The CEOs of Northwest Arkansas’ three Fortune 500 companies, John Roberts of J.B. Hunt Transport, Doug McMillon of Wal-Mart and Donnie Smith of Tyson Foods, gathered for an onstage conversation for the first time in November 2015.
They weren’t talking about supply-chain processes or business practices. They had gathered to discuss how they live out their Christian faiths in their work.
The event was coordinated by WorkMatters, a Rogers-based nonprofit organization with a mission of helping people bridge the gap between religion and employment.
“We spend half of our waking hours at work. So what’s the ‘why’ behind why we really do that?” asked David Roth, president of Work-Matters. “For most people, it’s money and being able to feed your family. It’s success. It’s promotion. For some people, it’s value, feeling some significance in what we do. In general, it’s still just work.”
“For 20 years, I was just focused on what I described to you, and it didn’t feel wrong, but it was just success,” he said. “My faith was always separate; it was a Sunday thing mostly.”
Roth joined WorkMatters’ founding board when it began within the Central United Methodist Church of Fayetteville in 2002. Soon, the interest and demand in the program had grown so much that the group was spun out of the church. Roth left his job as a vice president at J.B. Hunt Transport to head it up in 2003.
“Our whole mission is to help leaders find God’s purpose for their work. It’s really reconditioning people, teaching people, equipping people on what does it really look like to have a greater purpose for your work than just the work itself,” Roth said.
Elise Mitchell, founder and CEO of Mitchell Communications Group and a WorkMatters board member, said she believes that in the past, people didn’t feel they could bring their faith to work.
“You couldn’t ever express any belief in any higher calling. You needed to be all about yourself, and all about your company, all about success. … But I think there’s been a real paradigm shift in recent years,” Mitchell said.
Roth said more people now accept that they can integrate their faith and work lives. He added that people say: “I get that I should, but what does it mean? How do I really live my faith at work? What is it you really want me to do?’
“The last three or four years for us have been heavy into building content to help teach people how to really live their faith at work. That’s what they’re really looking for,” said Roth.
Beyond the blog, video and audio content available online, the group produces workbooks to guide smallgroup studies in workplaces around the country. Each features lessons centered on one of the group’s pillars of faith and work — such as love, influence and integrity. Over 3,000 people in 20 states have participated in the studies nationwide.
While WorkMatters remains grounded in Northwest Arkansas and its business community, “We are aggressively taking our content and pushing it out nationally and globally,” Roth said. “Growth is a good thing, and growth is a powerful thing. So the more people we can help digest what we’re talking about, the better.”
Another of the organization’s content pieces is the WorkMatters Institute, a biannual 16-week program that provides guidance and mentoring for young professionals in the Northwest Arkansas area. Ben Kirksey, executive director of the institute, said it offers some “guardrails and wisdom” for a millennial generation trying to find balance.
“I had always kept my work and faith very separate,” said Kali Davis, senior account executive at Procter & Gamble and WorkMatters Institute alumnus. “[In the program] I was able to see how I could just have one life.
“Nothing else changed about my life. I still work for a non-faith-based company, doing my same job, but I can just be one person and have one life all the way through,” she said.
In addition, Davis explained, it helped her rethink her daily tasks. “I was frustrated by finding the eternal purpose in the day-to-day tasks: the spreadsheets, the emails, the conference calls,” she said. “WorkMatters definitely shows you that God is delivering a purpose in your work, for my life, for the lives of those around me, for the world.”
Shelley Simpson, chief marketing officer, executive vice president and president of the Integrated Capacity Solutions segment at J.B. Hunt, serves on the WorkMatters board.
“It was the first time I heard about an organization that allowed me to think about my faith in my work and really what that meant,” Simpson said
“ Yo u g row u p h e a r - ing things like, ‘leave your problems at home,’ or ‘don’t bring your work life home,’ and I think the people who say that either don’t work or don’t have a home life,” Simpson added.
She said she now asks herself: “How can I live out my personal value system in the workplace in how I treat people? That’s the principle of what I try to do at work and as a board member at WorkMatters.”
Ross Cully, CEO of the Harvest Group in Fayetteville and a WorkMatters advisory board member, said there is “a certain level of introspection that this topic brings: What does this mean for me or my context?”
“There’s no prescription for your faith that WorkMatters is dictating. It’s more provoking those kinds of questions for each of us to ask,” Cully said.
“Not everybody believes in Jesus, obviously, so we’re not trying to cram Jesus down people’s throats,” said Roth. “But that’s what we believe, and that’s what a lot of people believe, so if we can learn how to incorporate what he’s teaching into this hard and difficult place called work, then the influence is going to be extraordinary, and the world’s going to be a better place.”
In the end, Roth said, his group’s “passion is to help people find real purpose in their work and have it be bigger than just the work itself.”