Corporations Compassion Culture

Chapter 1Inclusion, Equality, and Compassion in BusinessAn Overview

Changing the course of a culture can be like changing the course of a ship. You turn the wheel slowly. The ship moves in two- or three-degree increments at a time. The degrees of movement are imperceptible, especially relative to the ship's size. Those onboard may not perceive a change from one minute to the next. But after a certain length of time they start seeing small changes in direction. Finally, those slow, steady, and careful minor turns yield a complete change in the direction of the ship. Ironically, it may feel to those onboard that the change happened all of a sudden, but in fact the ship had been turning for a long time.

This is a good analogy for what is happening with traditional corporate culture. Decades of lack of equity, lack of inclusion, and inequality are slowly shifting the course of business toward a culture of fairness and ethics in employee treatment. Changing the way we do business and how we interact with employees has been a slow process. Yet, it remains an imperative one.

As we enter the post-COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter (BLM) era, the move toward a new compassionate culture, with equality and inclusion as a foundation, is even more urgent. A compassionate culture empowers people to develop new ways to solve business problems and deliver solutions. For employees to tap into these higher levels of learning, creating, and working, they must feel valued, included, and treated ethically. ...