The Science of Care: How Chick-fil-A Systematically Built an Unrivaled Corporate Culture of Care

Article updated in June 2023.

Tami Piland is a self-described “checklist person.” When she first started working at Chick-fil-A’s Corporate Support Center, she did what came naturally — starting each meeting by diving straight into her organized agenda.

She couldn’t understand why her people leader kept on interrupting her to ask how she and her family were doing.

At first, Piland thought her people leader was just being polite … and somewhat inefficient.

But she soon came to understand that her inquiries were just one small example of a profound Culture of Care deeply embedded throughout the entire organization.

“That's what happens at Chick-fil-A,” Piland says now. “It’s just who we are.”

A Community Where Acts of Care are Common

Talk to even a handful of the 2,000-plus professionals based at the company’s Atlanta Corporate Support Center, and you’ll quickly hear about the many ways that staffers at every level of the organization engage in acts of care — from the big to the small.

There’s the former CEO Dan Cathy, who would wrap up lunch meetings by clearing the dishes of those who work for him. There’s the IT analyst who starts every work day by stopping at all the desks in her department with a warm hello. There’s the people leader who, knowing one of his staffers was battling cancer, made sure she had all the support she needed to keep doing the work she loved without facing any pressure to over-exert.

There are the colleagues helping a software engineer keep his promise to himself to leave work early to spend more time with his kids. There’s the team that saw a coworker through a lengthy adoption process and then all showed up for the family’s final ceremony. There are the work groups that prioritize collaboration and results, but never competition. There are the colleagues who don’t let a meeting go by without checking on how a coworker’s wife, a nurse, is doing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Corporate Vision of Care

Leaders believe this shared kindness and connection is so key to Chick-fil-A’s identity that they have shaped a corporate vision driven by care.

Such an approach begs the question: How can a large organization foster care at the individual level? Plenty of businesses speak about their values — but how do you create an organization where employees in every function and department live those values out?

Plenty of businesses speak about their values — but how do you create an organization where employees in every function and department live those values out?

“It all starts with our practices and processes,” says Chick-fil-A Director of Culture Darya Fields. “We look at the entire talent experience lifecycle — from onboarding through development, performance management and ways of working — to ensure it’s executed in a way that is true to our brand promise.”

At Chick-fil-A, the Culture of Care starts with leaders setting examples of care through both words and deeds. It’s systematically reinforced through leadership training and an employee evaluation system that centers around the company’s core values, which are driven by service, collaboration, purpose and innovation. And it is solidified with an impressive array of corporate employee benefits and policies that make clear the company’s philosophy of care is accompanied by a commitment to action.

And the Culture of Care might not flourish without what Piland, now the Corporate Support Center’s director of campus hospitality, calls the company’s “magic sauce”:

“We don’t hire just for competency, or for a skill set,” she says. “We hire people who care about people.”

A Thoughtful Approach to Creating Care

Care can flourish only when it is backed up by authentic sentiment, reinforced through action and strengthened over time. These are some of the key ways Chick-fil-A builds its Culture of Care:

We Inspire Care Through Our Words

Every year, Chick-fil-A’s entire corporate staff and Franchisees embark together on a retreat focused on personal and professional growth and development. Almost three years ago, the retreat’s keynote speech focused on the company’s commitment to delivering care — and challenged people throughout the organization to find their own way to make sure they were turning that vision into a reality.

As the COVID-19 crisis hit this year, leaders led company-wide online meetings to express their focus on care and emphasize the need to offer grace and flexibility to the many staffers facing new challenges. Leaders spoke with vulnerability about their own personal struggles, needs and fears. They encouraged corporate employees to take time off as needed, and even launched an incentive program providing extra days off to all staffers taking at least one work day off a month. They also began offering a family care stipend to staffers juggling child and elder care needs.

We Set an Example of Care Through Our Actions

Years ago, Chick-fil-A's then-CEO Dan Cathy realized it wasn’t enough to tell staffers to put their family first as they made decisions about their work-life balance: If he wanted to have a real impact, he had to set an example.

So Cathy started making a point of exiting the building very publicly, down a central staircase, in the middle of the afternoon whenever one of his kids had a soccer game. It got the message across, and has set the tone for discussions about work-life flexibility throughout the company ever since.

A similar message of care comes through loud and clear in how the company handles its corporate benefits package. Employees and their families pay nothing for health care premiums, and staffers receive both a 401(k) match and a defined-benefit pension plan — practically unheard of these days. In non-pandemic times corporate staffers receive on-site child care, training sessions and classes at an on-site fitness center, and healthy lunches at the Support Center café. Employees receive dedicated funding for training and professional growth, and can spend two work days a year volunteering.

We Spread the Tools for Care Through Training

At Chick-fil-A, all corporate leaders at the director level and above have gone through a two-year training program that delves deep into the foundations of servant leadership. The program equips leaders to deliver care to their teams in personalized ways, and it helps to establish organizational expectations for how leaders should support their teams, encourage a wide range of viewpoints, and boost diversity and inclusion efforts.

“For me, the program shifted the way that I think about managing my team,” says Fields, the company’s director of culture. “It helped me internalize that it's equally important for me to invest in my people as it is to invest in what I'm delivering for the business.”

We Reinforce an Expectation of Care Through Our Evaluations

Chick-fil-A’s core values are far more than words. Each one is embedded into the company’s evaluation processes — from twice yearly formal evaluations to monthly conversations between people leaders and their staff.

“If I don’t encourage people to bring different thoughts to the table, if I shut down a conversation because I believe there’s only one right way to do something, I’m going to hear from my people leader that I’m not demonstrating our core value that We’re Better Together,” Piland says.

Leaders frequently coach their staffers on how to best embody that core value as well as the other three: We’re Here to Serve; We Are Purpose-Driven and We Pursue What’s Next.

“They provide a wonderful foundation for coaching and conversation,” Piland says.

We Know That Relationships Are Just as Important as Results

As for Piland, she has come to realize that the company-wide practice of taking time to have personal conversations and check in with colleagues amounts to far more than just being nice. She herself now starts off each meeting as her people leader once did with her.

“When you work somewhere else, people feel like they’re wasting company resources if they don’t get right to the point,” she says. “But at Chick-fil-A, you can spend your whole one-on-one time with a direct report talking about how they’re having a hard time, and no one thinks it’s a waste. That’s our culture.“

We’re looking for tenacious thinkers with big hearts who bring diverse perspectives and a natural curiosity to their work. Learn more about us at www.chick-fil-a.com/careers/corporate.