Employees Forum on Belief (EFB) Award 2010

I work for a Railway engineering company in the South West of England.

I became aware of the Employees Forum on Belief Awards via a TWUK newsletter. I have to confess that at first I filed the email and didn’t really consider it any further. It was brought to mind after re-reading some notes from the 2010 TWUK conference from the session on “The Effective Christian Workplace Group”. The account was that of Adrian Holloway from Borough Hall Christian Fellowship in Bedforshire.

I noticed that there seemed to be some key lessons to be learned from their experience; (1) raising the profile of their group, (2) alignment to business agenda, and an (3) open offer to pray into business related issues.

Following a lunchtime devoted entirely to praying for the group’s profile to be raised by some means, we decided to re-write our intranet advert and declare our alliance with the company’s corporate values. These corporate values might be described as christian with a small ‘c’.

It was at this point that I re-found the filed email and the opportunity to enter our company for the EFB Award. We approached our HR Director who was immediately open to the idea of the award entry.

The nature of the award meant that our entry could not be purely on the basis of having a Christian at work group, but that the company was open to faith based groups and had encouraged this activity rather than quash it. This was very difficult to do without it seeming biased towards the CAW group, and I struggled with a suitable approach. It was then that our media team offered to help with the award. They created “The Freedom of Faith Initiative” to package the approach that the company had taken towards our Christian group and in theory any other faith based group. The wording was quite strikingly pro faith, and resulted in an entry that I could not have imagined being signed off by our HR Director and Managing Director. Here are some of the statements to give you a flavour:

“a consciously cross-cultural and what we believe to be quite an unusual initiative in supporting non-confrontational faith based groups”

“support and encourage diversity of belief and faith and the open expression of this within the working environment”

“The Christians at Work Group has not only been supported in their meeting and prayer sessions, but also in the way that they interact on a wider basis with the whole workforce”

“this group provides an alternative spiritual support within the organisation, which would be missing without it”

The result of this strong entry was that we were short listed for the Small Companies Award. Unfortunately we did not win the award, but the events leading to that point in my opinion have strengthened the relationship between the company and the CAW Group and are in themselves a significant spiritual step.

Our plans are to now to move towards a more open and widely known opportunity for the workforce to make prayer requests to our group. At the end of the day we want the opportunity for God to be glorified, and for the testimony of the average employee to be one that has either seen directly, or by association, the power of God in action in a way that cannot be ignored. Any prayer support is appreciated.

Hugh Webber, August 2010.