religion at workplace

[Guest guest]

Dear bhakti-members,

 

In the latest issue of 'Business Week' adiyEn came

across a very interesting cover-story article about

how religion is making entry into American workplace.

Since most members are in the US adiyEn wants to know

what they think of some excerpts from the article

below:

Thanks,

Sampathkumaran

 

Religion in the Workplace

 

The growing presence of spirituality in Corporate

America

 

"... today, a spiritual revival is sweeping across

Corporate America as executives of all stripes are

mixing mysticism into their management, importing into

office corridors the lessons usually doled out in

churches, temples, and mosques. Gone is the old

taboo against talking about God at work. In its place

is a new spirituality, evident in the prayer groups at

Deloitte & Touche and the Talmud studies at New York

law firms such as Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays &

Haroller.

 

Across the country, major-league executives are

meeting for prayer breakfasts and spiritual

conferences. In Minneapolis, 150 business chiefs lunch

monthly at a

private, ivy-draped club to hear chief executives such

as Medtronic Inc.'s William George and Carlson Co.'s

Marilyn Carlson Nelson draw business solutions from

the Bible. In Silicon Valley, a group of high-powered,

high-tech Hindus--including Suhas Patil, founder of

Cirrus Logic (CRUS), Desh Deshpande, founder of

Cascade Communications, and Krishan Kalra, founder of

BioGenex--are part of a movement to connect technology

to spirituality. In Boston, heavy hitters such as

retired Raytheon Chairman and CEO Thomas L.

Phillips meet at an invitation-only prayer breakfast

called First Tuesday, an ecumenical affair long

shrouded in secrecy. More publicly, Aetna

International

(AET) Chairman Michael A. Stephen has extolled the

benefits of meditation and talked with Aetna employees

about using spirituality in their careers.

 

That's not to mention the 10,000 Bible and prayer

groups in workplaces that meet regularly, according to

the Fellowship for Companies for Christ International.

Just five years ago, there was only one conference on

spirituality and the workplace; now there are about

30. Academic endorsement is growing, too: The

University of Denver, the University of New Haven, and

Minnesota's

University of St. Thomas have opened research centers

dedicated to the subject.The number of related books

hitting the store shelves each year has quadrupled

since 1990, to 79 last year. The latest: the Dalai

Lama's Ethics for the New Millennium, a new business

best-seller. Says Laura Nash, a business ethicist at

Harvard Divinity School and author of Believers in

Business: ''Spirituality in the workplace is

exploding.''

 

In part, what's happening is a reflection of broader

trends. People are working the equivalent of over a

month more each year than they did a decade ago. No

surprise, then, that the workplace--and not churches

or town squares--is where American social phenomena

are showing up first. The office is where more and

more people eat, exercise, date, drop their kids, and

even, at architecture firm Gould Evans Goodman

Associates in Kansas City, Mo., nap in

company-sponsored tents. Plus, the influx of

immigrants into the workplace has

raised awareness about the vast array of religious

belief. All over the country, for example, a growing

number of Muslims, such as Milwaukee lawyer Othman

Atta, are rolling out their prayer rugs right in the

office.

 

With more people becoming open about their

spirituality--95% of Americans say they believe in God

or a universal spirit, and 48% say they talked about

their religious faith at work that day, according to

the Gallup Organization--it would make sense that,

along with their briefcases and laptops, people would

start bringing their faith to work.

 

.... perhaps the largest driver of this trend is the

mounting evidence that spiritually minded programs in

the workplace not only soothe workers' psyches but

also deliver improved productivity. Skeptics who scoff

at the use of the words spirituality and Corporate

America in the same breath might write this off as

just another management fad.

 

But a recently completed research project by McKinsey

& Co. Australia shows that when companies engage in

programs that use spiritual techniques for their

employees, productivity improves and turnover is

greatly reduced. The first empirical study of the

issue, A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America,

published in October by Jossey-Bass, found that

employees who work for organizations they consider to

be spiritual are less fearful, less likely to

compromise their values, and more able to throw

themselves into their jobs. Says the book's co-author,

University of Southern California Marshall School of

Business Professor Ian I. Mitroff: ''Spirituality

could be the ultimate competitive advantage.'' Fully

60% of those polled for the book say they believe in

the

beneficial effects of spirituality in the workplace,

so long as there's no bully-pulpit promotion of

traditional religion.

 

 

NEW SWIRL. All this may seem counterintuitive at a

time of scientific and technological apotheosis. But,

just as industrialization gave rise to social

liberalism, the New Economy is causing a deep-seated

curiosity about the nature of knowledge and life,

providing a fertile environment for this new swirl of

nonmaterialist ideas. ''In this kind of analytical

framework,'' says Harvard's Nash, ''suddenly it's O.K.

to think about forces larger than yourself, to tap

into that as an intuitive source of creative,

analytical power.'' And the Internet's power to blast

through old paradigms and create previously impossible

connections is inspiring fervent feelings that border

on the spiritual. ''This new sense of spontaneity has

caused even the most literal-minded to say, 'Wow,

there's this

other force out there,''' says Nash.

 

Spiritual thinking in Corporate America may seem as

out of place as a typewriter at a high-tech company.

But the warp speed of today's business life is

buckling

rigid thinking, especially now that the sword-swinging

warrior model has become such a loser. Besides, who

has time for decision trees and five-year plans

anymore? Unlike the marketplace of 20 years ago,

today's information and services-dominated economy is

all about instantaneous decision-making and building

relationships with partners and employees. Often,

spiritual approaches can be used to help staffers get

better at the long-neglected people side of the

equation. It's no wonder high-tech companies are

packing nerdy programmers off to corporate charm

schools to teach them how to talk to customers and

each

other. ''More and more people are going to spiritual

processes for help,'' says consultant Whiteley, whose

clients include Goldman Sachs (GS), Sun Microsystems

(SUNW), and Ford (F).

 

All this spiritual revival may have a fin-de-siecle

feel--in fact, what's happening now is something of a

replay of the spiritual movement that took place at

the last turn of the century. The difference is that

in those days, workers were considered extensions of

machines. Then in the 1930s, the

arm-around-the-shoulder theory of management was born.

The idea was that bosses need just issue a little

praise, and productivity would soar.

 

Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, thinking shifted toward

viewing workers not just as bodies needing sustenance

but as people with minds, says University of New

Haven Management Professor Judi Neal. Fueling today's

trend, too, was the collective revulsion over the

greed in the late 1980s. That's when CEOs, determined

to rout insider trading and other skulduggery from

their organizations, furiously crafted ethics

statements as a way to give their employees a new

moral compass.

 

Once words like ''virtue,'' ''spirit,'' and ''ethics''

got through the corporate door, God wasn't far behind.

Best-sellers such as Jesus, CEO and The Seven Habits

of Highly Effective People (one of which is to

cultivate spirituality) began to line the oak-paneled

bookshelves of America's managers. Seizing the moment,

such spiritual gurus as Deepak Chopra and M. Scott

Peck began advising corporate chieftains about how

they could tie the new secular spirituality into their

management techniques. Team-building programs sprouted

like mad. So too did the Dilbertian sendups of these

efforts, some of which swept through organizations at

the same time that downsizing was crushing morale.

 

Body, emotion, brain. The only thing missing from the

equation was spirit. But will this revival amount to

anything more than a momentary sensation? No matter

how it shakes out, in the wake of the Internet's

creative destruction, new rules will have to be made.

And the physical and human capital that powered the

latter part of the 20th century is likely to be

coupled with a new kind of social capital.

Perhaps it's already coming.

 

By MICHELLE CONLIN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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