Faith Friendly: Companies Impart Values, Accommodate Beliefs

Tyson Foods has 115,000 employees and 123 paid chaplains.

The chaplains are not there to evangelize; in fact, they specifically are ordered not to do so. But they do help employees deal with personal issues and matters of the heart and soul.

Ninety-two percent of Americans told a Gallup poll in 2011 that they believe in God, and for many, faith is a part of everyday life that cannot be ignored during the 40-50 hours a week they are at work. So how does a company impart its values, respect the beliefs of diverse employees, and stay out of legal trouble?

Judi Neal, Ph.D., director of the University of Arkansas’ Tyson Center for Faith and Spirituality in the Workplace, has been studying the issue for more than 20 years. She said companies typically work through a process of becoming more faith friendly. That process starts with offering more accommodations for religious expression – what she called the “Let’s not get sued” stage. Affinity groups of like-minded believers start gathering, followed by an interfaith dialogue and then multiple programs with measured results. At that point, being faith friendly is seen as a company mission.

It can take a while to get comfortable with this process. Neal said she has been talking with officials at one bank where several leaders have deep religious faiths. One of the vice presidents has a strong sense of calling about creating an environment that is open to prayer while honoring employee differences. However, bank officials are not ready to go public with their plans.

Neal said it became more common in the mid-1990s for companies to speak openly about faith and spirituality. With corporations merging, acquiring each other or moving factories overseas, employees no longer could count on having a company job for life and had to look elsewhere for their identities, including their faith. Companies responded to that. Meanwhile, the economic upheaval led many people to become entrepreneurs who started their own companies that reflected their values. These attracted like-minded employees.

In the last two or three years, however, she’s seen a shift where companies are less comfortable talking about these issues, though not necessarily in enacting faith-friendly policies. She attributes this tight-lipped phenomenon to the polarized political environment, where certain faiths are increasingly identified with a particular political party and nobody wants a consumer backlash. Also, the shaky economy has made more companies averse to risk, and religion can be risky.

At Tyson Foods, the company’s core values explicitly include matters of faith and spirituality. Among them: “We strive to be a faith-friendly company” and “We strive to honor God and be respectful of each other, our customers, and other stakeholders.”

Those values are explained to new employees during their orientation, according to Rick McKinnie, the company’s director of chaplain services. The role of the plant’s chaplain is also described – to be there for crisis situations and moral support. “Many of our team members don’t have any idea whether our chaplains are Methodist or Baptist or Presbyterian,” he said. “They just see them as a Tyson chaplain there to be supportive of them.”

The company’s chaplaincy program has been in place since 2000 and serves facilities in the United States, Brazil and Mexico, though not those in China and India. Larger facilities can have two to four chaplains, not all of them necessarily working full-time. The company tries to match the chaplains’ skill sets with the employee population, so a facility with many Hispanic employees might look for a Spanish-speaking chaplain.

Tyson’s chaplains serve a role similar to those in the military in that they focus on earthly needs – death in the family, cancer diagnosis, etc. Currently, all the chaplains have a Christian background, but the company has employed rabbis and even a Muslim imam. As in the military, all chaplains are expected to minister to people of other faith backgrounds, not just their own. If an employee opens the door by asking about spiritual matters, chaplains can continue the discussion. But the chaplains don’t try to convert anyone from another religion to theirs.

“We don’t walk the evangelism line,” McKinnie said. “I forbid evangelizing. In my chaplain manual, it’s very loud and clear in there that you will not evangelize as a Tyson chaplain. To proselytize or to evangelize is not something that we’re about. We are here to help people with their burdens or issues.”

The chaplains’ jobs involve a lot of listening and referring to professionals such as social workers and counselors. On deeply spiritual matters and especially when dealing with other faiths, chaplains are expected to refer employees to community clergy members. Company facilities often host clergy day events where religious leaders from various faiths are invited for tours.

“Part of our job is to make them aware that we are there as chaplains, but we’re not there to replace them,” McKinnie said. “We’re there to be an extension of their ministry, if you will, so that when the people come to work and they’ve got problems or issues going on, we can support them and make referrals back to the community for them.”

McKinnie and Gary Mickelson, Tyson’s director of public relations, say the company incorporates its core values in other tangible ways, such as being active in the United Way and in dealing with hunger issues across the country. It has donated more than 90 million pounds of food to various organizations since 2000 and has been involved in disaster relief, including responding to last year’s Hurricane Sandy and to the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in 2011.

While Tyson Foods is a faith-friendly company that provides a purely secular service, others, like Dayspring Cards out of Siloam Springs, are what Neal calls “faith based” with a clearly religious mission. At Dayspring Cards, a visitor is greeted by a fountain shaped like a cross, and spiritual quotations hang on the walls.

However, even a faith-based company cannot force workers to attend religious services or ask potential employees about their religion under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Companies with 15 or more employees are subject to federal discrimination laws, and those with nine or more are subject to Arkansas laws. The exception is when the hiring decision involves what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission calls a “bona fide occupational qualification,” where the job is unavoidably tied to a particular religion, such as a Catholic church that has an opening for a priest.

Still, that doesn’t mean that companies have to leave their values at the door of the human resources office. “They can be very explicit about their Christian mission and message,” Neal said. “They don’t ask somebody what your religion is. But they say, ‘Are you comfortable with what we stand for and how we do things?’”

According to Missy Leflar, director of human resources for the city of Fayetteville and an employment law attorney, employers have an obligation to accommodate a person’s beliefs so long as they do not impose an undue hardship on the employer. A person wearing a religious necklace in an office setting is very different from a person wearing one in a factory where it can be entangled in a piece of machinery. Scheduling for religious observances and holidays also must be decided on a case-by-case basis, and the same goes for employees who wish to be open about their faith at work. If they do it in a way that keeps a fellow employee from working, that behavior perhaps can be limited. If two employees are simply reading their Bibles on their lunch break and someone else is offended, that’s a different matter. The key, said Leflar, is not to favor one religion over another. “If they’re going to be faith friendly, they would probably be well advised to be friendly to all faiths,” she said.

At St. Vincent Health System, faith is an integral part of everything the hospital does. However, according to Sister Susan Evelyn, vice president of mission integration, and Tim Osterholm, vice president and chief people officer, the hospital makes no attempt to hire only Catholics and wouldn’t even want to do so. According to Evelyn, among the hospital’s core values is “reverence,” and that involves respecting diverse points of view.

“What we do look for, and it is part of the interview process, is that people are willing and able and excited about our mission and our core values, and that they do say that they will live by them,” Evelyn said.

The hospital has three full-time and two per diem chaplains with one open position. Not all of the chaplains are Catholic, but all are Christian. If a patient asks for a rabbi, imam, or Buddhist priest, the hospital will try to meet that need, and chaplains are ready to offer support to nonbelievers. Moreover, the hospital has had a Muslim employee whose need for prayer time was allowed to be incorporated into his daily work. As with Tyson, chaplains never evangelize.

So how does the hospital maintain a Catholic identity? A statue of Jesus greets visitors at the entrance, and there are crucifixes and Bibles in the rooms. The hospital has a priest and three sisters on staff at the main campus, though only one of the sisters dresses in a traditional habit. Otherwise, the hospital’s values are seen through the way staff, physicians and patients treat each other.

“I have often seen or witnessed a nurse praying with a patient, a transporter praying with a patient,” Evelyn said. “Our Catholic identity allows those things to happen that could not happen in, say, a non-faith-based hospital.”

So when is a company successfully accommodating faith in the workplace? Neal said that happens when employees feel valued for who they are and feel free to talk about their deeply held beliefs in an atmosphere of civil discourse. That can improve not only employee morale but also a company’s bottom line.

“What we’re seeing is that when companies are successful at embracing faith and spirituality in the workplace, they’re much more likely to have creativity, innovation, a sense of service to each other and a sense of service to the customer and other stakeholders,” she said. “And that kind of sense of service especially will lead to, all other things being equal, good business practices, should lead to a competitive edge. People are going to want to do business with a company where people want to be of service.”