One of the world's largest processors
and marketers of chicken, beef and pork is a company called Tyson Foods. They
are the second-largest food production company in the Fortune 500 and a member
of the S&P 500. They also happen to have 120 chaplains working for them and
their roughly 115,000 employees. Hope I got your attention!
Workplace Chaplains play a role that no other department can or even wishes, to tackle. Caring for employees and their families in times of crisis is something most businesses seldom if ever think about. For example, the best most can come up with when a death occurs, is send flowers and a nice card. Nothing wrong with that but...
I was the chaplain for a window manufacturing company for a few years. During that time I had situations arise that Human Resources and the Employee Assistance Program had no answers for. Here are just two small examples of how I was able to help as a chaplain:
A young man woke up one morning and started preparing for work but realized his mother who was usually up before him, was still in her room. He knocked on her door but when she didn't answer he opened it and found her lying in her bed. She was dead at a fairly young age and her son was devastated. As the chaplain I was informed by an employee who had been helping this young man with another issue. He had already been under a lot of stress and this was almost too much for him to bear. It took many weeks of listening and encouragement to help him through those days but as the chaplain, I was paid to do just that.
A second scenario involved an older male employee that I had built a good relationship with. One day he advised me that his 20 year-old son had been murdered during a home invasion 10 years earlier. He had been shot in front of the boy's mother, the wife of this employee. The wife had taken it very hard and started taking drugs to ease the pain and by now was addicted to them. The perpetrator had never been arrested and therefore it had become a cold case with the police. I received permission from the employee to phone my contacts at Toronto Police and as a result, the head of Homicide phoned me. He agreed to phone these parents who had not heard back from the police for several years. The head of Homicide (our present Chief of Police) personally phoned them a few days later. This made a huge difference for the employee's wife. Can you imagine HR or an EAP doing any of this?
Add to these, hospital visits, funerals, weddings, referrals for addiction counselling, listening to and helping resolve employee issues within the workplace and even passing along the mood of employees to management. All these are done confidentially and no employee name is ever divulged unless permission is given by the employee.
Some might look at all this and correctly point out that this is not at all what they thought a chaplain would be involved in. Remember also, that these accounts are involving employees that seldom if ever attend church and they involve employees who are often from faith communities other than Christian. For example, as an airport chaplain, one of my friends that I speak to regularly is a devout Muslim. He knows I prayed for him when EMS took him to the hospital one day after he collapsed at the airport. So much is based on building relationships with employees and with that, trust.
I will continue in this series of blogs in a few weeks. Hopefully I can unpack the essence of Workplace Chaplains to the point where some will at least investigate. Next time I will talk about the ROI for a business that uses chaplains.
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