Higher power

Entrepreneur, Feb, 1999 by Jacqueline Lynn

Should your office get religion?

They've been a discrete presence in the workplace since the early part of this century, providing counseling, offering referrals and sometimes just listening. And as companies become increasingly committed to creating quality working environments, workplace chaplains are growing in number and visibility. Diana Dale, founder of the Institute of Worklife Ministry, the mentoring and training arm of the Worklife Institute in Houston, says that more and more businesses are utilizing chaplains.

"Many of today's employee-assistance programs started as in-house corporate chaplaincies or pastoral counseling departments," Dale says. Diversity in the workplace and concerns about providing services on a nonsectarian basis prompted companies to adopt the term "employee-assistance program," but many of those departments are still being run by ordained clergy who have been trained as business or industrial chaplains.

Workplace chaplains don't promote any particular faith, but when a need is expressed, they can incorporate spiritual issues into a counseling situation. Dale says that workplace chaplains assist companies with ethics issues, including establishing and communicating ethics policies, conflict resolution, violence mitigation, crisis management and critical-incident debriefing.

"When there's been a serious industrial accident, a suicide or violence in the workplace, everybody can be traumatized and it can take the whole company down," Dale says. "Whether it does depends on [whether it's] dealt with immediately." Bringing in a chaplain to help employees work through their emotions after a crisis can be crucial to the healing process.

Chaplains are also often a resource for employees with personal problems. "Our spiritual or theological foundation is that each person is of infinite worth and value, and the workplace is a major area where people live out their sense of who they are, their worth and their vocation," says Dale.

What about the theory that personal issues should be left at home? That's simply not realistic, Dale says, especially when so many people link their personal self-image with who they are in the professional world.

Smaller companies without an in-house employee-assistance program can utilize workplace chaplains on a fee-for-service basis, says Dale, who also serves as president of the National Institute of Business and Industrial Chaplains (NIBIC), a professional organization of clinically trained chaplains. For a referral to a trained and credentialed workplace chaplain in your area, contact the NIBIC at (713) 266-2456.