement for the vision? Have laughter and community ceased? If the team is struggling, the mission will struggle.

Church teams with great morale consistently demonstrate commitment to staff members through words and actions. They invest generously in one another, provide clear expectations, and communicate in healthy ways.

Good morale energizes mission-focused work. Happy, healthy team members are in a better position to make a positive difference in the congregation and the community.

Conversely, poor team morale leads to team members feeling disengaged from the mission and the church. This will trickle down to every part of your ministry.

Culture and morale are both intangibles that are difficult to quantify, but the effects of great culture and high team morale are unmistakable: committed and productive team members, quality work, creativity and contagious enthusiasm.

Here are three ways to fuel your team’s morale and improve results:

Create a Culture of Value and Care

Building up morale is a difficult but rewarding task. Consistency is key. At New Life Church, we frequently talk about culture — reviewing our mission, values and convictions. We have these conversations at every level of our organization, from department head meetings to volunteer gatherings. Even our signage reflects our culture.

Every church must build a culture of valuing and caring for one another, because that is the nature of Christ. There are times when leaders can become so focused on their God-given vision they forget they are in the people development business. God does not need us to sacrifice the holistic development of our teams to accomplish His will. When a leader goes down the road of me-centric leadership, team morale will suffer.

Every church must build a culture of valuing and caring for one another, because that is the nature of Christ.

People want to know that we care about their well-being. It’s less about what we say and more about what we do. We communicate care and value in two ways: investment and development.

Once a month, our lead pastors surprise a department with an all-expense-paid outing. This builds team morale and relationships. Most importantly, it communicates that our lead pastors value the team.

We communicate the value of family from the stage weekly. Allowing staff to have time for their families is our investment in their children’s future.

We believe in financially taking care of our staff, and our budget demonstrates that. We don’t allow job performance to dictate what people receive financially.

Of course, we do believe in the importance of doing our best and accomplishing the mission of New Life Church. We make room in every department head’s budget for personal and professional development. We encourage our teams to visit churches in the area and attend conferences that will take their departments to the next level.

Create a Culture of Encouragement

Every Monday as a staff, we discuss weekly wins. We talk about great things God did the previous week and highlight team members who demonstrated our culture. This is an ideal time for department heads to encourage team members and celebrate them in front of the staff.

Create a Culture That Lives What It Values

At New Life Church, we value three things: extravagant grace, bold faith and ridiculous generosity. We not only want this to be true of how we view our church, but also how it translates to our staff. Sometimes the biggest morale killer in organizations is how we financially take care of our team members.

At New Life Church, we put our money where our heart is. We invest our money in missions, ministry, outreach, Kingdom Builders and our team. Proverbs 11:24-25 provides insight that we, as leaders, should remember when considering the financial commitment to our staff: “Give freely and become more wealthy; be stingy and lose everything. The generous will prosper; those who refresh others will themselves be refreshed” (NLT).

How do churches, organizations and businesses build great team morale? Create a culture that is consistent, values and encourages the team, and lives what it values. Great culture breeds great team morale!

This article originally appeared in the September/October 2018 edition of Influence magazine.