Praise the Lord! Dealing with religious colleagues

A young woman praying with her hands together. Photo/FILE

What you need to know:

  • Victor is further angered when his supervisor ignores opportunities to boost the morale of employees who have delivered stellar results.

  • “When picking up notes for good performance, surely it is only fair that you applaud the workers who combed their brains and stayed up late to do the job and tell us what they did right. Do not just say we give God all the glory,” Victor says.

  • Exit Victor’s supervisor’s simplistic answers; enter his propensity to proselytise — an attempt to convert a person from one religion, belief, or opinion to another — where the supervisor grabs any opportunity to “share the word”.

Conflict in the workplace, as it is in geopolitics, is rooted in religion. While there is legislation to protect employees from discrimination based on religion, there is hardly any literature in Kenya to guide them on handling any religious colleagues who might get in their nerve at the workplace.

Take video editor Achieng’ Omamo, for instance. In a career charged with pressure to meet deadlines, her blood boils at her colleague’s response when she delays the time set for production by not completing duties assigned to her on time.

“She always says God has a reason why we never met that deadline, that it could have been worse, so we should find reason to thank Him,” Ms Omamo told Jobs.

She is not alone, as 26-year-old Jessy Jess, a Pentecostal and marketing executive in a retail store, has a bone to pick with her deeply religious colleagues.

“Their ‘praise-the-Lord’ greetings instead of ‘good morning’ or ‘good afternoon’, for instance, do not make sense to me,” she says. This, she adds, is because they all work in a professional environment where rules of secularism should apply.

“You make everyone else uncomfortable because as much as Kenya is 80 per cent Christian, there are the other 20 who do not subscribe to that faith.”

In meetings where,  among other work-related issues, conflicts are resolved, Victor Ochieng’, who works in a research firm, raises his eyebrows when his supervisor offers religious solutions.

“He says ‘let us pray’ or reads some story from the Bible, and then asks us to apply what we have learnt from the story to solve the problem,” he says.

Victor is further angered when his supervisor ignores opportunities to boost the morale of employees who have delivered stellar results.

“When picking up notes for good performance, surely it is only fair that you applaud the workers who combed their brains and stayed up late to do the job and tell us what they did right. Do not just say we give God all the glory,” Victor says.

Exit Victor’s supervisor’s simplistic answers; enter his propensity to proselytise — an attempt to convert a person from one religion, belief, or opinion to another — where the supervisor grabs any opportunity to “share the word”.

In offering solutions to the conflicts that arise when professional and religions interest lock horns, Kenyan law, which protects religion even in its most ridiculous forms, upholds the right to worship. Also, the workplace consists of diversity in gender, nationalities, religion and myriad other personal characteristics which, if managed well, could be a source of rich experiences.

You have to be aware of these dynamics

Mr James Aggrey Mwamu, former East Africa Law Society chairman and council member of the Law Society of Kenya (LSK), offers the first practical strategy as knowledge.

“As a manager, you have to be aware of these dynamics, and since there are no clear-cut rules in handling such personal matters such as religious conflict, you have to devise means of addressing them when they rear their heads.”

Mr Mwamu advises that managers should have at least a cursory knowledge of the religion in question.

“If, for instance, an employee says God had a reason to delay production, you could react by telling them that God created everything in six days, and each day had a specific assignment that He had to complete.”

While there are many companies that do not have human resource regulations to take care of religious conflict, Mr Mwamu advises that the manager needs to reinforce the existing rules of work.

“When employees fail to perform duties well and make the rest uncomfortable, remind them firmly that the company has paid them for their expertise and not their ability to evangelise or preach,” Mr Mwamu says

“Tell the employees that if they do not perform the company’s duties well there would be no money to pay their salaries, and that the mark of a true Christian is being a model to the rest.”

Firmness is also key when tackling colleagues with strong opinions about religion, especially those who cannot resist the temptation to share it.

In the book Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant, Lynn Taylor says of touchy topics like politics and religion: “Do not belabour, share when asked.”

Career specialist Katherine Brooks, also author of You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career, offered coping strategies to people faced with proselytising colleagues in an interview with Forbes in April 2012.

“Nod and make neutral comments and they would know it’s a subject you do not want to participate in,” she said. “Push conversations to work-related issues”.

Mr Mwamu cautions managers that they must strike a balance between avoiding irreparable losses to the organisation when they either do not accommodate religion or favour one side and leave others disgruntled.

Judi Neal, an internationally acclaimed management expert, writes in Handbook of Faith and Spirituality in the Workplace about using employees to tackle the thorny topic.

After explaining to the workers the challenges that their differences in faith have brought, Judi writes, ask them an open-ended question about the challenges they have been experiencing and their suggested opinions on how the problem should be solved.

Touchy as the subject may be, the world’s largest human resource management organisation, Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), carried out a survey on religion and corporate culture in 2008 and found out that work environments that respected and valued religious beliefs benefitted from higher employee performance and loyalty to the organisation.

The survey recommended that simple practices such as developing a formal policy to guide religion in the workplace could keep conflict at bay.

 

Key takeaways for managers on dealing with destructively religious staff

  •  Learn the religion and use that knowledge to challenge the colleague

  •  Draw a formal policy to deal with religion at work

  •  Do not bend the existing work rules in favour of religion

  •  In dealing with a proselytising staff, give neutral answers or ambiguous nods; he or she will know that is a conversation you do not want to take part in

  •  Invite employees to suggest means of solving conflict at work that arises from religion