Читать книгу Corporations Compassion Culture - Keesa C. Schreane - Страница 12

Changing the course of a culture can be like changing the course of a ship. You turn the wheel slowly. The ship moves in two- or three-degree increments at a time. The degrees of movement are imperceptible, especially relative to the ship's size. Those onboard may not perceive a change from one minute to the next. But after a certain length of time they start seeing small changes in direction. Finally, those slow, steady, and careful minor turns yield a complete change in the direction of the ship. Ironically, it may feel to those onboard that the change happened all of a sudden, but in fact the ship had been turning for a long time.

This is a good analogy for what is happening with traditional corporate culture. Decades of lack of equity, lack of inclusion, and inequality are slowly shifting the course of business toward a culture of fairness and ethics in employee treatment. Changing the way we do business and how we interact with employees has been a slow process. Yet, it remains an imperative one.

As we enter the post-COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter (BLM) era, the move toward a new compassionate culture, with equality and inclusion as a foundation, is even more urgent. A compassionate culture empowers people to develop new ways to solve business problems and deliver solutions. For employees to tap into these higher levels of learning, creating, and working, they must feel valued, included, and treated ethically.

Compassion in business means creating a culture in which equality, inclusion, and kindness are foundational principles, integrated at every level. Through a compassionate culture, employees have the agency to bring creativity, innovation, intelligence, and imagination to their jobs.

A business can't be compassionate if it's not willing to practice equality and inclusion. Equality and inclusion are not the same as compassion, but they do go hand-in-hand. They complement each other. Practically speaking, companies that embrace decent pay, diverse hiring, inclusive language, and ethical behaviors likely have compassionate cultures.

Just how seriously have corporate leaders taken their responsibility to be compassionate, just, and equality-focused up until now? The data speaks for itself:

 2014: Facebook admits it has “more work to do” in recruiting after reporting 74% of their US senior workforce is White and 77% is male.

 2019: Five years later, Facebook has a US senior workforce that is 65% White, 25% Asian, and 67% male; all other ethnicities still report single digits.

 2019: Uber expects a near $90 billion initial public offering (IPO), even as their drivers strike over low pay.

 2019: Hundreds of McDonald's workers in US and UK cities staged walkouts over low wages, as well as made accusations that the fast-food giant had an unsafe work environment and allowed sexual harassment to take place.¹

 2020: Black workers at Adidas protested outside the sportswear company's US headquarters in Portland, Oregon, saying they had experienced racial discrimination in the workplace—this despite the company brandishing a public image of being antidiscrimination.²

Organizations that represent the global corporate world (such as the World Economic Forum and Business Roundtable) have given us hope that the old ways of doing business are changing, based on statements they've made. For example, in 2019, the Business Roundtable's updated commitment noted the following:

Investing in our employees. This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits. It also includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. We foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.³

Employees, suppliers, communities where businesses are located, and even organizations and governments are all invested in the business world. Whether they realize it or not, they all have a stake in corporate diversity, equity, inclusion, and commitments to dignified, respectful treatment of others.

Diversity is a term used to describe a workplace composed of employees with varying characteristics, such as sex, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability.⁴

Inclusion refers to a workplace environment where the diverse backgrounds and perspectives of individual workers are embraced and respected, which promotes equivalent access to opportunities and the full contribution of employees to the organization's success.

Workplace equality involves providing the same level of opportunity and assistance to all employees, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and so on. This includes pay equality when women and men are paid at the same rate for performing the same job.

Equity, involves providing people what they need to make things fair, and it naturally evolves from a workplace that promotes and maintains diversity, inclusion, and equality.⁵

Employees and suppliers are invested because they work at the companies. Communities are invested because they share natural resources with the companies. Organizations and governments depend on companies' partnerships to support societal change.

People invested in positive, forward-thinking movements in the business world hope that words like those just defined would be followed by deliberate action. But just when employees, suppliers, and communities thought companies would do better, many actually got worse.