Leadership Not by the Book by David Green with Bill High

Author:David Green with Bill High
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Leadership;Leadership—Moral and ethical aspects;Business ethics;Entrepreneurship—Moral and ethical aspects;Hobby Lobby Creative Centers;REL012090;BUS071000;SEL027000
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

What Shows Genuine Concern?

Today, more than ever, I want to do everything I can to help our employees.

That’s why our stores close at 8:00 p.m. None of our competitors do that.

That’s why we’re closed on Sunday. None of our competitors do that.

That’s why our stores are open for just sixty-six hours each week. None of our competitors do that.

That’s why our minimum wage for full-time workers, as of January 1, 2022, is $18.50 an hour. Who else does that?

We also try to help our employees thrive in several other ongoing ways. I won’t present an exhaustive list, but allow me to highlight a few initiatives that have worked very well for us.

Once a month on our Oklahoma City campus, any employee who lives in the area, along with their spouse, can come for a free all-day life enrichment workshop. One month the workshop focuses on marriage, the next month it offers help and guidance on raising children. These seminars might be taught by one of our own chaplains, or we might bring in outside experts to give us their best insights. The room normally used for these sessions has a capacity of approximately two hundred persons, and I’m told it typically gets pretty full.

We have a special perk for all our salaried managerial employees working in stores across the country. They have an opportunity to attend a first-class weekend retreat on marriage enrichment, most often a “Weekend to Remember” event hosted by FamilyLife. We pay all employee expenses, from the flight to the hotel room to meals to the conference fee to incidentals. We pay for the entire weekend. We see it as a great investment.

A staff of full-time chaplains (currently five) works out of our headquarters. Any employee with a nonwork-related problem can visit a chaplain at any time, on the clock, to get counsel and help. Employees can’t bring up conflicts with supervisors or disputes with coworkers or discuss job complaints, but just about anything else is fair game. Many of our people ask for a chaplain’s help with problems they’re having at home. Probably the biggest troubles, our chaplains tell me, involve children or anger management. Sometimes we may send hurting individuals to other ministries in town that might be better equipped to provide longer term solutions to serious problems, such as alcohol or drugs.

Through the chaplain’s office we also run a program called Shared Harvest, a monthly frozen food distribution program available to all employees working at our main campus.

While I’ve never told anyone to bring their problems to work, I want them to see an attitude in us that communicates, “What can we do to help you? Is there something we can do?” We don’t want them hearing us say, “Hey, get busy! We need you to make us more money.”

Also at our headquarters we operate a medical clinic, fully staffed with medical professionals, including nurses and physicians. The clinic even has an MRI machine, which already has caught some serious physical conditions among our employees that otherwise might have gone undetected.

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