Bringing human to business

In our Ethics class, we've been talking a lot about working with a company rather than working for a company. The distinction is important, and related to the thought that there might be a trend toward employees choosing work that means something to them. Think of a Venn diagram: one circle is your personal life/values, and the other circle are your professional life/values. How much do they overlap? My Ethics professor and a good number of people who study these things (including Jim Collins) would say that employees increasingly want the circles to have heavy overlap. I can only speak from my personal experience - I have chosen deliberately to make these circles overlap as much as possible. I choose to work for a "social enterprise." But one thing I'm realizing is that working in a social enterprise isn't the only way to align personal values with work values. Not by a long shot.

One a-ha moment I've had in Ethics is that we can choose, either as employees (through choosing to work for this or that company), founders (by creating a company's mission, a la Whole Foods), or investors (investors voting for board members) - we can choose a company's stated values. If employees are interested more and more in bringing their humanity to the workplace, a company's values (what they are, and how assessable they are) become more important.

Here's a company that's very clear on their values - Herman Miller (they make furniture) - and a very cool video they put together on the type of employees they want to join them.

(side note: Johnson & Johnson is usually held up for being one of the most ethical big companies out there, but a recent event around not being forthright about risks of the birth control patch would indicate otherwise).