The Business of Kindness: creating work environments where people thrive
An Introduction to the Business of Kindness
Our society is built on a foundation of many different types of relationships, which connect individuals to families, friends, work colleagues, communities, countries and our global community. From the playgrounds to the boardroom and into our courtrooms, relationships are at the very heart of our challenges as well as our solutions both personally and professionally. The way we affect each other relates to the quality of our interactions and ultimately determines the health, well-being and success of each of our employees and our society as a whole.
Author Bo Lozoff, leader of an organization called the Human Kindness Foundation, writes, In the midst of global crises such as pollution, wars and famine, kindness may too easily be dismissed as a soft issue or a luxury to be addressed after more urgent problems are solved. But kindness is in the greatest of need in all those areas, kindness toward the environment, toward other nations, and toward the needs of people suffering. Simple kindness may be the most vital key to the riddle of how human beings can live with each other and care properly for this planet we all share.
Kindness is a simple concept too simple, one might think, to provide a solution to the complex and serious challenges we face daily in work. However, it is precisely this simplicity that allows kindness such power and magnitude to affect change at all levels within individuals and organizations. Promoting kindness in the workplace as a core value only strengthens the foundations of our businesses. We all know what it means to be kind how it feels to be the recipient of a kind act and the rewards of committing a random act of kindness upon another human being. It does not take days of training seminars or piles of manuals to teach people how to be kind to one another. Kindness is something that each and every person knows how to do and can appreciate across all cultures, religions, genders and age barriers.
Regardless of how independent our job description might state we are required to be, we are each still a colorful thread interwoven into the fabric of a team environment. Kindness is powerful beyond measure. It is also the one sustainable element that inspires individuals to develop connection, compassion and community in the workplace.
This is the end of the copy that is going in a separate page entitled An Introduction to the Business of Kindness.
