Corporate
Soul

It may sound like an oxymoron, but today's businesses are investing in the employee as well as the bottom line.

Howard Schultz, the entrepreneur who created the concept for Starbucks Coffee Company, is talking about why he believes his company will succeed well into the twenty-first century. There's the superior product, the comfortable atmosphere, the brand identification, and the corporate soul.

Yes, soul. "One of the things that you can't measure on a balance sheet or on a financial statement is the soul of Starbucks," Schultz says earnestly.

"Corporate soul" may sound like an oxymoron, but it's an expression used increasingly by corporate chiefs intent upon exorcising the image of Gordon Gekko, the greedy; soulless character in the movie Wall Street. In some boardrooms, terms such as "respect," "community;" and "goodness" are heard more and more frequently alongside old business buzzwords like "efficiency," "quality," and "bottom line."

Lotus Development Corp., the software maker, operates by eleven principles, including insisting on integrity; respecting others, listening with an open mind, and having fun. It also has a "soul committee" that reevaluates those principles and creates several task forces to explore issues that concern employees. At AT&T, some middle managers attend an off-site program that requires them to identify their personal values and write a plan to integrate those values into the workplace.

And there are other methods. The Boeing Co. recruited poet David Whyte to read poems as part of a program to lift the spirits and increase creativity of its managers. Dana Corp., a Toledo, Ohio, vehicle arts manufacturer, also hired him to recite poetry for French employees during walks through the woods of Provence. Whyte's book, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, was on the business bestseller list for months.

And Whyte is not the only author on the business bestseller list appealing to a higher calling. Tom Chappell, president and co-founder of Tom's of Maine, which manufactures natural toothpastes, deodorants, and shampoos, took a mid-career break to get a divinity degree from Harvard University. In 1993 he wrote The Soul of a Business, a bestseller subtitled Managing for Profit and the Common Good.

Chappell sees two reasons for the move toward increased corporate spirituality; One is employees' need for meaning. They are saying, "In order for me to come to work in this culture day in and day out, I need more than just working by fear. I need to be connecting my life to something greater, and in that connection making meaning of my life," he explains. "We're in an age where a lot of people are looking for more meaning out of not just their personal lives, but their work lives." The other reason is old fashioned bottom line." The corporate leadership is looking for new ways to motivate employees and create innovative solutions," Chappell says.

There is evidence that people-oriented and value-driven companies outperform their competitors, according to Terrence Deal, co-author of Leading with Soul: An Uncommon Journey of Spirit, another business book. "We're trying to argue that the heart is really what leadership is about, and the soul of the company is going be its competitive edge," says Deal, a corporate consultant and human organization professor at Vanderbilt University.

Why this interest in a soul now? Judith Neal, an associate professor of manage-ment at the University of New Haven, is writing a book about employees' spirituality; "The things that organizations were doing to people in the 1980s and even up to now - layoff announcements are always coming - were so dehumanizing and had no regard for the spiritual nature of people," she says.

Those layoffs, Neal adds, also made people take a harder look at their 9-to-5 lives. "Maybe we don't look at things as jobs anymore because jobs come and go. Maybe people are starting to say 'What's my work in life? Jobs may come and go. What's my contribution to society?"'

Companies such as Starbucks and Tom's of Maine are attempting to create a culture and imbue it with values. And through those values to give employees a sense of meaning to their work, whether the daily task is pouring a cup of espresso, filling a tube of toothpaste, or creating a marketing strategy.

Methods of creating and encouraging corporate soul vary. Money and benefits, of course, top the list. Tom's of Maine provides generous benefits, including reimbursement for child care, eleven paid holidays per year, plus vacation and health care. The company donates ten percent of pretax profits annually to nonprofit organizations for the arts, the environment, and education. Employees are encouraged to donate five percent of their paid work time to volunteering. "You simply can't work at Tom's of Maine and ignore the common good," Chappell says. "That doesn't work here."

Starbucks' Schultz talks about how creating a company is like raising children: You give the employees values and then set them out into the world. You maintain your standards and expect excellence, but when they stumble, you accept their mistakes and help them hack on their feet. And those values breed success: His company has zoomed from a handful of stores in the late 1980s to more than 600. "We are profitable," he adds, "because of the value system of our company."

At Starbucks, the employee, not the customer, comes first. Even part-time employees are eligible for health care (employees pay an average of twenty-five percent of the premium). All workers may participate in the Bean Stock program, which grants stock options actual to roughly fourteen percent of an employee's annual salary. And they get a free pound of coffee per week.

Peter Hopkins, a twenty-nine-year-old actor who has worked a variety of retail jobs, says it was "a real shock" to learn that his job as a barista at a Starbucks store in Manhattan would pay above minimum wage and that he would receive health insurance -- including dental and eye coverage -- and a stock plan.

"I'd just come from a retail job where you could get a health plan after a year, a vacation after a year," he says sitting at a table in the company's Greenwich Village store after the morning rush. "You had to use a key to go to the bathroom and sign out the key. It was a delight to come to Starbucks."

Hopkins has been at Starbucks for less than a year, but he already feels a part of something different. He notes that the company stock is trading at just over thirty this day, stock he can purchase for a fifteen-percent discount, just like corporate executives. "It sounds cute, but we all share common goals," he adds. "We all have this common belief in the product we sell."

But what happens to a corporation's soul when hard times hit? What happens when those layoffs that have led people to look for more meaning in their work come to a company like Tom's of Maine?

"Financial returns will follow good acts," Chappell writes in his book. Not during fiscal 1994. The company lost $400,000, only the second time in twenty five years it was unprofitable. Executive salaries were cut eight percent. When that didn't stem the bleeding, Chappell laid off three senior managers. Their salaries and health benefits, he says, were continued for "several months" and they were offered career counseling.

"What those moments do is reaffirm the character of the company. That it's not about all profit or all goodness, but both," Chappell says.

Though he is the one of the figure-heads of the corporate soul movement, Chappell's mission and statement of beliefs for Tom's of Maine are a pragmatic combination of business sense and values. In a list that includes addressing community concerns and providing meaningful work, the last mission statement is about the bottom line: "to be a profitable and successful company, while acting in a socially and environmentally responsible manner."

New thinking meets old. "This is all about attitude. It's not about imitation or copying some new management technique", Chappell says. "It's totally about attitude. You either respect people and nature or you don't."

"You can't be single-minded about making money. You have to have an integrated attitude toward both the goodness that we all have about life and the discipline of making money he says. "It makes for a bigger and tougher assignment than just making money. But the paradox is that when you do [both], you get a richer, more profitable, faster-growing company."