Caring Organization

LESSON 26: CARING ORGANIZATION Today we are going to learn about Caring Organization. Points to be covered in this lesson:

Concept and Characteristics of Caring Organization What is a company that cares? According to Marci Koblenz, a founder of Companies That Care, “A company that cares is one that sees creating a positive work environment for employees, and being an active corporate citizen, as integral components of their identity. Their day-to-day business practices clearly reflect those priorities.”

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Institutionalize psychological/spiritual support at all stages for assignments (prior to, during and after)

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Provide education and support for home office staff to provide quality services

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Provide support to immediate family members

We have so far looked at organizations as having two aspects:

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First, we have considered organizations as hierarchical collections of autonomous individuals who are connected to each other and to the organization by contractual agreements. The employee signs a contract agreeing to carry out the tasks spelled out in the “job description” in return for a wage that the employer agrees to pay him or her. Employees take their orders from ranked tiers of managers arranged in a hierarchy of authority, at the top of which sit the CEO and his or her top management staff, and at the bottom of which stand the workers who perform the actual labor of the organization. The whole organization pur-sues the goal of profit. We have called this aspect of the organization the “rational” organization.

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Crisscrossing the rational organization’s formal lines of authority is a second system of power, which we have called the “political” organization. The political elements of the organization consist of the network of power relationships, coalitions, and informal lines of communication through which individuals seek to achieve their personal goals and seek to get others to help them achieve their personal goals through the exercise of power.

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It is possible to conceive of organizations as consisting of yet another quite different set of relationships. Recent thinkers have suggested that orga-nizations can and should be thought of also as networks of relationships in which “connected selves” form webs of on-going personal relationships with other “connected selves.”

The Center for Companies That Care acknowledges the leadership of organizations that take social responsibility for their internal and external communities seriously. “A company that cares embraces social responsibility as a duty, but is also quick to acknowledge that the caring they demonstrate is returned to them many times over in the form of greater employee commitment and better business results. In this way, ethics and economics drive Companies That Care because both are required for a sustainable future,” adds Koblenz. 10 Characteristics of Caring Organizations Those Companies who have deep commitment to elevating the quality of the work environment for their employees and the quality of life for people in the broader community. By definition a “Company That Cares,” 1. Sustains a work environment founded on dignity and respect for all employees 2. Makes employees feel their jobs are important 3. Cultivates the full potential of all employees 4. Encourages individual pursuit of work/life balance 5. Enables the well-being of individuals and their families through compensation, benefits, policies and practices 6. Develops great bosses who excel at managing people as well as results 7. Appreciates and recognize the contributions of people who work there 8. Establishes and communicate standards for ethical behavior and integrity 9. Gets involved in community endeavors and/or public policy 10. Considers the human toll when making business decisions. Organizational Practices that Promote Care

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Change the culture - talk about these issues without being worried about being a cry-baby

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Address risk management issues in a proactive, timely and thorough way

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Aggressively promote good self-care behaviours

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Aggressively address safety and security concerns of staff

In this aspect of the organization the focus of em-ployees is not on the pursuit of profit, nor on the pursuit of personal goals, but on caring for those particular individuals who make up the organization and those with whom the organization interacts. We encounter this aspect of the organization when we make friends with the people with whom we work, come to care for them, look out for their well being, and seek to deepen and preserve these caring relationships. Employers, too, may grow close to their employees, deepening their relationships with employees, and coming to seek ways of caring for the particular needs of these particular individuals and of develop- ing their full potential. When a fire destroyed the main plant of Malden Mills, for example, the CEO, Aaron Feuerstein, refused to layoff the idled workers but continued to pay them from his own pocket even though they were not working, saying that they were “part of 11.292

the enterprise, not a cost cen-ter to be cut. They’ve been with me for a long time. We’ve been good to each other, and there’s a deep realization of that.” The members of an organization may befriend even their clients and customers, truly caring for them and gen-uinely seeking to develop and improve the well being of those particular cus-tomers whom they encounter. Such caring for the well being of customers is most evident, perhaps, in organizations of professionals that provide services for their clients, such as hospitals, law firms, and consulting firms that have on-going relationships with their clients, as well as of pharmaceutical compa-nies that provide life-saving medicines for people. Merck, Inc., a very suc-cessful pharmaceutical company, for example, developed and gave away at no charge a cure for river blindness that it saw one group of customers desper-ately needed but could not afford. This aspect of organizational life is not adequately described by the con-tractual model that underlies the “rational” organization, nor by the power no-tions that underlie the “political” organization. It is, perhaps, best described as “the caring organization” in which the dominant moral concepts are those that arise from an ethic of care. Jeanne M. Liedtka describes the caring organiza-tion as that organization, or part of the organization, in which caring is: a.

Focused entirely on persons, not “quality,” “profits,” or any of the other kinds of ideas that much of today’s “care-talk” seems to revolve around; b. Undertaken as an end in and of itself, and not merely a means toward achieving quality, profits, etc. c. Essentially personal, in that it ultimately involves particular individuals engrossed, at a subjective level, in caring for other particular individuals; d. Growth-enhancing for the cared-for, in that it moves them towards the use and development of their full capacities, within the context of their self-defined needs and aspirations. It has been argued that business organizations in which such caring rela-tionships flourish will exhibit better economic performance than the organiza-tion which restricts itself to the contractual and power relationships of the rational and political organization. In the caring organization trust flourishes because “one needs to be trusting if one sees oneself as interdependent and connected.” Because trust flourishes in the caring organization, the organi-zation does not have to invest resources in monitoring its employees and try-ing to make sure that they do not violate their contractual agreements. Thus, caring lowers the costs of running an organization and reduces the “costs of disciplinary actions, theft, absenteeism, poor morale and motivation.” (In the genuinely caring organi- zation, of course, caring is not motivated by the desire to reduce such costs but is pursued for its own sake.) It has also been argued that business organizations in which caring flourishes develop a concern for serving the customer and for creating customer value that in turn enables such organizations to achieve a competitive advantage over other organizations. For in such a business organization the focus is not on producing differentiated or low cost products for growing markets, but on 11.292

creating value for particular customers and remaining tuned to their evolving needs. Such a focus on know-ing and serving the customer, it is argued, enables the company to continually adapt to the rapid changes that characterize most markets today. Moreover, the caring that gives rise to a focus on the customer, can also inspire and motivate employees to excel in a way that contractual and power relations do not. Bartlett and Ghoshal, for example, argue: “But . . . contractually based relationships do not inspire the extraordinary effort and sustained commitment required to deliver consistently superior performance. For that, companies need employees who care, who have a strong emotional link with the organization.” There may be few, perhaps even no organizations that perfectly em-body the caring organization. But some well-known firms come close. W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc., for example, the extremely successful company that invented and now manufactures the well-known “GORE-TEX” line of fab-rics is an organization, which has no managers, no titles, and no hierarchy. In-stead, every employee is left free to decide for him or herself what job each will voluntarily commit to do according to where each feels he or she can make the best contribution. Leaders emerge when employees are willing to follow them because they are convinced the leader has a worthwhile idea or project. Every employee has one or more “sponsors” who work closely as coaches to help the employee develop to his or her full potential, and who serve as the employee’s “advocates” when a “compensation team” (consist-ing of fellow employees) reviews the contribution the employee has made in order to decide what compensation the employee should receive the follow-ing year. Company units are kept small (under 200 people) so that everyone can get to know everyone else and so that all communications are open, di-rect, and person-to- person. In such an unstructured and unmanaged organi-zation, all work done within the organization must ultimately rely on the relationships that employees form with each other. And, over time, employ-ees come to care for each other and for the customers for whom they are try-ing to create value. Although organizations like W. L. Gore are rare, still most organizations, to a greater or lesser extent, have aspects of the caring organization. In some organizations, such as W. L. Gore, the caring organization dominates the ra-tional and political aspects of the organization. In most others, however, the contractual and political aspects are more prominent. Yet in many, there are at least some employees and managers who respond to the demands of caring by nurturing the relationships they have with each other and by attending to the concrete and particular needs of each other and of their customers. In the contractual model, the key ethical issues arise from the potential for violations of the contractual relation. In the political model, the key ethi-cal issues arise from the potential for the misuse of power.

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What are the key ethical issues from the perspective of the caring organization? There are two: the potential for caring too much and the potential for not caring enough. 1. The moral problems of caring too much. The needs of those for whom we care can demand a response from us that can overwhelm us, leading, eventually to “bum out.” Here the conflict is between the needs of others and the needs of the self. Several writers have argued that the ethic of care requires achievement of a mature balance between caring for the needs of others and caring for one’s own needs. Others have argued that “burnout” occurs not because people are over-whelmed by the needs of others, but because organizations place bureaucratic bur-dens on caregivers and limit their autonomy and influence in decision-making. In addition to conflicts between the needs of the self and the needs of others, the demands of caring can lead to a different kind of conflict: the needs of those for whom we care can demand a response that conflicts with what we may feel we owe others. This is the problem of balancing partiality toward those for whom we care, with the impartial demands of other moral considerations, such as the impartial de-mands of fairness or of moral rights. A person, for example, may be tom be-tween caring for a friend who is violating company policy, and fairness toward the company that requires that such violations be reported. Which demand should be satisfied: the demands of caring partiality or the demands of impartial morality? 2. The moral problems of not caring enough. More pressing, however, are failures to live up to the demands of caring. This may happen on a personal basis or on an organizational level. We may personally see a fellow employee or a customer in need, but fatigue, self-interest, or simply disinterest, may lead us to ignore that need. Or, on a broader organizational level, the entire organization may system- atically drive out caring, through indiscriminate layoffs, through the creation of large impersonalized bureaucracies, through the use of managerial styles that see employees as disposable costs, or through the use of reward systems that dis-courage caring and reward competitiveness. How should these kinds of moral issues be resolved? At this time, un-fortunately, the answers are not clear. Research and thinking on the caring or-ganization and caring in organizations is so recent that no clear consensus has emerged on how issues such as these should be resolved. We have come here to the very edges of current thinking in ethics.

Overview

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“A company that cares is one that sees creating a positive work environment for employees, and being an active corporate citizen, as integral components of their identity. Their day-to-day business practices clearly reflect those priorities.” ~ Marci Koblenz

Activity What are the characteristics of Caring Organization? What are the organizational practices that promote care?

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