There is an interesting guest column at Inc.com on religion and work written by Alan Wolfe, Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. Wolfe writes the following:
Workplaces are not public in a legal sense and, because they are not, courts will generally allow companies room to find their own ways of accommodating the rights of believers. But workplaces are public in a social sense; they are composed of groups of people, and the larger the groups grow, the more likely there will exist religious differences among them. There is an implicit bargain here for private companies to accept. Make room for diversity and tolerance, and few will object to religious expression in the workplace. Confine the right to expression only to select groups, however, or use one faith to browbeat others, and those others will rightly object. The choice is up to each company.
I believe that Wolfe has missed an important part of this issue by looking at this only from the position of the individual employee and to define it only in terms of evangelization toward a specific religion. There are many privately owned businesses in which the owners have used the core values of their faith to shape how they start and grow their companies. They build their values into the policies and practices, and into the culture of their companies, that govern everyday activity in their businesses.
These entrepreneurs are not doing this to convert their employees nor to make their firms an extension of some particular church. They do this because their faith is based on integrity. What is good and what is right does not change once they walk into the door of their businesses. And they find ways to integrate this into how they run their companies. It shows up in compensation systems, job design, employee ownership programs, policies governing customer relations -- the list goes on and on. It is not a matter of using their businesses to save others souls, but to act in ways that assure that their own souls do not become compromised by how they act in their business.
The specific religion that these entrepreneurs practice becomes inconsequential, as does the religious tradition of their employees. My experience and the results of the interviews we have conducted for our forthcoming book suggest that because the focus is on how the entrepreneurs' faith and values guide their actions, these businesses become good places that are valued by employees of all faiths. They are companies that treat all employees with dignity, fairness, and respect, that treat their customers well, and that have a truly good culture.
