Thanks for joining us on Season 5 of The Flourishing Culture Podcast, brought to you by The Best Christian Workplaces Institute. You’ll learn how to build a flourishing workplace culture that drives the ministry impact of your organization, your church, or your company brought to you by the Best Christian Workplaces Institute. Now here’s your host, BCWI president, Al Lopus.
As a leader what would you do if you discovered you had an unhealthy workplace culture where there are strong silos between departments, poor communication, and lack of trust between leaders and staff? Well, today’s podcast is a great case study of an organization that has seen its culture transformed. And as a result, are better prepared to face today’s unique challenges.
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It’s my pleasure to welcome to the microphone Mike Kremnitzer Director of Benefits and Human Resources for the West Ohio Conference of the United Methodist Church.
Toxic culture and a crisis do not go well together. The culture work we’ve done has given us a firm foundation to weather these storms.”
In this episode, you’ll hear about:
- How is the West Ohio Conference of UMC coping in the midst of this pandemic? (02:52)
- What motivated the Conference to survey its employees? (07:12)
- The BCWI survey acts as a mirror, an objective look inside the organization (07:17)
- The survey would benchmark the organization (07:42)
- We needed a tool for the job (08:03)
- How an anonymous survey helps to foster trust (09:35)
- The first round of survey results revealed that we were broken and needed to be fixed (09:57)
- The importance of developing core values (13:15)
- Hiring individuals who live the core values (13:28)
- The decision to be a strengths-based environment (16:32)
- How to avoid isolation in a telework environment (20:50)
- Chemistry, respect, trust are three words that describe the Conference’s culture today (21:50)
Additional Resources
Download BCWI’s four-page guide for inspirational leadership in crisis for FREE.
Read the Transcript
Read a complete, word-for-word transcript of the episode here

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