Aristotle taught of a direct, meaningful tie between virtue and happiness, for ourselves and others.
University College Dublin ethics expert Rosa Chun explores how Aristotle’s wisdom about the motivations and consequences of doing good apply today in our workplaces in this Harvard Business Review analysis (pay gate).
The thought goes, if a company’s social responsibility efforts tap into employee and customer stakeholders’ emotional connections between generous behavior and deeper satisfaction, those efforts will translate into sustainable, highly motivating traits of character. Chun notes that doing well by doing good is not just words, but a core strategy that can stand any business’s stress test of cycles and events. She writes:
“Virtue, represented by integrity, empathy, zeal, conscientiousness, warmth, and courage, is linked to employee and customer satisfaction via identification. Think of identification as a perceived oneness or emotional attachment to the company. My findings suggest two organizational virtues are key for this. For employees, identification with a firm is driven most significantly by integrity (such as being honest, trustworthy). For customers, identification with the company is driven chiefly by empathy (such as being concerned, reassuring).”
Identification is an emotional, gravitational pull. Identification speaks loud and clear about who an organization is and what that organization wants to be, which is happier by doing great as a business.
And this is exactly what Habitat for Humanity’s Home Builders Blitz is, an annual builder-palooza that excites the mind, warms the heart, and expands the confines of the soul, as people who work for home building, manufacturing, financial services, materials supply, and other parts of the housing community coalesce to make a meaningful contribution to the lives of other people.
The all-out effort goes right at the jugular of one of housing’s single most vexing issues–the affordability crisis. Affordability is a many-headed serpent. The term encompasses a range of conditions, from subsistence-level needs for shelter, to monthly payment power, to income-to-price ratios, to relative attainability, to relative value.
Habitat and its presenting partner Ply Gem will team with other builders, manufacturers, and other suppliers to build or repair 80 homes between the days June 5 and June 9, in 32 cities, in 17 states, a D-Day style assault on the problem of getting families that deserve it into decent homes in good communities. In 2017, the Habitat and Ply Gem juggernaut will have rolled into 28 states, partnering with more than 200 families on that opportunity for a great home.
The Blitz works three ways at solving the “wicked” affordability problem. One is blindingly clear. It gives families and households that didn’t have a way out of a financial hole a way into a good home. Two, it forces a level of collaboration in the ecosystem of home building’s players to learn to build well fast, a proficiency that carries over into market-rate operational excellence in these organizations profit-making initiatives.
Third, and perhaps most important, the Blitz works its way in under the skin of every one of its participants in that way that Aristotle meant the term virtue. Solving the affordability crisis will take innovative, collaborative organizations doing what it is they do best, and then some.
It will take people who identify themselves emotionally as ones whose greater satisfaction, assurance, and happiness come from watching families walk across the thresholds of these homes for the first time.
That extra emotional investment is critical to solving for the nation’s housing affordability issue. So, this comment from Ply Gem chairman and CEO Gary Robinette makes sense:
“We believe it’s our role as a leader to make the entire building industry aware of the positive impact that affordable housing has on local families and communities.”
We at Hanley Wood thank Ply Gem, Habitat for Humanity, and all the builders, manufacturers, and other supplier partners participating in Home Builders Blitz of 2017, for inviting us to Nashville to work by your sides for a few days.
Clearly, participants in the Blitz choose to be part of it not because of any moral obligation to do it, nor because by doing so they will gain a competitive or consumer edge. They’re there, in it for the reason Aristotle spoke about.
UCD Dublin ethicist Rosa Chun writes:
In Aristotelian thought, virtue ethics are supposed to lead to a good outcome: happiness. A good CSR strategy should aim for happiness too. I believe corporate virtues, once nurtured and established, can lead to happy stakeholders and, ultimately, better performance.
Thanks to Ply Gem, our very own Matthew Carollo, Jennifer Castenson, Marisa Mendez, and Patty Morin got to join in on the Blitz in its Nashville stretch. You can bet that it makes us happy to be workers among workers in this enormously important effort.
