Dr. Brian Grim

As President of the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation, Dr. Brian Grim is a leading ex-pert when it comes to Faith in the workplace and the impact it can have on culture.

Religious Freedom is for Everyone in the Workplace

Brian Grim is the world's leading expert on the relationship between religious freedom and the economy. As President of the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation, Brian has appeared as an expert on global religion, on numerous media outlets, including CNN, BBC, Fox, CVS, cspan, and regularly presents to high level audiences throughout the world, including the White House State Department, the Vatican, and the United Nations. Brian is recognized as a global expert on international religious demography and the socioeconomic impact of restrictions on religious freedom.

Brian Grim: The majority of people in the world have a faith and it's important to them, and that inspires them in their life, in their family, and in their work. So, so many people come to work and they view work as part of their calling. So if we try to cut that part away from them, then you're cutting what their deepest motivation in life is and their reason for even being in a job. So if you don't open the workplace to allow people to bring their whole self to work, including their faith, you're going to get half an employee, somebody who's looking for some other job where they can bring that part of themselves to the workplace. So it's really important to understand that religious freedom is a value that's for everybody. It means that you can have a faith or you can change your faith, or you can have no faith at all.

Religious freedom gives you freedom. So at the micro level, religious freedom sets people free to do good. That's what religious freedom's about, about giving us that freedom to put our faith to practice. And when that is the rule, you could say the rule of law in a company, people have all kinds of ideas of doing good, bringing not only sort of loving and caring things, but also their ethics. So when you allow those kind of motivations to come in a workplace that makes it more trusting, more successful, teamwork is better, and all that's good for the bottom line.

So it is such a differentiator for companies when people feel like there's a loyalty here because they're loyal to me as a person and me and my community.

Intentionally Bringing Faith into the Workplace

Companies that have been the most successful in opening the door to faith have done it intentionally. They've thought about it and they've aligned this with their company mission. So instead of saying, okay, let's have church, or let's have mosque or whatever on campus, it's okay, we want you to have this faith, and how is it that what you want to do helps our company succeed?

One of the best examples I've seen is in Intel where the head of the Christian group there said what we're doing, bringing people, allowing them to bring their faith to work, is really benefiting people. The teamwork, the bottom line retention, we're just having a lot of success, but there's also a Muslim group and a Jewish group, and a Bahai group and a Hindu group, and an atheist agnostic group. So what he said is, why don't we form a coalition of these faith and belief groups so that we can work together to help our whole company see that this is okay to bring your faith to work or your beliefs if you don't have a religious faith.

And you know what? Everybody said that's a great idea. Even the atheist agnostics showed up and they said, we're on board. Now let's talk about what we can do together to impact our workplace. So as a Christian, instead of shying away from working with people who are different, instead he said, this is an important cause for people, so would you like to join me in it? So that's a different beginning point than saying, okay, we're Christians or we're Muslims and we want to do this at work instead, it's, okay, everybody, you're welcome and let's see how you can help the company.

And just an example, at American Express, they have a Christian group, a Muslim group, and a Jewish group that have been set up, and they all have the same mission to recruit and retain the best Jewish talent for this company. Well, that's the Jewish group, Christian group, the best Christian talent, and the Muslim group, the best Muslim talent. And the company promotes that. So they've thought through what will make a Jewish employee feel at home in American Express, and what can we do to nurture them, bring them along, help them have the best success they can have in the company.

What Does Faith in the Workplace Look Like

So I think that's really the secret is that the faith at work movement where it's successful is that they realize this is faith at work. It's not just faith. You can go to your church or your mosque or your synagogue, but at work, what does it mean in the workplace for Christians, it is just the same question that the lawyer asked Jesus, what's the most important commandment?

And what was the answer? Well, in that discussion, it's to love God and love your neighbor. Who does Jesus give as the example of a neighbor, the Samaritan who were despised foreigner of a different religion, different race, and he was the hero. The Samaritan was the hero of the story. So I think that that is the attitude that Christians need in life and in the workplace is that that person who's a different faith than me, that person who's a different race than me, a different belief than me, wow. That's the kind of person Jesus held up as the example. And I think that's challenging for some Christians, but I think that's what Jesus would challenge us to do.

So for a business to get started in this, the very best thing to do is to find the people in the company that care about this and listen to them. And so I think it has to begin there listening to the employees. What are they concerned about? What would they like to do? What would help them? That would be the first thing. And then the second thing is to talk to people from other companies. So learn from other companies what they've done.

Well, business is at the crossroads of culture, creativity, and commerce. So all of those things are coming together in business. And people were thinking of the next new product, the next new service, the way to move forward, the way to change the world. And many of these people have a faith and they're motivated by their faith. So my hope is that this faith motivation that's inside of so many people in some of the best companies gets shown in the light of day that people can see that that's an important part of what's making our world have the next big discovery, the next big invention, the next big solution to a pandemic or to whatever problems we're facing.

Well, four years ago, Google did not have a faith group within their company. This year, the head of Diversity, the Global Lead for Diversity, gave the keynote at the Faith at Work, employee Resource Group Summit. So going from nothing to giving the keynote there is momentum. Another big company that's just gotten into this is Walmart. Just a year, a little over a year ago, they set up their first faith group called Favor Interfaith Group. They had never had one. And now when you get the biggest employer in the United States, the biggest economy, I don't see how you can conclude that it's not a movement in the making.

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