The Art of Loving in the Workplace – The Company Cube

1^st Draft

Good morning everybody and welcome to our session entitled the Art of Loving in the Workplace. At this session we hope to explore how we can bring the Art of loving which Chiara talked about earlier into our businesses and other workplaces.

I and the other people here have been working in various employments now for more years than we care to remember and we’d like to share how we have tried to combine the richness of the spiritual life we’ve been trying to live with our daily lives in our various workplaces.

For my own part I have been involved in business as an accountant and more recently as General Manager in an American owned firm. When I got to know the movement first I was excited about how we could change the world and we had such enthusiasm that we felt everybody else would soon catch that enthusiasm from us. However trying to convert the people I worked with by talking to them about the gospel and inviting them to meetings met with a lukewarm response. So at first I felt disheartened and settled for having a spiritual life outside of work and putting offering up work as a suffering.

I was a slow learner and it took some time for the penny to drop that I could also live the gospel at work but in a different way.

So when Chiara spoke about the Art of Loving those of us who were in the workplace sought ways that we could live this in our work in a way that would be acceptable and not trying to impose our ideas on others.

So when Chiara say that we should love everybody we talk about Valuing every Person.

When she says that we should love our enemies – we talk about being Friends with our Competitors.

When she talks about being the “First to Love” we can talk about being the “First to Help Others”.

When she talks about “Loving in a Concrete Practical Way” we can talk about “Supporting with Actions and Not Just Words”.

When she talks about Making Ourselves One we can talk about Building Relationships Every Day.

This has now been developed into the “Company Cube” which we can now see on our screen

At first it may seem as if we are diluting the gospel by replacing the word Love with other terms like Respect and Support but this has not been our experience.

When we have tried to live like this in our workplace we have found many instances where difficult situations have been transformed and we will share some of these with you.

One of the things that has helped us is the opportunity that we have had to share these workplace experiences with each other. We learn from each other’s experience and are encouraged to continue on and renew our commitment to live like this even when the going gets tough.

Living in this way we have come closer to living “A Life Undivided” where we are the same person both inside and outside work.

In my own experience when I started to look at the workplace as an opportunity to love others I found my life changed completely. I also found that my work had greater meaning. At certain stages in my life I felt that working in business was not really a great way to live a Christian life. Perhaps working in one of the caring professions would have been more worthy. But gradually through looking at it in the light of the Art of Loving my life has been enriched enormously and every day small miracles happen.

A few years ago in our work we reported into an American boss who had the idea that the only person who should be paid a bonus were those who walked an water as he put it and this would normally be only one or two people in the company in a year. We did however manage to persuade him that we would share it more widely and he eventually conceded that the bonus would be paid to four of us. However because we Valued Every Person we felt that all of the staff should get some of the bonus so we took the bonus ourselves and paid the tax on it so that we were in compliance with instructions but then we went to the bank and took some of the money out and distributed it among the rest of the staff. This helped morale a lot but I also felt better because I was living according to my principles. Often times when you deal in finance you are under pressure to make a profit so often time temptations come along and you have to deal with them. For instance we are building a number of moulds for a particular customer to a total value of over €150,000. When we reviewed these last week we realised that on some of them we had miscalculated and would not make as much profit as we first thought but on one of them the customer had made a mistake and had sent us a purchase order for €47,000 when our quote had been for €35,000. We knew that with that particular customer once we had received the Purchase Order there would be no further discussion and when we made the mould and sent in the invoice it would be paid. We had a short discussion and agreed to go back to the customer and inform them of their mistake and ask for a new Purchase Order for the lower amount. We did not have a long discussion because this type of situation  has arisen so many times before and we always do the same thing so that now it is in the culture of the company. And the small amount that we lose is regained a hundredfold with long term relationships built on trust.

Other more mundane examples of living the Company Cube are coming in to work early and emptying the dishwasher and making the coffee before the rest of the staff arrive.

To show how this is in different workplaces we can now ask the others to share their experiences.

Donal Lawlor