Integrating faith and work: companies that develop "faith friendly" cultures to allow employees to put their souls as well as their hearts and minds into their work will ultimately be rewarded with better performance and productivity.

Recent allegations (reported widely in the media) of evangelizing by Christian officers at the U.S. Air Force Academy have renewed discussion of the proper "place" or "role" of faith in public life. While most Americans believe more or less in the separation of church and state, the idea of interweaving faith with every part of life, including business, is not novel. For much of human history, religion was much more central to day-to-day life than it is now, and often it was closely interwoven with commerce. The British and Dutch East India Trading Companies, for example, frequently sent chaplains along on their ships that were traveling around the world.

Over time, however, faith became relegated--at least in the Western world--to the personal and private spheres and less to the public sphere, including the workplace. By the mid-20th century it was generally agreed that there were certain things you just didn't talk about at work, one of which was religion. Faith was seen as a private matter and was kept to the side.

But beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we began seeing a series of changes in the workplace that show an almost uncanny trajectory toward greater acceptance of faith. At that time, the question of race began to consume corporate America, and most forward-thinking companies began to embrace what we today might call race-friendly policies. Then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the women's movement gained steam, and corporate America embarked on a crusade to lend a gender-friendly accent to policies and operations. In the 1980s the question became how to create a family-friendly environment, and enlightened companies realized that to attract and retain the best workers they not only had to be race-friendly and gender-friendly, but also family-friendly--for example, by recognizing single-parent families and other non-traditional family units.

By the early and mid-1990s we had begun to confront gender orientation issues, and companies adopted policies to become neutral or non-discriminatory, if not actively friendly, toward gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees. Then, in the late 1990s, we began seeing what I call faith-friendly policies emerging from corporate human resources offices. At their best, these policies acknowledge and respect all religious traditions and encourage employees to feel they no longer have to leave their spiritual identities, their souls, and their faith in the parking lot when they enter the workplace.

LIVING AN INTEGRATED LIFE

I think what's driving this corporate accommodation of personal faith is not churches or synagogues or organized religion--in fact, most religions and seminaries and divinity schools are unaware of this phenomenon--but average men and women who are saying, "I want to live an integrated life. I want to be who I am 24/7. I don't want to have to pretend to be one person at work and another person in my private life."

This desire for an integrated life encompasses questions of spiritual identity and world views that come from one's spiritual and religious upbringing. It manifests itself in the workplace in many, many ways, which I think is one of the exciting aspects of what I call the "faith at work" movement.

For some people, living their faith at work means paying attention to questions of social justice, like paying fair wages and being honest in representing your products and services and treating people fairly in the workplace. Others are motivated by the belief that no matter how much money they make or how impressive their title or how prestigious their organization, these things alone don't provide meaning or purpose, so for them it's a question of finding a deeper truth in their work.

Some people see their faith as a way of helping them deal with the rough and tumble of the marketplace, like the times when they get passed over for a promotion they deserve or get laid off or downsized through no fault of their own, or when someone else gets credit for their work. Their faith can be a source of solace and nurture and healing in such times. For others, faith is a matter of expression, of letting people know what they believe, how they believe, and why they believe.

These examples hint at the richness of the faith at work movement and suggest that what we're seeing today in the workplace goes far beyond the obvious things, like having a meditation room or prayer room. By and large, companies have a responsibility to accommodate these expressions and/or practices of faith so long as they don't unduly disrupt business operations. This entails making sure that someone is not harassing someone else in the workplace based on their religion and making sure someone doesn't disrupt the flow of work.

I've found in my research that with a little bit of foresight and training and a heavy dose of common sense, most expressions of religious faith can be accommodated pretty easily in workplace settings. The training is important--we need to cultivate a new breed of managers and executives who will be attentive to questions of religious identification and motivation in the same way they might today be attentive to cultural traditions, such as how you pass your business card with two hands in Japan, not just one hand.

The people at the top of the corporate pyramid right now represent the tail end of the generation that believes there's no place in the marketplace for religion or politics or sex. But the reality is that every company talks about politics because they have their political action committees and lobbyists, and every company talks about sex because they've had to develop (or at least consider developing) policies addressing same-sex benefits. Faith at work is the next big frontier to explore.

EXPERIENCING SUDDEN JOLTS

The big question, of course, is how much staying power it will have. When I wrote my doctoral dissertation, I looked at the faith at work movement over the past 100 years and identified a few peak periods of activity Using the historical data, I've tried to predict, based on the factors that caused the other movements to run out of steam, when this one will recede. From everything I've seen, I think we will see even greater attentiveness paid in coming years to the question of integrating faith and work.

Simply put, there is an acute desire to live a holistic life, however one defines that term. Most people want to be consistent in terms of who and what they are, both at work and at home, and their faith is a big part of that need for consistency. To some extent it's a function of age--as people grow older, they show more interest in transcendent questions of meaning and purpose and faith. In the main, you don't tend to see 24-year-olds asking these kinds of questions; they're more interested in promotions and paychecks.

That said, it's puzzling why this didn't happen to my father's generation. I think there are other factors that are giving people permission, if you will, to think and ask about these questions--permission that my father and his father certainly didn't have. One such factor is geography In southern cities such as Atlanta or Dallas or Chattanooga, expressions of religious identity and particularly Christian identity are fairly common and considered normal. Conversely, in Boston or New York, there's more of a reluctance to express one's faith in the public sphere.

Another factor is immigration. The United States historically has viewed itself as a Judeo-Christian country, but in recent years there's been a growing awareness of other religions. They may be very small statistically, but in certain parts of the country they may enjoy a significant representation. For example, there are some parts of the country with many more Laotian or Vietnamese or Somali citizens than their overall percentages would suggest. When you translate this phenomenon to the workplace, you find some employers experiencing sudden jolts when they encounter ethnic groups, largely comprising immigrants, with whom they've never had any interaction.

A HOT POTATO 

Accommodating these cultures and their religious beliefs represents both a challenge and an opportunity The historical concern of the mainstream media and intellectual elite has been to question, rightly, whether the Christian majority is proselytizing or imposing its beliefs on religious minorities. The assumption is often that conservative Christians are being heavy-handed toward adherents of other faiths.

First, I think that is an unfair characterization of most Christians. Moreover, most religious lawsuits filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) aren't about religious harassment in the form of proselytizing or evangelizing; most of them are filed by members of minority religions arguing their employers don't understand their faith or its practices and thus have discriminated against them according to their religious beliefs. So, generally speaking, it's not the overzealous proselytizer overstepping boundaries who causes most problems but the unwitting manager or supervisor who isn't familiar with others' religious practices or the laws that stand behind them and who thus denies others their rights of religious accommodation.

Yet another external factor--one that none of us could have predicted, of course--is that, in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, questions of religion and its impact are with us every day. I believe the Islam-Christian question is not going to go away in the next coupe of years; over the next decade or two, we will be very engaged with questions of Muslim-Christian dialogue. Just as the Cold War defined many of the geopolitical and social policies of the post-World War II period in the second half of the twentieth century, Muslim-Christian relations will, I predict, define such policies in the first quarter of this century. This will greatly affect business because more and more companies these days are engaged in international commerce with a supplier or vendor, and one has to think not just, "How do I do business in Tuscaloosa?" but also "How do I do business in Bali, Bangalore, Bahrain, or Baghdad?" These cultures and economies are all very different, and they're all shaped by religious considerations.

It's tempting to take the approach that faith at work is a hot potato and it's better not to touch it, but I'm encouraged by the number of companies that are saying, "Yes, it is a hot potato, and precisely because of that we're going to think hard about it and not put our heads in the sand." To me, that's a sign of leadership, and these companies will reap the dividends of their courage.

"HOW DO I DO THIS?"

Ultimately, issues of faith and work are leadership issues, so employee assistance professionals with an interest in coaching (especially executive coaching) can make a significant impact on how well business leaders integrate the two and maintain or even enhance workforce performance. The old, simplistic understanding of the faith at work movement is that of a bunch of white, middle-age business owners meeting before work for a prayer breakfast and Bible study, There is an element of truth in that, and there's nothing wrong with it, but integrating faith and work is much richer and broader in scope and possibility than work-related Bible studies.

What I find as I meet with different CEOs around the country is that a question keeps coming up: "How do I do this? How do I create an atmosphere that allows people to integrate faith and work?" These leaders tell me they need a language and a framework to enable them to get their arms around issues of faith and work, and they didn't learn anything about this in their MBA program or from their mentors earlier in their careers.

Most of the people I've been involved with have tried very consciously to thread the needle, if you will, between balancing their own sense of their religious teachings with a recognition that everyone else around them may very well hold different views. And they struggle, sometimes quite openly, over how they can make sure they're being respectful of others who feel differently and at the same time draw on their faith and traditions to be good leaders and make ethical decisions. They want to be authentic to that which they believe and at the same time recognize they're operating in a diverse world.

I conclude that the best way forward is to develop policies that help create a "faith friendly" culture. Corporate leaders and managers need to give people permission to bring their whole selves to work--their hearts, minds, and souls. Companies that do this may hit some bumps along the road, but they'll likely avoid major accidents, too, and will become better places to work as a result.

David Miller, M.Div., Ph D.

David Miller is executive director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School and an assistant professor (adjunct) of business ethics. He serves as an advisor to several corporate CEOs and senior executives on questions pertaining to ethics, values, integrating faith and work, and becoming a faith-friendly employer. Prior to joining academia, David lived and worked in London, England for eight years, where he was an equity partner in a private bank and, before that, a senior executive and director of the securities services and global custody division of Midland Bank plc (now part of the HSBC Group). His forthcoming book, The Faith at Work Movement, examines the growth, dynamics, and possible future of the faith in the workplace movement.