Are Your Values In Your Business?

I've had a lot of side conversations with folks out there about what is the blend of my faith life with my work life. I want to take time on Fridays to have a little conversation about faith and work, we'll call this faith and work Fridays.

Specifically today I want you to think about in your work and in your business is how do your values show up at work? You see, many of us have a firewall between our work and our personal life, between our convictions personally and the work that we do. And as long as our work isn't too objectionable to us, we'll continue to do it. 

This is one thing that, that Jeff Van Duzer calls Enron with a smile, right? If you remember, Enron ended up being this kind of nasty company. They were real crooks and maybe even a Ponzi scheme involved.  They ripped off a lot of people of their money. And if we did that but had a nice little smile on it and maybe you put a little religious symbol on it, we would somehow sanctify that it.  Well, it really doesn't work that way.

If we think honesty and integrity are important, then we need to show up that way in our business. If we expect that our clients will pay us net 30, that is, that they'll pay us within 30 days of receiving an invoice, then we had better be prepared to pay net 30

There's two businesses that I really love where I've seen this play out.

One business is absolutely committed to no debt and so their business doesn't have any debt but more than that, they actually will not take credit card payments because they're so committed to no debt as a part of the value and a principle with their business that they don't accept credit cards. They won't accept the debt as a form of payment.

Another company that's deeply committed to Sabbath keeping--to taking one full day off where they do not work.  Guess what? If you go on their website and you get there on Friday after sundown, you can't order products from now until Saturday after sundown when their observation of Sabbath is finished. It's fascinating because of course it's a computer that's taking the order anyway, and yet they're committed to making sure that the values they hold personally are lived out in their business.

As you think about how your faith and your business work together, what are values that you hold that need to show up in your business? Go out there and make sure that your faith and your work come together so that your business can be truly a part of you and how you spend your days.