Religion at the Office

Diversity is not always immediately visible. It can root at the core of an employee's faith or spirituality.

In the United States, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars religious discrimination in the workplace and stipulates that employers make reasonable efforts to accommodate their workers’ religious needs. According to Dr. Georgette Bennett, president and founder of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding in New York, most corporations were in denial with respect to the issue of religious diversity until Sept. 11. Since that time, the number of religious discrimination complaints has skyrocketed.

The Tanenbaum Center, one of the few institutions worldwide that studies the impact of bringing one’s religious and spiritual self to the workplace, first got involved with this topic in the mid 1990s. At that time, it saw a clear demographic shift taking place in the United States, although many of the executives the center spoke with felt it was a nonissue.

After doing the first national survey of employees in 1999 with regard to religious bias and accommodation in the workplace, the Center has seen a large movement away from companies being in complete denial to an acknowledgment by others that this is a big issue — and they seek to develop the necessary tools to deal with it.

“Corporations have two sets of responsibilities: responsibility under the law and responsibility in terms of being responsible to one’s markets, both internal and external,” said Bennett.

In subsequent research, the Tanenbaum Center found religious accommodation and creating an inclusion culture that respects employees’ religious beliefs and practices has a significant impact on employee satisfaction, retention and productivity, which in turn have an impact on the bottom line.

The findings of Ian I. Mitroff and Elizabeth A. Denton seem to support that of the Tanenbaum Center. In their book, A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America, they said companies that foster a spiritual environment tend to have employees who are more creative, loyal, productive and adaptive to change. The employees believe they can bring their whole selves to work, including their full creativity and intelligence.

According to the Tanenbaum work, one in five people surveyed said they or someone they knew directly had been the victim of religious bias. Of those people, almost half said they were thinking of looking for another job because episodes of religious bias were happening regularly. Again, almost half of those affected said it negatively impacted their productivity.