WHAT'S WORKPLACE ETHICS?

by Cornelius von Baeyer



 

(Based on a presentation to shareholders of a European-based international industrial enterprise, spring 1999.)

I am a management consultant specializing in workplace ethics, what the Americans like to call ‘business ethics’.  People often want to hear more about my work -- isn’t ‘business ethics’ an oxymoron?

Between law and religion

I describe my work as filling a middle ground.  On the one hand there is the law, which deals with crime and punishment.  On the other there is religion, which deals with virtue and sin.  Organizational ethics sits in between -- it goes well beyond the law, and links to the personal beliefs of employees, but its focus is the corporation or association or government department.  Such groups of people must work together to achieve common goals, while also striving to do the right thing in a complex, diverse world.

What I actually do is to help management and employees recognize moral dilemmas in decision-making, and provide ways for these to be discussed and resolved. I also try to strengthen common understanding of ethical norms that apply to modern corporate life.  My brand of organizational ethics actually deals much more with creating and maintaining a healthy corporate culture than with exploring philosophical ethics applied to business.
 

Codes

Let me describe some of my activities. I help organizations to develop codes of various sorts.  Ethics codes generally deal with corporate values and guiding principles, and codes of conduct generally deal with actual behaviour that is favoured or prohibited.  However, there is no firm line between different kinds of codes.  (See my short article on Codes of Conduct.)

How the code is developed (how much real employee input?), and why the code is developed (just to protect senior management?) is as important as the content of the code itself.  The focus of a code is also crucial -- whether it points the way for employees to do business with integrity or just sets out some prohibitions (thus assuming the employees are potential crooks).

Codes cover many subjects -- each organization needs some but not others at any given time in its history.  Remember all the fuss about quality control, which is now assumed to be a minimum requirement?
 

Values

Organizational values often include such traditional virtues as trust, loyalty and commitment, honesty and respect for one another, and avoiding conflicts of interest.  Values may also include newer elements such as innovation, teamwork, customer focus and continuous improvement.
 

Principles

Guiding principles set standards for the organization that go beyond the law in such areas as:

Ethics programs

In the North American setting, successful codes are embedded in larger ethics programs designed to make sure that everyone in the organization knows the values and principles and how to apply them to their work. Communications programs might include a video for all employees, featuring a personal promise to uphold certain values by the head of the organization, and frank presentation of current issues by a cross-section of staff.

Training programs are of various sorts: integrated with other training or separate, self-study or group work.  A famous American training program includes a game that brings large numbers of engineers and other professionals together to solve ethical dilemmas that reflect common workplace situations.

Another piece of most ethics programs is an ethics advisory service, to give employees impartial, confidential help.  The advice might come on a hot-line from the corporate ombudsman, or from an ethics counsellor or commissioner.  Generally it should not come from the company lawyer or staff relations officer.

An ethics program expands the effect of a code, but the question remains, is the code really just warm words?  There is no definitive answer.  With constant attention to ethical decision-making, ethics programs can act as preventive medicine, to avoid crises, and to help resolve crises when they occur.  However, you cannot create an ethics program in the middle of a crisis in order to solve the problem -- no one would accept your good faith without further proof.
 

Case studies

Ethics programs are not the only way to work on ethics in an organization. One of my clients with staff around the globe had recently been downsized and reorganized, and employees were disillusioned.  A code exercise might deepen cynicism, but it was important to reaffirm basic values.

So we asked all staff to contribute values and ethics dilemmas in their work.  We received many, on a range of subjects: hiring fairly, dealing with political pressure, questionable accounting, personal safety, conflicting policies, and so on.  The most representative were sent out again as generic cases (without naming names), and employees met in groups to develop responses.

When the many answers were compiled, it was found that the organization still had its fundamental values.  Furthermore, it is much more acceptable now to bring an ethical dilemma to one’s colleagues in the organization.  The year-long project has evidently helped to raise morale and reinforce values without a code or ethics program.
 

Resources required

Even for typical North American ethics programs, it is important to note that they do not consume large resources, or impose onerous tasks on employees.  A number of large American corporations give employees training in corporate ethics when they first join the company, and then require them to spend a half day or a day every year to review ethical practices -- check the code, discuss some cases, watch a new video on the subject.
 

Benefits


A major benefit of such activities is that it becomes much easier for employees to overcome their reluctance to discuss ethics in public and to talk about troubling workplace issues with their colleagues.  Such discussion is the proper way to resolve problems in a large organization, so that the solutions will benefit from group thinking and also be useful in future cases.  Teamwork and good communications -- sounds familiar.  (My short article on Discovering Discourse Ethics expands on this approach.)

My conclusion?  Business ethics is not an oxymoron.  In fact, good ethics is good business.

Please do not reproduce without permission.
 

Codes of Conduct: Panacea or Bunk? | Discovering Discourse Ethics | Benefits of Case Discussions | Interpreting Your Code | Index of articles
 

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This page updated 13 May 99.