Happiness is a workplace where everybody can be their 'authentic' self
Thursday, 5 September 2019
Spark employees gathered in the atrium of the company's Auckland headquarters on March 18 and stood together as a show of support and love for their Muslim colleagues after the horrific mass shooting in Christchurch three days earlier.
It deeply touched Spark employee Isma Azad, from the companies Muslim cultural group.
'I've never seen the atrium that full. People came together to stand with us when we did a little prayer,' she says.
'I had people who didn't know me walk up and ask me if I was alright.'
**READ MORE:
* Tears of the chief executive
* We need to face the uncomfortable truths, says Spark boss Simon Moutter**
It was a moment which underlined just how big a cultural change the telecommunications giant has experienced in just two years since now former chief executive Simon Moutter spoke publicly about how Spark had failed to become an organisation in which women thrived.
'We have learned how to care for each other,' says Spark employee Riki Hollings, a member of Spark's Rainbow and Maori employee groups.
After Moutter spoke up, famously shedding tears, Spark employees launched the Blue Heart pledge to be tolerant, empathetic and inclusive.
It led to an explosion of employee-led groups that have surfaced the many cultures of Spark's more than 5500 employees.
Among the groups there's a Pasifika group, a Maori group, a mental health group, a Muslim group, a Rainbow group and an Indian group.
Each is visible, each holds events, each communicates across the entire Spark employee base through the internal Yammer communication channel..
The majority of Spark staffers wear a small blue heart on their lapels, or lanyards, signifying to their colleagues their commitment to being a respectful and empathetic colleague.
The idea of Blue Heart was to create a workplace to which people could bring their full, authentic selves, and most embraced it.
'He (Moutter) said we are not getting this right, and I'm giving you permission to start making changes,' says Grant Pritchard, from Spark's larger business partners' team, and part of the mental health group.
'My lived experience is it is helping our people to thrive and work and function well,' says Pritchard.
That may not be a description of happiness, but it is a description of people with purpose and the ability to have an impact.
'I think that's a closer human need than happiness,' he says.
Kim Ngarimu-Hunt, a support engineer, and part of the Maori group, has been with Spark for 20 years. She recalls what the Spark of now distant memory was like.
'It was more 'Could you be Maori on your own time',' she says.
There was a cult of uniformity.
That's been swept aside, with Spark having found something of its Maoritanga, something Moutter said was important in the revitalisation of the company.
'It's about understanding each other, and celebrating each other, but also the Blue Heart platform has given people the opportunity to bring what's important to themselves into work,' says Hollings.
'You don't have to leave yourself, or your faith ,at the door, but you do have to leave your prejudices at the door,' Pritchard says.
Hollings recalls the days when a Spark employee spoke of being gay in a 'whisper'.
He sees a parallel in what has happened at Spark through Blue Heart surfacing so many aspects of people's lives in Spark, and gay people 'coming out' by telling people of their sexuality.
'It was everybody coming out,' he says.
It's inspired some Spark employees to start conversations, sometimes brave ones, outside of work, including with their churches, principally on bigotry towards gay people.
Spark people have become a lot more culturally educated.
Rachel Cooper, from Spark's consumer sales team, says the Pasifika group has led celebrations of each of the Pacific language weeks.
'Just being able to share that with everybody has been a really big thing for us,' she says.
'It does give everyone an exposure to the cultural aspects of where people come from,' says Niall McCarthy, on Spark's special projects team, and a member of the Rainbow and Mental Health groups.
'When you have a workplace that's reducing the barriers to getting to know people from different backgrounds, it makes it easier to be curious,' Pritchard says.
There's nothing exclusive about the employee groups. Ujjainkar helped out with organising the Eid celebrations. Azad helped out with Diwali.
Blue Heart has also normalised tolerance, and respectful behaviour.
'It makes you braver to call out behaviours,' says Azad.
Part of the hope is empathy and education helps reduce the unconscious bias that Moutter had spoken about, giving the company a better chance of developing the talent available to it.
McCarthy believes Spark is now a place where people find their unconscious biases being much easier for them to spot themselves.
'We've learned to understand what our inherent biases are,' he says.
That's enabled people to get to a place where they can show 'true respect' to each other.
Spark hasn't hidden its diversity light under a bushel. Last year, it ran the two dads advert last year, a move Moutter first heard about when he saw it on the TV. This year, Spark released an advert featuring the journey of a mother whose daughter transitions to become her son.
Pritchard says the mental health group has 'changed the DNA' of the company into a better, more empathetic place to work, where people do not have to hide their challenges, stigma is reduced, and leaders ask how their employees really are.
Azad says people have much more empathy for each other now.
'From there everything else flows,' she says.
Spark has also become more family-friendly, with a greater recognition of the importance of being parents to many workers.
The Spark employees believe New Zealand as a whole can learn from its empathy revolution, and take to heart how fast change can happen.