The merger of faith and work: Think religion and work are as separate as church and state? Not anymore

May 17, 2007

Copyright © 2007 PRSA. All rights reserved.

By Katie Sweeney

The following article appears in the spring issue of The Strategist.

In his 13 years working at Sears’ world headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Ill., Michael Valleskey has survived recessions, manager changes, several rounds of layoffs and the Sears-Kmart merger of 2005.

So what has kept him going? His Christian faith — and his Christian co-workers.

Seven years ago, Valleskey, a real-estate research analyst for Sears Holding Corp., helped found the Christian Fellowship at Prairie Stone, a 150-member informal group of Christian employees at the Prairie Stone office complex where Sears has its headquarters. The group of mostly Sears employees holds lunchtime Bible studies and prayer groups, and members act as a support network for one another. Valleskey also participates in the Sears Associate Gospel Choir, which rehearses at lunchtime and is an officially recognized group at Sears.
 
“I don’t know what I would have done without my co-workers of similar faith,” he says. “They have been there to support me, encourage me, make me a better worker. They really are family. It’s basically church. I have a church in the workplace.” Church at work? It’s not as far-fetched as it might sound. Across corporate America, there’s a growing movement to recognize and incorporate spirituality and religion in the workplace. A few of the signs: a growing number of religion-based affinity groups, lunchtime prayer meetings, on-site corporate chaplains and company “quiet rooms” for meditation and prayer. Meanwhile, books on religion and spirituality in business are flying off the printing press, and even some business schools are starting to address the issue.

Who’s behind this movement? While evangelical Christians are leading part of the charge, the trend also includes other Christians, as well as groups focused on more general spiritual principles. In addition, people of all faiths are seeking time off and other religious accommodations from their employers. In short, religion in the workplace is the next big diversity issue.

If this sounds like sticky territory for companies, it is. However, ignoring the issue has its own perils, says David Miller, executive director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and author of the book “God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement.”

“The soul train is going through town,” Miller says. “If you haven’t thought through a structured policy and appropriate training for your management, you’re going to make a misstep and find yourself on the back end of a lawsuit.”

Searching for meaning
Employee communications directors, take note: Americans are increasingly unhappy with their jobs.

According to a February report from the Conference Board Consumer Research Center, less than half of all Americans are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent 20 years ago. Workers under the age of 25 reported the lowest level of satisfaction and the lowest ever recorded in the 20 years of the survey.

Those numbers aren’t surprising to many in the spirituality-at-work movement. “People want careers that are more meaningful,” says Don McCormick, Ph.D., an adjunct associate professor at California State University at Northridge who has researched spirituality at work and teaches classes on it. “As other structures of meaning in society fall away, we look for that kind of meaning in integrating our spirituality with our workplace.”

Changes in work itself over the past two decades are another factor behind the trend. Like Valleskey at Sears, many employees now routinely deal with mergers, management changes and layoffs — not exactly morale boosters. At the same time, baby boomers are getting older, and like every aging generation before them, they’ve begun to ask more questions about life’s purpose.

With people working more hours than ever before, it stands to reason that this search for meaning would spill over into the workplace.

“People are more inclined to live an integrated life now and be holistic,” Miller says, adding that younger workers are particularly adamant about this. “They don’t want to have to artificially turn off some part of themselves. And if their faith is a central part of their identity, they can’t just turn that off.”

Complicating matters further is the growing religious diversity in the workplace. Changing immigration patterns have resulted in more foreign-born workers, many of whom practice religions outside Judeo-Christian traditions and come from places where religion is deeply intertwined with daily life.

Meanwhile, religion is becoming an increasingly public topic, with today’s politicians commonly discussing their spiritual beliefs.

“When everyone from the president on down wears their religion on their sleeves, then it’s not surprising that in the workplace, employees would become more assertive about their rights to religious expression,” says Georgette Bennett, president and founder of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, a pioneering organization in the field of religious diversity in the workplace.

Religious accommodation
Many companies have been caught off guard by the trend. While reports of other types of discrimination — such as age, race, sex and disability — are leveling off or declining, complaints of religious discrimination are on the rise. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the number of religious discrimination complaints jumped 49 percent between 1997 and 2006.

Although religion is still a relatively small category, the problem may be worse than the EEOC data suggest. According to the Tanenbaum Center’s research, only 23 percent of employees who believe they’ve been the victim of religious bias report it to anyone.

“Even though your HR people may not be aware of it, this stuff is roiling around below the surface,” Bennett says.

One of the biggest issues is religious accommodation. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from discriminating against individuals because of their religion, employers are required to accommodate employees’ religious needs, as long as it doesn’t cause “undue hardship” to the company or other employees.

Common requests include time off to pray, attend religious services or observe religious holidays. Dress and appearance is another issue, especially in jobs that require the wearing of a uniform.

While some requests are simple to accommodate, others can be tricky. Even if a lawsuit isn’t filed, disputes can be painful. For example, in 2005, 30 Muslim workers made the news when they walked away from their jobs at Dell Inc.’s Nashville, Tenn., plant, saying they weren’t being granted time off to pray at sunset. A month later, the workers, who were packaging computers through a temporary labor agency, were reinstated, given back pay and granted an accommodation.

Amina Rubin, spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which advocated for the workers in the Dell case, says time off for daily prayers is a commonly requested accommodation for Muslims, who are required to pray five times a day.

Accommodations are requested by people of all religions, though, and companies don’t have to accommodate everyone. Under current law, “undue hardship” has been defined as anything more than de minimis (or very trivial) expenditures, which is a low standard. But courts have differed in their interpretation of undue hardship in cases where the effect is nonmonetary, says Dudley Rochelle, shareholder with Littler Mendelson, a national employment and labor law firm.

“The courts have come out in a fairly pragmatic way,” Rochelle says. “They don’t always say that the person’s religious request trumps everybody else.”

Many religious groups, however, are seeking to tighten the standard of undue hardship through legislation called the Workplace Religious Freedom Act. The legislation has been introduced in Congress several times over the past decade but has never passed.

The right to proselytize? 
Perhaps the biggest hot-button issue, though, is proselytizing. Considered religious expression, proselytizing is a protected form of speech. However, when an employee on the receiving end of proselytizing asks for it to stop — and it doesn’t — it becomes a harassment case.

It’s hard to say for sure whether religious proselytizing is on the rise in the workplace because the EEOC doesn’t track proselytizing cases as a separate category. Still, in a 2001 survey of human resources professionals conducted by the Tanenbaum Center and the Society for Human Resource Management, 20 percent of respondents reported employees proselytizing co-workers about religion.

But the bigger problem arises when executives or managers begin to preach their faith to employees, says Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a now-independent offshoot of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“You can always tell a fellow worker to leave you alone if you don’t like [his or her] proselytizing,” Maltby says. “But if your boss starts to tell you how his faith is better than your faith, you aren’t free to tell him to take a hike. And unfortunately that happens far too often.”

Employer proselytizing more typically occurs at privately held companies, he adds. But private or public, a company can’t require employees to practice a particular religion, attend prayer breakfasts, visit with a company chaplain, etc.

“The only legal principle companies need to be aware of is making sure that they’re not doing anything that’s even subtly coercive,” Maltby says. “If everything you’re doing is really voluntary, you’re not going to have any legal problems.”

Os Hillman, president of Marketplace Leaders, which seeks to teach Christians how to apply biblical faith to their working life, says that while evangelism is one of the goals of the Christian-based faith-at-work movement, he discourages people from proselytizing during work hours.

“We strongly believe that when a person’s there to work, they’re there to work,” says Hillman, who also directs the International Coalition of Workplace Ministries and is author of the book “The 9 to 5 Window: How Faith Can Transform the Workplace.” “What they do on their coffee breaks or before hours or after hours is their own time.”

Evangelism isn’t the only goal, either, he adds. Christian workplace ministries also seek to encourage Christians to do their work with excellence, ethics and integrity and to view their secular work as a calling from God.

Taking spirituality a step further 
The fear of proselytizing is enough to make many companies avoid the topic of religion and spirituality in the workplace. But that would be shortsighted, says Martin Rutte, president of Livelihood, a management consulting firm in Santa Fe, N.M., and an international speaker and consultant on spirituality at work.

Rutte, who also chairs the Centre for Spirituality in the Workplace at the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, argues that allowing people to express their spiritual selves at work can lead to a host of benefits, including increased creativity and a greater sense of morality, ethics and community.

“Work does not have to be a place where you give up your soul,” he says. “It needs to be a place where people’s souls are nourished, so that they can serve [other] people, either customers or fellow colleagues.”

“Nourishing the soul” can include everything from solving practical issues that demoralize employees to giving workers private space to pray or meditate. Another growing trend: allowing people to form religion-based affinity groups. Ford Motor Co., for example, supports the Ford Interfaith Network, a group of employees who promote religious tolerance and understanding. Since its founding in 2000, the group has spearheaded the conversion of under-utilized Ford conference rooms into prayer and meditation rooms and lobbied for installing special sinks that Muslim employees can use for religious washings. 

Some organizations take spirituality a step further. Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), a $7.1 billion nonprofit health corporation that operates more than 100 hospitals and health facilities around the country, begins all of its meetings with prayer reflection and holds leadership retreats that encourage participants to reflect on their personal spiritual values. The Denver-based organization does a “core values assessment” every three years and publishes an annual book of “Sacred Stories” about employees providing exceptional, compassionate care to patients.

For its efforts, CHI won the 2005 International Spirit at Work Award, which is awarded by the Association for Spirit at Work, a professional association for people involved in the spirituality-in-the-workplace field.

“People tell me, ‘You know, this is the first organization I’ve been part of where I’ve been encouraged to reflect on how my spiritual values contribute to the work I do each day,’ ” says Alan Bowman, vice president of mission integration for CHI. “For me, that’s pretty powerful.”

Becoming faith-friendly
While a faith-based approach can work well for nonprofit organizations such as CHI, it’s inappropriate for most companies because it can be seen as too exclusionary, says Yale Center’s Miller. Instead, he advocates taking what he calls a “faith-friendly” approach.

“A faith-friendly company is one that respects all faiths equally,” Miller explains, adding that this includes nonreligious people as well. “It’s not trying to privilege or highlight one religious tradition over another, and it’s giving people permission to be who they are. Most people I know find that a pretty attractive proposition.”

So how do you create a faith-friendly company culture — and steer clear of potential pitfalls along the way? Experts offer these suggestions:

• Have a written policy. Few companies have a written policy that addresses religion, but that’s a big mistake, says Bennett from the Tanenbaum Center. Policies should address religious harassment as well as the issues of time off for religious observance and prayer, religious holidays, attire, etc., and include a procedure for requesting an accommodation or reporting harassment.

• Don’t use “God” in your corporate values statement. A statement such as, “We strive to honor God,” implies endorsement of a particular religion, Bennett says. “It’s almost borderline proselytizing,” she says. “Whose God are you honoring?”
• Form a focus group. Miller suggests creating an employee task force to get input from diverse employees at all levels of the company about what they would like a faith-friendly culture to include.

• Words are everything. This should come as no surprise to communications professionals, but how you say something matters a lot. For example, establish a “quiet room” instead of a “prayer room,” Bennett advises. Another example: When one company’s diversity council posted an article about a gay pride parade, it caused an uproar among Christian employees. Why? The article’s wording implied that the company was encouraging employees to participate in the parade.

• Set guidelines for affinity groups. Religion-based affinity groups can be assets to companies if handled properly, Bennett adds. A few suggestions: Groups should be open to everyone, make a business case for their existence and never form opposition to any other affinity group.

• Be flexible. Floating holidays and holiday swapping can make it easier for workers to take time off for the holidays that matter most to them, Bennett says. Also, refrain from scheduling important meetings during major religious holidays that your employees may want to observe.

• Get educated. With growing religious diversity in the workplace, it helps to have a basic understanding of different religions. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, for example, offers a booklet to employers that explains Islamic practices and holidays.

• Training is the best prevention. According to Littler Mendelson’s “The National Employer” handbook, to defend a claim of harassment, you need to show that the company took measures, such as training, to prevent it. Supervisors should be given training on avoiding religious harassment, and an anti-harassment policy that addresses religion should be disseminated to all employees.

Finally, expect to make some mistakes while getting more comfortable with this issue. In the end, Miller says, companies that successfully create a faith-friendly culture will have a competitive advantage.

“If you really believe in diversity inclusion, then you can’t say no to this question,” Miller says. “And you just might create a culture that’s so attractive and appealing that the best and brightest people are going to want to come and work for you.” 

Katie Sweeney is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. She is a frequent contributor to The Strategist.

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