Today was an interesting day, everyone had the day off to recover from the volunteer appreciation last Friday.  So with no one in the office it was the perfect time for our IT guy, Bill Morrison, to do some updates of our phone internet servers.  I came in because a day off for me is really just one less day to get work done, which makes taking days off almost not worth it.  Plus I knew Bill could use some help. 

At one point today we got to talking about communication, or the lack there of at our church.  During this conversation Bill made the comment “we just don’t have a culture of communication.”  I realized that was really the problem, it’s not that people don’t want to communicate, it’s really they don’t know how, or to who. Worse was the realization that all the tools in the world wouldn’t fix it if it was not a cultural change. 

One of our problems is we have become a big staff very quickly.  People that have been around awhile never had to learn to communicate in a large staff environment, and people coming in later either didn’t have the skills or gave up on them because no one else has them. We have the culture of a small church where everyone knows everything, and nothing more really needs to be passed on.  Unfortunately, we have a large staff (over 100) and most people don’t know all the people on staff much less what all their jobs are.  More importantly most people don’t know what ripples are caused by the decisions they make.  This is the real danger in a culture non-communication, people will do things that will make more work for other people without realizing it.  This gets back to the church being a submarine.  I know we are not the only ones who suffer from poor communication, or a culture of not communicating what tools/ solutions do you use to overcome this?