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Speech of Ansul Gupta on the 15th World Confluence of Humanity, Power and Spirituality on 27th December 2024

Good-evening Dignitaries, Firstly I would like to Thank Dr. Hariprasad Kanoria ji, Dr. Rahul Varma ji and the entire Kanoria foundation for this esteemed opportunity and recognition.

I attended the my first confluence organized by Kanoria foundation in 2016, that year it happened twice and that also happened to be my first year of formalized research on workplace spirituality, the year when you are establishing the problem statement and exploring the viability of the subject. Attending these confluences gave me the much needed confidence and boost on the subject and since then there has been no looking back. The book by Kanoriaji-–“A Journey within through service”, covered a lot of perspectives on the implementation of spirituality at workplace and in business how humanity can be help high alongside profitability. 

So fast forward coming to my research, I did my doctorate in Human resources on the subject of “workplace spirituality”. It started with the simple idea with me practicing transcendental meditation for almost 19 years now, can we engage people at work the way they are engaged in worshiping their deity? And then,  I found that a measurable construct exists in the research domain and is far hidden a gem for the management fraternity. 

Workplace spirituality is an empirically tested construct that is based on following sub dimensions — 

1. Finding meaning in life through work, 

2. Having interconnectedness at work  

3. Your values and organizational values matching,  

4. Having Compassion at work  

5. Acknowledging inner life of employees. 

It is an interaction of individual and organizational spirituality, fully measurable and has direct implication on the company’s bottom line. There are many published scale, we also have one and also unpublished one, that can be used commercially. 

It is a next way of understanding human’s at work, summarized as Spiritual HRM, the need of the hour. Now, not just me, TV Rao, father of HRD and the various other leaders in the HR fraternity are saying so- 

It all starts with understanding of Humans at work-As an extension of machines in the industrial era, then comes the thinking beings and then the emotional beings, since past 25 years there has been research globally of acknowledging employees as spiritual beings, that there is a spirit within the employees that needs to be engaged and that engaging the spirit of the employees is the highest form of engagement at work.  

Workplace spirituality is negating the myth of two different lives-Personal and professional. It is about accepting that the basic nature and values of individuals donot change with place of work and that work-life balance should be a seamless transaction. 

Individual spirituality is about recognition that employees have an inner life that needs to be nourished whereas organizational spirituality refers to the “Corporate Soul” and is depictive of the work environment provided by the employer to the employees. It refers to both the top line that is the purpose of existence of the organization and the bottom line that is the organizational profitability and its interaction is workplace spirituality. 

Going ahead our research says that the workplace health (wellbeing/happiness at work) needs to be measured on its spiritual levels in terms of individual and organizational spirituality rather than on the benefits and perks it provides making it the most sought after workplace. 

Workplace spirituality is an OD intervention, its an attitudinal change towards work and life. It needs to be driven from the top. When employees see meaning in life through work, they utilize their full potential at work and develop skills unique to themselves and the skills become unique to the organization. A culmination of these unique and sustainable skills than becomes a source of competitive advantage for the firms. A concept of lean in terms of human potential too can be created wherein through workplace spirituality the human potential spillage can also be restrained.  

A spiritual workplace is a workplace that has the measurable culture of – Benevolence, Generativity, Humanism, Integrity, Justice, Mutuality, Receptivity, Responsibility and trust. The  outcomes for the organizations are in the form of Increased job performance, lower attrition, Decreased absenteeism, Increased organizational citizenship behaviour, Increased innovation, lesser legal hassles’, Increased self development, Increased governance, Increased team performance, increased acceptance and tolerance at work, increase in customer satisfaction and increased employer brand. 

 Thus, a spiritual workplace is the reality that is needed to navigate the current turbulent times to enable their long term success and sustenance to this tending to extreme business world.  ............... Thank you..