Performance Reviews
How Healthy
is Your Parish Staff?
Signs of a Healthy Organization
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Minimal Politics
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Minimal Confusion
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High Morale
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High Productivity
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Low Turn-over
Becoming a Healthy Organization
3 Steps to Becoming Healthy:
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Know your employees (both their job performance and personal lives).
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Help them see meaning in their work (including via encouragement and affirmation)
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Provide measurable standards and goals (and review their job performance in a non-threating way)
Youth Minister Burnout
Turnover in youth ministry is frequently due to burnout. Often, youth ministers and other parish staff burn out for one of three reasons:
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They do not feel that their pastor and/or supervisor knows and genuinely cares about them.
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They feel like the work they do is not making a difference in the Kingdom of God.
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They overwork themselves because they do not know the pastor's and/or their supervisor's expectations for job performance.
Watch this great 2 minute video by Patrick Lencioni on this topic.
Importance of Regular Performance Reviews
Different authorities will cite different methods, but one thing is constant: the more often and more clearly you communicate your expectations to your employee, the better will be their job performance. Those expectations need to be realistic and demonstrate that you understand who they are as a person and what a single person is capable of accomplishing. But most importantly, they need to be communicated rather than assumed.
3-Step Process for Performance Reviews
It is recommended that you provide three basic components for the review process:
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Work together with your employee to set clear and measurable goals and objectives at the start of a given year.
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Provide periodic informal reviews of those objectives, ideally in dialogue with the employee.
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Provide an annual performance review based on the mutually agreed upon objectives.
This process could be but does not have to be formal. The goal is to increase communication between you and your youth minister, and to create a culture of planning with purpose that will allow you to affirm your youth minister and also challenge them as needed. It will help them to be happier in their job while also ensuring that they understand your vision for the parish and its ministry to young people. Such performance reviews also provide a baseline for discussions about the continuation or termination of employment.