TruthBook Religious News Blog

This lengthy article is worth reading. It expands upon the problems, and benefits, of providing for spirituality in the workplace. Since so many Americans profess religious connection, it is an idea that makes an attempt to incorporate this important aspect of American life into this large part of the lives of American workers.

Many employers are weaving religion and spirituality into company cultures. The push may come from bosses or the rank and file—and their motivations vary. Either way, when religion and spirituality cross the threshold, they result in daunting legal and managerial challenges along with perceived benefits.

By Robert J. Grossman

Bob Pettus spent his entire career with Charlotte, N.C.-based Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated —all with top-level human resource responsibility. Like an Israelite wandering in the Sinai seeking the Promised Land, he engaged in a quest—to find the keys to attracting and retaining high-performing workers and managers. After decades in the wilderness, he was losing heart.

“Our employees’ salaries, benefits and perks were always a little bit ahead of others so we could attract the kinds of employees we needed,” recalls the HR veteran, who retired in 2005 as vice chairman of the nation’s second-largest Coca-Cola bottler with 5,800 employees in 11 Southeastern states. “I would get all excited about giving everyone a 3.5 percent increase, putting in a new insurance policy, adding a new holiday. But when I made the announcements, there was hardly any response except, ‘Hey, that’s what everyone else is doing. You guys should have been doing this a long time ago.’ We spent all those millions, and all we got for it was ‘ho-hum.’ ” ›

Then Pettus—who now consults for the company—saw the light. He was meeting the physical and emotional needs of workers, but what about the spiritual? Did it make sense to keep religion under wraps and require people to leave their faith at the doorstep? Equally important, if leaders really believed in running the business in concert with God and religious values, shouldn’t they say so?

Pettus knew company leaders who answer affirmatively buck convention: Most business leaders are faith-frosty, convinced that the less religious expression at work, the better. They comply with legal mandates and accommodate individuals who require special arrangements, but go no further.

The U.S. educational system and other teachings “say you should compartmentalize faith,” Pettus says. “Folks who are willing to talk about their faith and live it out Monday through Friday often are viewed as fanatical. Someone can go to a football game and scream and holler, throw things in the air and dress like a slob. But at work, if you mention that you should love one another and live right every day—it’s like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ”

Pettus took a stand. Working with the chief executive officer, he drafted a mission and values statement that makes it clear company leaders embrace and honor God. It opens the door to spirituality for all employees and champions stewardship. The statement leads with “Our Values Honor God.”

Finally, an initiative that was met with an overwhelming positive reaction. When people learn they can live out their faith, Pettus says, “There’s this loyalty, this willingness to go the extra mile.”

Faith Focus

Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated represents one of many faith-focused U.S. companies. These organizations proactively conduct business in a manner that embraces the faiths of leaders or owners. Their faiths provide underlying values that motivate and guide the organizations. A few, such as Coca-Cola Bottling, are publicly traded. Many more—such as Austaco Ltd., a privately owned Taco Bell franchisee with 1,800 workers in Austin, Texas—number among the nation’s small and medium-sized and frequently family-owned businesses.

“We classify ourselves as a Christian company—Christ- or God-centered,” says Don Barton, Austaco’s HR vice president. “We do things like say grace when we have a meal, something a typical company might not do. The employees know that our CEO, Dirk Dozier, is open about sharing his Christian faith in personal testimony. Our motto is to serve, which includes serving our employees on a spiritual basis.”

A strong majority in the United States are religious, even as religious affiliation becomes increasingly diverse. According to a 2008 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life:

* 92 percent of Americans say they believe in God.
* 83 percent are affiliated with a religious group.
* 54 percent attend religious services at least once or twice
per month.
* Nearly 60 percent pray every day.
* 39 percent meditate at least once a week.
* 74 percent believe in life after death.
* 63 percent say they believe Scripture is the word of God.

Labels: business, Coca-Cola Bottling Co, faith-friendly, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Robert J. Grossman, workplace spirituality

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Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Toppling A Taboo: Businesses Go ‘Faith-Friendly’

Religion comes knocking at the workplace.

Knowledge@Wharton

Evidence of faith percolating through the workforce abounds. Prayer breakfasts, once confined to Capitol Hill, are now popular among executives in unexpected sectors such as technology and real estate. Companies are hiring corporate chaplains to do everything from performing marriage ceremonies to visiting sick employees and offering drug and alcohol counseling. The Academy of Management's five-year-old interest group on spirituality and religion has attracted nearly 700 members, and a quick trawl through Amazon or your local bookstore reveals enough spirituality-at-work titles to fill a small chapel.

Is this just evangelical Christians flexing their business muscles? Or members of non-Western religions appealing for recognition? It's all that and more, argues Miller. It's a genuine social movement, a confluence of forces including an increase in non-Western immigration, rising religiosity among management-level baby boomers, and a search for meaning prompted by 9/11. This faith-at-work movement, says Miller, will ultimately shape business culture as profoundly as the push for civil rights and equal pay has shaped the environment for minority workers and women.

"The old paradigm of leaving your beliefs behind when you go to work is no longer satisfying," says Stew Friedman, practice professor of management and director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project. "More than ever, people want work that fits in with a larger sense of purpose in life. For many people, that includes a concept of God, or something like it."

Do Ask, Do Tell

At Fannie Mae, a leader in the diversity and inclusion field, recognizing religion has been a natural outgrowth of responding to employee needs, according to Emmanuel Bailey, vice-president and chief diversity officer at the Washington, D.C.-based home finance giant. In addition to conducting a biannual employee survey, the diversity office also initiates conversations with its 16 employee network groups, five of which are religiously based.

"We want a corporate culture that retains employees, so that they value Fannie Mae as a great place to work," says Bailey. "We ask, 'From your own perspective, what could we do to improve the culture here?' We had the Jewish, Muslim and Hindu groups say, 'We always see an acknowledgement of Christmas, but we never see any acknowledgement of Rosh Hashanah, Ramadan or Diwali,'" says Bailey.

The issue came up again recently, when Fannie Mae was rushing to complete its financial restatement following charges that it misstated earnings from 2001 to 2004, among other allegations. "Some of our divisions had to work on a six-day-a-week, 12-hour-a-day schedule," recalls Bailey. "From our employee network groups we learned that this decision cut into certain people's religious observances. That's what led us to the multicultural calendar."

The calendar, available company-wide, notes religious celebrations throughout the year. When holidays approach, says Bailey, employee groups write an article about the holiday's meaning and history, which is then posted on the company intranet; at the bottom is a note directing managers on how to accommodate employees celebrating the holiday.

Avoiding Bad Business Decisions

Whether it's prayer breakfasts, study groups or workplace ministries, much of the faith-at-work movement has evolved outside of the church - in large part because churches in recent decades have been uninterested in, if not hostile towards, the business world, according to Miller, a former senior executive in the financial sector. "Although there are pockets of interest in some churches, it's fair to say that churches, whether evangelical, mainline Protestant or Catholic, have abdicated their theological and pastoral interest in the workplace," Miller says.

A thriving evangelical culture is gradually reversing this trend, however. David Roth was a vice president for business development and marketing at J.B. Hunt Transport when he attended a leadership conference at his Arkansas megachurch several years ago. When the conference ended, Roth's pastor announced the creation of a new ministry to bridge the gap between faith and work.

"That message penetrated me like a laser beam. I spent 25 years of my career as Christian on Sunday, but come Monday, it was all about success and money," Roth recalls. When the church ministry was spun off to form a separate, non-profit organization called WorkMatters, Roth quit his VP post to become its first president. Today, the organization advises companies large and small on how to integrate religion and spirituality into their corporate values, and provides individual employees with a template for starting faith-based groups at work.

Meanwhile, leveraging employee religious knowledge to assist product design "can help companies avoid a lot of dumb mistakes," such as Liz Claiborne's decision to embroider verses from the Quran on the rear end of its DKNY jeans, says Georgette Bennett, president of the New York City-based Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, a pioneering organization in the field of religious diversity in the workplace. "Cultural competence is a big buzz word right now. But you can't be culturally competent without understanding something about religion, because religion is the largest component of culture. You have to figure out how to tap into your internal diversity resources."

Corporate leaders resistant to the idea of being faith-friendly may be persuaded by evidence that religion and spirituality already exist in their workplace, says Bennett, pointing to a 2005 NBC poll in which nearly 60% of respondents said religious beliefs played some role in making decisions at work, and an even higher number said such beliefs influenced their interactions with co-workers. Similarly, recent figures from the U.S. Census show a dramatic rise in the rate of immigration from non-Western countries; one-third of human resources professionals surveyed in 2001 by the Tanenbaum Center and the Society for Human Resource Management said the number of religions in their company increased in the past five years.

Legal Hot Spots

Proselytizing in the workplace is one legal hot spot, according to Deborah Weinstein, who teaches employment law for managers in Wharton's legal studies and business ethics department. "Courts across the country have interpreted this issue very differently. In a 2006 case in California, the court said persistent and blatant proselytization is prohibited because it could constitute harassment. But other courts, in Colorado, for example, have said employers need to bend over backwards to accommodate those who [believe they] need to proselytize," says Weinstein, whose Philadelphia-based Weinstein Firm provides legal and consultancy services on workforce issues.

Employers may be surprised to learn the extent of religious expression legally protected in the workplace by the Constitution and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from discriminating on religious grounds and requires them to make "reasonable accommodations" for employees' "sincerely held beliefs."

Another contentious issue right now is what Bennett calls "diversity backlash," in the form of Christian employee affinity groups opposing domestic partner benefits, hrefusing to sign diversity statements that include homosexuality, or asking management not to recognize Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgender (GLBT) affinity groups. While Bennett says these conflicts make some companies "scared to death" of religion in the workplace, Nicole Raeburn, a University of San Francisco sociologist, says many of these disputes have been successfully resolved, sometimes with the help of outside mediators.

"It's a red herring to presume that evangelical Christians are by definition going to be at odds with GLBT groups," says Miller. "Yes, [companies] will stub their toes sometimes. But they need to be realistic: Good outcomes require struggle."

Taking the "Faith-Friendly" Plunge

For managers used to keeping religious belief - or non-belief - under wraps from nine to five, talking about religion in terms of company policy can feel as strange as wearing your underwear on top of your slacks. Miller suggests leaders use the term "faith-friendly" to ease into the topic, because it accommodates both popular, general spirituality and more specific, orthodox religion.
Like underwear, faith-at-work is not a one-size-fits-all product: Companies have to choose the approaches that fit best. The menu of options for meeting religious and spiritual needs is short but growing. Popular picks right now include allowing employees to swap holiday time; modifying cafeteria food to meet religious dietary restrictions; providing spaces for prayer or meditation; and allowing employees to start faith-based affinity groups.

Hiring corporate chaplains, who do everything from conducting weddings to visiting sick or injured employees in the hospital to advising managers on meeting ethical standards, is another possibility. Tyson, for example, has a director of Chaplain Services, a manager of Chaplain Operations and 122 part-time chaplains working throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Becoming "faith-friendly" is "not a formula; it's a mind-set," Miller adds. He encourages companies to make faith-friendliness an explicit part of company policy - a move that could heighten a company's appeal to potential employees.

Wharton's Friedman advises companies, when introducing any work/life integration program, to encourage a "grass-roots approach," in which employees take responsibility for asking the company to meet their individual needs. "Let's say you need to pray several times during the work day. How does your being able to pray during the day make the company more effective? If it's something you really care about, you'll find a convincing way to make your case. This inverts the normal antagonistic way of thinking about your company meeting your needs," he says.

And how does one create an environment where employees feel this sense of personal responsibility? "That's the job of a progressive, smart company: motivating people to bring what they've got so it can help both them and you," says Friedman. "Most people want to have more of themselves alive and active in their work. The more they can be a whole person at work, the more energy, focus and motivation they have to offer.

Labels: church, culture, faith-friendly, religion, religiosity, social movement, workplace spirituality