Solid and bald, Dailey looks like a football player poured into a suit. Standing in front of 100 people at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax last fall, he delivered facts and passion. He has found what he was looking for: doing business in a new way. Business, he says, is changing—and improving—as more companies embrace elements of spirituality.

 

Spirituality? What in the name of Mammon is he talking about? “I can give you the debit side of the ledger or the credit side of the ledger,” says Dailey, who still lives in Chicago. “The debit side is that if you don’t have values, ethics, and integrity instilled in your employees, eventually you’re going to have some ethical [problem] and you’re going to lose money. The best examples are Enron and WorldCom. The other side is that I can show you statistics that say companies that view their employees in a holistic sense tend to have higher profit trajectories. It stands to reason that employees who feel more involved and cared about are likely to be more dedicated employees, and this will increase productivity.”

 

Intrigued by the connection between spirituality, employee contentment, and company success, three years ago the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s launched the Centre for Spirituality and the Workplace, the first centre of its kind in Canada. It hosts guest speakers (including Dailey), stages conferences, offers two credited courses, and is being used as a resource by at least five PhD students.

 

“Spirituality should not be a taboo topic,” says David Sable, who teaches the centre’s two courses. “The centre encourages a conversation about spirituality in the workplace, including those who regard it as religious practice and those who regard it as what you might call secular spirituality. My own exposure to this has been very inspiring. I’m a Buddhist, and I feel so enriched and pleased with the relationships I’ve made with people who are not Buddhist. I’ve been impressed again and again with how you can connect across these labels and barriers.”

 

The world is changing quickly—and so is the view that business exists as something wholly separate from the rest of life. Spirituality at work has become a major topic of conversation. Hundreds of books have been published on the subject, with such titles as The Soul of Business, Working from the Heart, Igniting the Spirit at Work, and Liberating the Corporate Soul. Dailey, a Catholic, is one of a vanguard of former executives now running consulting companies aiming to bring aspects of spirituality to work.

 

Embarrassing and expensive scandals devastated Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, and other companies. Last summer Boeing agreed to pay the American government $615 million (U.S.) to avoid criminal charges for serious ethical lapses. These and otherdisasters are prompting calls for businesses to become better citizens.

 

Rather than see this as a negative, many companies are learning that an enlightened change of attitude can be good for the bottom line. In 1999 Business Week magazine reported that a research project by McKinsey & Co. Australia showed that “when companies engage in programs that use spiritual techniques for their employees, productivity improves and turnover is greatly reduced.”

 

“This makes sense,” says Sable, “because when you have loyalty that is not just based on self-interest, you get the strongest team possible and people who want to stay there.” Ian I. Mitroff, a business professor at the University of Southern California and the co-author of A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America, has proclaimed, “Spirituality may well be the ultimate competitive advantage.” Mitroff found that often both employers and staff are eager to feel fully connected at work but aren’t sure how to make that happen.

 

Traditional religion has its value and its adherents; for example, in Toronto some brokers on Bay Street hold a regular Bible-study program. When discussing a new attitude for business, however, the word “spirituality” is often used rather than religion, thus avoiding any possible confusion with religious dogma.

 

God knows the status quo could use some shaking up. For many people, their job has no connection to what they love. It has little to do with family or friends and nothing to do with making the world a better place, and it doesn’t allow them to express themselves or their deepest beliefs. No wonder millions of Canadians would rather be anywhere but at work.

 

The Centre for Spirituality and the Workplace has an advisory group that includes spiritual and religious thinkers from Germany, South Africa, New Zealand, and other countries; it aims to influence the global conversation about workplace spirituality. Here at home, the centre is helping Atlantic Canadian businesses and government departments learn new principles. Conscious of appearing newfangled, flaky, or religious, many government and business leaders “prefer to do it quietly,” says Sable.

 

Moncton’s David Hawkins is happy to talk about why he embraces the pro-values shift. In business for 40 years, he was the long-time owner of Hawk Communications; five years ago he and his wife sold Hawk, and they now own Nouveau Communication Strategies. He believes that incorporating spiritual values at work makes sense. “At the end of the day, we are dealing with people, so in a sense it is just that simple,” he says. “People respond to being treated, communicated with, and dealt with in a respectful and helpful way. Having a set of values and principles can encourage them to live up to their highest sense of being, whatever that may be.”

 

Hawkins used to tell executives at Hawk that when dealing with the firm’s 75 employees, no matter what the employee did—whether it was stealing or some other transgression—the executives should treat the employee as they would want their own son or daughter to be treated. Hard decisions could still be made, but the spirit behind the making of those decisions had to be reasoned and heartfelt.

 

“When you are in business and dealing with people on a day-to-day basis,” says Hawkins, “stuff is going to happen—a lot.” He describes one deal in which a misunderstanding sparked a blow-up, including horrible words spoken and a sudden loss of trust. Instead of letting it ruin the deal, he made the problem go away. “I picked up the phone and we resolved it in seconds. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my business career. The key was forgiveness. And why not? You can choose to be offended at anything.”

 

Some companies have come up with novel ways to help employees feel more comfortable and energized. The head office of the clothing company Patagonia offers employee breaks for yoga instruction and a subsidized organic-food cafeteria. Xerox executives took week-long retreats to learn a Native American model of council meetings and to experience vision quests; as a result, they developed a group of environmentally friendly products that proved to be enormously popular with consumers.

 

Becoming better connected to your environment, both in the office and the larger world, is a move that Tom Dailey recommends: “Spirituality is just a sense that you’re connected to your environment.”

 

 

Companies that are interested in exploring the advantages of workplace spirituality need to start at the beginning, with a genuine commitment in place of clichés. “The most important first step is to have a set of clearly defined values,” says Tom Dailey, a workplace consultant based in Chicago. “They must be measurable well-defined values that employees can identify with. Too many companies adopt lofty mission statements like, ‘We will provide outstanding service to our customers,’ which are often neither measurable nor believable.”

 

Secondly, companies must create an atmosphere of respect and collegiality among employees, where suggestions are valued and, to some degree, mistakes are tolerated or viewed as learning opportunities. And finally, management must walk the talk.

 

“I have conducted sessions where a senior executive introduces me to a group of employees and tells them I am going to talk about values, integrity and ethics, only to have that executive leave the room and not participate in the session,” says Dailey. “Employees see that as a lack of management commitment and buy-in, and it becomes just another ineffective flavour-of-the-moment corporate program.”