The demand for spiritual care in the private sector
From a video by Chaplaincy Innovation Lab
Karen Diefendorf has now retired as Director of Chaplaincy Services for Tyson Foods, an American multinational corporation that is the world's second-largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork. Here are some of her insights and perspective on the wide and varied landscape of the private sector and chaplaincy - how spiritual care shows up in business and commercial settings:
I retired as an army chaplain and then had experience with hospice chaplaincy and then later with corporate chaplaincy. Tyson Foods has about a hundred full-time and part-time chaplain positions spread across 25 US states.
The proportion of full-time and part-time chaplains was about 50-50 - dependent on the size of the plant. We advised managers that if they were going to start a chaplain programme, then look at the number of employees that they had. We suggested three hours per week per 100 people. So if you had a plant that was 700 or 800 people, you would say 21 to 24 hours a week for that chaplain.
Here's the great part. Once the plant got used to having a chaplain there and saw all the things that that chaplain could do in helping wellbeing and therefore management e.g. absenteeism, presenteeism (where you're there but your head's not there - you're distracted because of a life circumstance/crisis which could become a safety issue), then it doesn't become long before they make the chaplain full-time.
The boundary between HR and chaplaincy is that chaplains have to be neutral. They cannot carry the politics as much as the company might like them to. They will lose their ability to be trusted agents by all of the employees if they begin to look like they're just another management person pushing a particular corporate agenda. Their ability to stay neutral is critical so that they can move in and out in a liminal way (occupy a position on both sides of a boundary).
It is not the the job of a chaplain to perpetuate the system but to be liminal and that takes a lot of gifts and introspective skills. System thinking, understanding one's place and how power works are key for educators of chaplains to keep in mind. They need to assess if students can do critical thinking and subsequent effect thinking. Every manager in the business, in making decisions, has to do a risk assessment and as a chaplain adviser about people, things or things I see, I have to be able to help the manager think through subsequent effects. Then it's his or her decision what they're going to do. I ought not to be silent and then go out and grumble about what did or didn't happen.
Having a good counselling background helps you to understand the system, how to be an advisor to the leadership on what you see within the system and identifying sometimes who needs personal chaplaincy support in the leadership team.
Curriculum design to train chaplains for corporate chaplaincy must include; counselling, systems theory, ethics - religious ethics, business ethics and even medical ethics.
Watch this 9 minute video:
There are other videos here for other sectors e.g. prisons, hospices.
If your church is close to businesses, why not get gifted people to ask to be chaplains to the workforce there?
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From a video by Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, 14/02/2024