It’s just business
I had only been working at my first real job a little over a year when the announcement came that our company had been sold. A few core employees were transferred to Florida while the rest of us were left behind to finish up existing projects. For us, moving wasn’t an option. Our positions were being eliminated or would be filled by people already living in Florida–people whose moving expenses wouldn’t need to be reimbursed.
A week or so after the announcement, I was offered another job. It was a temptingly good offer, but I was torn about accepting. If I left, my former employer couldn’t fill my position, meaning my soon-to-be-unemployed fellow coworkers would have to pick up the slack. When I mentioned the situation to a friend who also worked there, he advised, “You need to look out for yourself because no one else will. It’s just business. It’s how things work.”
I ended up taking his advice and accepted the job, but his “it’s just business” way of thinking bothered me. It seemed like an excuse for doing what I wanted, not for doing what felt like the right thing. Sure, the company was leaving and not taking me with it, but they’d been exceptionally good to me, and so had my coworkers.
In the years since, every time I’ve heard “it’s just business,” the phrase was used to justify some questionable behavior–to excuse taking advantage of a person or a situation or to lessen the guilt of “having to make the tough choice” instead of the right one. Only recently, though, did I learn that the phrase could be used in a positive way. In a way that couldn’t be any more right.
Kelly Wymer had been a paralegal with the Charleston branch of the law firm of Spilman, Thomas & Battle for 14 years when her then six-year-old daughter, Ali, was diagnosed with lymphoma.
Ali’s condition would require two years of treatments. Treatments that would often force Kelly to be away from the office for long stretches of time.
“When I told my bosses, they said for me to do whatever I needed to do in order to take care of my family,” said Wymer. She never had to work through lunch hour or stay late to make up her hours. She was able to do her job as best as she could manage, enabling her to concentrate completely on caring for her daughter.
“I can’t imagine how much more stressful this would have been if they hadn’t been so understanding,” said Wymer, whose daughter, now a third grader at Sacred Heart Elementary, will finish the last of her chemotherapy the end of this month. “I’m not the only one they’ve done this for either. They’re always going above and beyond for someone.” She told of several coworkers who’d been through tough times and how the company and their staff would go to extremes to help out.
But wait a minute. These are lawyers. The stuff that jokes are made of.
So intrigued was I by the idea of good-hearted lawyers that I called the managing partner at Spilman, attorney Mike Basile.
“Our firm began in 1864,” said Basile. “Since the very beginning, we’ve been family oriented and community driven. We live by it. That’s our aura. You hear businesses claim to be a family, but that’s true of ours.
“We’re different by design. We hire people who both give and receive. Yes, our business is a for-profit model, but we take care of our own, especially during crying times,” said Basile. “It’s just business.”
His words stuck with me a long time. I hadn’t considered that “it’s just business” could actually be a positive thing. It had always seemed the perfect catch phrase for this dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all world of ours.
But then I run across a firm that believes that just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. A company that understands the long-term value in taking care of their own.
Throwing money at employees will never buy the kind of service and loyalty that caring for them can. And making a working parent’s life easier by being flexible and understanding when issues arise—whether it be two years of chemotherapy treatments or last-minute childcare issues—is a perk a company should be proud of.
It’s doesn’t cost much to do the right thing. It should be just business.
Do you have an employer who went above and beyond? Or maybe it was your coworkers who deserve recognition. I’d love to hear about it for a possible future column. Send me an email at karinfuller@cnpapers.com.
