Sydney Business Insights
‘You can’t eat that’ @ work
No Bull: WeWork declares meat is off the menu at all of its company events. It also won’t pick up the tab for meals that include meat (fish is OK) when employees dine out on company business.
Noble: The coworking heavyweight says meat lessness is part of its corporate social responsibility commitment to reducing carbon dioxide and water use, as well as saving animal lives.
Is this a case of sticking their principles too far into its employee’s business? How far should a company go in imposing an ideology on its employees and, for that matter, its customers? WeWork is not the first to meld business with social activism – IBM, Facebook and Qantas have all included ideological causes into their operating practices. General Electric even utilised capitalism’s basic currency by offering to pay employees to quit smoking.
Why it matters: With employees also seeking to impose their personal values on the business – think Google’s withdrawal from a military AI project at the staff’s behest – we are at a cross roads where values (ideologies?) are increasingly entering the workplace and the market place. Companies are creating new strictures that are testing how much social conscious a brand can carry.
Listen to Sandra and Kai discuss this story on The Future This Week
Image: Flickr
Sydney Business Insights is a University of Sydney Business School initiative aiming to provide the business community and public, including our students, alumni and partners with a deeper understanding of major issues and trends around the future of business.
