be more GEORGE (Wellbeing and Retention 5)

Physical Wellbeing. Probably the culture shift that Cadbury is most famous for is developing a “factory in a garden“, building not just work facilities but high-spec, beautiful housing around community facilities for his workers in an era of city slums. Beyond their home lives, he transformed the work-life of his employees. (You might even say he pioneered work-life balance.) They had on-site, paid-for medical and dentistry (helpful with all that sugar around), they were one of the first businesses to introduce just a five-and-a-half-day working week and paid holidays, and pay was typically 10% higher than the industry average. He went on to establish the “Workers Welfare Association”, which eventually became (debatably) the leading HR institute globally. Recreation was at the heart of community life, with playing fields and swimming pools on-site and famously celebrated “works outings” to the seaside.

Education & Progression. In the early 1900s, the idea of being “promoted” was a rare thing, but Cadbury was committed to staff progressing, so he established an in-house central training department, developed a management training programme giving staff an extra half-day a week for study, and other staff could leave early and potentially obtain bursaries for night school education.

Greater Equality for Women It’s hard to imagine the outrage that would have ensued from Cadbury’s decision to have equal pay for women in the industrial world of men. His demographic of such a large percentage of the workforce being women would also have caused concern in some quarters. Cadbury had what we’d now consider cultural blind spots when it came to employing women, but in his day, his practices were ground-breaking.

Staff Engagement. My post-grad thesis was on employee engagement, and I’m embarrassed at how much of my “action plan” had been in place a hundred years ago in a factory 5 miles from my home in Birmingham, England. It’s likely that Cadbury’s had the first ever workers’ “suggestion box” to develop what we’d now call a ‘culture of feedback’. He established workers’ suggestion committees (the first implemented “suggestion” was to abolish the 6 am shift start time!), which progressed into democratically elected works councils which are still a feature of European work environments to this day. Today, as “unionisation” is the fear of many employers, it’s hard to imagine that the Cadbury brothers actually pushed for 100% unionisation of their workforce so everyone was equally represented.

Spiritual Welfare. The heart of his motivation came from George Cadbury’s faith. Often seen on his bicycle early on a Sunday morning as he headed off to teach his Sunday school class, Cadbury had no sense of a sacred-secular divide.  He built churches at the heart of the community he constructed in Bournville. He had prayers and Bible reading at the beginning of every workday (A practice that continued until the workforce became too large in the mid-20th century), and he was very engaged in the personal and spiritual lives of his workforce.

Much of what we now call best practice in HR and organisational wellbeing has its roots in the pioneering initiatives of Cadbury and some other Quaker contemporaries (but that’s another article for another day). He showed how staff care was not just possible but positively good for business.

So how can we be more George? For us in LDHR, I think it starts with talking the language of leaders. If we perpetually talk in apologetic, cautious, sympathy-inducing terms about wellbeing, we undermine the strategic value of staff care in getting the job done and being effective in the mission God calls us to. Helping leaders join the dots from healthy, happy teams to effectiveness in the mission is the task before us. We tend not to be great (OK, I tend not to be great) in gathering and using data to show the effects of having known, needed and valued staff on the mission, but the data is out there for the gathering. There are certainly many anecdotes of what happens when that culture of valuing staff is not in place.  These anecdotes tend to fill up far too much of the work life of LDHR leaders around the globe.

For George, the mission and the people that got them there were always two sides of the same coin. It was never an issue of one at the cost of the other but a recognition that (before it was everybody’s strap-line) people are the most, most valuable asset an organisation has. This series of articles has been titled “wellbeing and retention” because, in a season when many of our ministries are struggling with recruitment, retention is the backdoor you need to watch while still making sure the recruitment front door is wide open. If the consistency of the workforce at Cadbury’s is anything to go by, it looks like wellbeing and staff care are at the heart of retention.