Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58912
Your Turn Bringing Employees on Board with Ethics Just as the topic of ethics has become a key subject at many business schools, so too has it become a major focus of many corporations. Recent scan- dals, ethics violations, and ethics legislation have caused many cor- porations to rethink their positions on ethics—or at least pay more attention to how those positions are communicated to all of their employees. As a corporate ethics officer involved in design, delivery, and enhancement of ethics and com- pliance programs for a large U.S. company, I know how difficult it is to get all employees in a company to pull together in a new direc- tion when it comes to ethics. Yet it's essential that all employees understand the company's desired ethical culture and that they work together to implement it. My organization has 125,000 employees at more than 1,200 locations in several nations. Get- ting all of them to think the same way about ethics is akin to getting 125,000 individual rowboats to go in the same direction. To change a company's ethics, managers must touch every employee and get them to actively row in the new direction. In today's Web-based age, com- panies sometimes attempt to use computers and video equipment to get employees all rowing together. Two companies I know of, both facing serious ethical failures, relied on electronics to disseminate ethics training to all employees. That's fast and low-cost. I know of anoth- 60 BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2006 by Carl R. Oliver er company that required every employee to attend a four-hour lecture. That is moderately fast and moderately expensive. Both approaches are valuable, but they don't do enough. To get all employees moving in the same ethical direction, man- agers really must take a two-step approach. They must create an environment in which employees feel comfortable discussing eth- ics, and they must foster employ- ees' learning about ethics in the workplace. Many employees will come to an organization already having studied ethics at business school, whether as undergrads, MBA candidates, or participants in executive education programs. But it's important that programs at the office reinforce this training so employees become effective, life- long learners about business ethics. When my company wanted to revamp its ethics program, we first told managers to ask employees two questions: What values do you bring to work with you from home? And what values do you want this company to be known for? From the resulting discussions emerged widely shared values that the company adopted as its corpo- rate values. Once those values were established, the company sched- uled managers for 360-degree evaluation against those values. The goal was to reinforce each manager's existing strengths and provide ideas on how to develop new ones. The company also produced clear and readable ethics guide- lines and distributed them to all employees. The ethics office pre- pared packets of possible workplace scenarios and distributed these to managers. During staff meetings, managers led discussions about how to handle various situations in light of the company's ethics poli- cies. Combined, all these activities encouraged an environment where employees could expect to com- municate openly and safely with their managers about ethics. I know these measures defi- nitely have changed the direc- tion in which our employees row. For example, I recently heard five women discuss a scenario in which a male manager jokes with a female employee in terms filled with sexual innuendo. One woman said, "Fifteen years ago, that often happened in this company. Women could keep quiet and keep their jobs, or they could complain and look for new jobs. Things have changed. Now such situations rare- ly happen. If they do, the woman can complain safely, and the com- pany will take action." Encouraging open discussion is just one part of the ethical equa- tion. Just as important is the second part: helping employees develop their ethical frameworks and learn to make sound ethical decisions. Often, companies can develop eth- ics programs with the assistance of local business schools that cover ethics in their own curricula. Disci- plines such as business, philosophy, law, history, sociology, psychology, accounting, logic, and organiza- tional systems help illuminate the full spectrum of ethics issues that employees will face. Ultimately employees will develop the skills to recognize an ethics issue, gather information about it, generate options for handling it, execute their decisions, and feel that they have done the right thing.