Here is a link to the published journal and article
Performance Improvement Intervention: Ethics Management Program
Performance Improvement Intervention: Ethics Management Program
Nikki Strawn
Strawn, N. (2017). Aligning Strategic
Goals for More Space. Journal of Training,
Design, and Technology, 1(1), 49-54.
Abstract
With the increase of social media,
global connectivity and media coverage of corporate scandals, ethics management
has become crucial in shaping and organization’s values, maintaining an
organization’s public image and securing profit & productivity. An ethics
management program is a performance improvement intervention that conveys
corporate values, uses codes and policies to guide decisions and behaviors,
implements extensive ethics training and evaluating to ultimately provide
guidance in not only in ethical dilemmas but in everyday business decisions.
This paper explores ethics management as a performance improvement intervention,
gives examples of how the intervention has been used to resolve performance
problems, identifies the benefits and challenges of ethics management and
offers tools and strategies required to successfully implement an ethics
management program. The significant and positive impacts that an effective
ethics management program has on employees, organizations and society as whole
places ethics management programs as an imperative performance improvement
intervention for any human performance practitioner when seeking to implement
organizational changes.
Performance Improvement Intervention: Ethics
Management Program
An ethics
management program plays an important role in shaping an organization's values,
culture and vision and ultimately improving an organization's overall
performance.
An ethics management program is a performance
improvement intervention that conveys
corporate values, uses codes & policies to guide decisions and behaviors,
implements extensive training and evaluating to ultimately provide guidance in
not only ethical dilemmas but in everyday business decisions.
There are five tools that are important to establishing an
effective ethics management program. They are codes of ethics, codes of
conduct, policies and procedures, real to life ethical dilemmas and training.
Code of ethics is a document that provides a guide of ethical principles to
help professionals conduct business honestly and with integrity. They outline
the mission and values of the organization, identify how professionals are
supposed to approach problems and establish the organization’s core values and
standards. (McNamara, n.d.) The code of ethics serves as the constitution of
the organization and govern decision making. “The code serves as the
organization’s conscience, should be integral to the organization’s
communications strategy, and serves as an annual assessment tool for continuous
improvement.” (Collins, 2012)
Code of
conduct is a document that outlines specific behaviors that are required or
prohibited, identify social norms of the workplace and outlines rules and
responsibilities.
Codes of conduct are comparable to the by-laws of
the organization and govern action. Policies and procedures are also vital for
an organizations ethics management program. Organizations manage values and
ethics through the use of policies and procedures. McNamara (n.d.) writes, “For example, we're
most familiar with the value of social responsibility. To produce behavior
aligned with this value, organizations often institute policies such as
recycling waste, donating to local charities, or paying employees to
participate in community events.”
Using
real to life ethical dilemmas is another vital tool to an ethics management
program. Oftentimes ethics management programs make the mistake of presenting
ethical decisions as more simple and concrete “right” choices than what real
ethical dilemmas truly pose. In the Complete Guide to Ethics Management: An
Ethics Toolkit for Managers, the author states “Perhaps too often, business
ethics is portrayed as a matter of resolving conflicts in which one option
appears to be the clear choice. Case studies are often presented in which an
employee is faced with whether or not to lie, steal, cheat, abuse another,
break terms of a contract, etc. However, ethical dilemmas faced by managers are
often more real-to-life and highly complex with no clear guidelines, whether in
law or often in religion.” (McNamara, n.d.) Using real to life ethical dilemmas
in an ethics management program is key to developing an awareness of the
complexities of ethical dilemmas and growing one’s own ethical intuition and
moral compass. If organizations are not challenged with nor practice resolving
real and complex ethical dilemmas together, they will not be prepared in the
face of a true ethically turbulent time.
Ethics
training is the means of informing employees about what the ethics program is,
how it works and their roles in it. The purpose of ethics training is
"to enable employees to identify and deal with ethical problems developing
their moral intuitions, which are implicit in everyday choices and
actions"
(Sacconi, de
Colle & Baldin,
2002, p. 13). Ethics training and compliance programs
include but are not limited to the following topics:
·
Upholding an organization's code of ethics,
·
Identifying standards of acceptable behavior
on the job,
·
Maintaining integrity in supplier
relationships
·
Maintaining privacy and data protection,
·
Recognizing and preventing money laundering
·
Regulating international trade control and
financial transactions
·
Addressing improper payments and gifts
·
Complying with laws and regulations
·
How and when to report concerns regarding
unethical conduct
·
Specific ethics-related resources and
reporting methods
·
Addressing conflicts of interest
In ethics training,
employees not only learn about the ethics and values that guide the
organization but they also learn the methods and tools used to ensure ethical
standards are met. For example, employees will learn to use an ethics
checklist, a ten step method decision making tool or the twelve questions
approach tool.
Ethics management is classified as an organizational design
and development intervention. Organizational design and development is a
process that examines the operation and management of an organization and
facilitates needed changes in an effort to improve efficiency and
competitiveness. (Van, Moseley, & Dessinger, 2012) Within organizational
design and development interventions, ethics management is categorized under
organizational values. “Organizational values are the “stuff we all live by,”
our organizational energy, the reason for the organization to exist. They
create the organization’s vision of the world— how people are treated, how
employees act, how they function as teams and make decisions, how people
respond to mistakes and failure, how they take risks, learn, and grow, and how
information is communicated and shared.” (Van, Moseley, & Dessinger, 2012)
A lack of ethics
leads to a substantial amount of performance problems for organizations
including legal issues, negative employee performance, poor employee relations,
and lack of company credibility. Legal issues could include facing large
fines, fighting costly court battles and even facing criminal charges.
Workplaces that lack a strong ethics culture may find employees ignore
procedure and protocols resulting in careless, costly and sometimes deadly
errors. Employees are more likely to lie about time spent on the job and duties
performed and take advantage of employer resources. “A lack of ethical
behavior can also cause tension among employees, with some employees resenting
those who do not play by the rules and still manage to get ahead. Unethical
behavior in the workplace also has the potential to lead to a lack of trust among
employees, which is detrimental to a business that relies on collaboration and
a sense of community.” (Zeiger, 2011) An organization's image is highly
scrutinized by the public when organizations face ethical violations.
Recovering from ethical negligence is costly and time consuming and often
results in a loss of a key customer base and consumer confidence for a period
of time. Table 1 identifies other performance problems where ethics management
strategies may be a possible intervention selection.
Table 1: Examples of
Performance Problems and Ethics Management Interventions
Current state
|
Intervention
|
Improved performance
|
Significant customer complaints on false advertising of
services or products
|
Marketing Ethics Training
|
Honest sales staff, increased sales, increased consumer
faith
|
Tension and arguments amongst supervisors and co-workers
|
Workplace Ethics and Behavior Training, Include workplace
ethics in job performance evaluations
|
Increased teamwork and collaboration
|
Poor community image
|
Implement Corporate Social Responsibility Program
|
Improved community image
|
Misuse of company technology
|
Acceptable use policy training & post AUP near
equipment
|
Efficient use of company resources
|
Many companies
and organizations have faced performance problems that can be traced back to
ethics. Stephen J. Gill, Ph.D., an
independent consultant with over 25 years’ experience in employee training,
performance improvement, and organization development writes:
“BP’s oil spill. GM’s faulty
ignition switches. Takata’s airbag ruptures. Volkswagen’s emissions fraud.
Simplicity’s crib deaths. Samsung’s phone fires. Wells Fargo’s customer
deception. In each of these cases, somebody knew about the ethical violations
long before lives were affected significantly, but company culture at the time
either discouraged those individuals from speaking up or motivated leaders to
sell products even with the knowledge that the risk of failure and criminal
negligence was high. They chose sales and profit over doing the right thing.
I’m sure all of those companies include ethics in their employee training
programs and list ethical behavior among the values in their employee
handbooks. The problem is not with training compliance; it’s with the way
people learn about ethical behavior and the way that behavior is supported by
the culture of their companies.” (Gill, 2017)
A comprehensive
and interactive ethics management program that incorporates more than just
outlining the concepts of “doing the right thing” could help eliminate many of
these corporate ethical problems that society faces today. An ongoing ethics
management program that communicates expectations and requirements, has buy-in
and modeling from all levels of business, and develops measurements to
determine if ethics are being maintained can yield desired results. Such
programs can prevent ethical dilemmas from tarnishing a business image,
destroying a product's reputation, losing a key customer base or ruining
consumers' lives. Over a decade ago,
Krouse and Giacalone (1997) outlined what was needed for an effective ethics
training program. To achieve ethics training success, they suggested that the
program must:
• help people understand ethical judgment philosophies and decision-making heuristics;
• address areas of ethical concern within their industry/profession;
• teach the organization’s ethical expectations and rules;
• help people to understand their own ethical tendencies;
• take a realistic view, while also elaborating on difficulties in ethical decision-making;
• have people use the material in the workplace, then return to training to analyze use
program must:
• help people understand ethical judgment philosophies and decision-making heuristics;
• address areas of ethical concern within their industry/profession;
• teach the organization’s ethical expectations and rules;
• help people to understand their own ethical tendencies;
• take a realistic view, while also elaborating on difficulties in ethical decision-making;
• have people use the material in the workplace, then return to training to analyze use
Bellsouth was
one of three corporations that were recognized as leadership examples in ethics
management by the Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) in 2001. BSR helps
companies achieve commercial success in ways that respect ethical values,
people, communities and the environment. According to the BSR ethics training
report these organizations were chosen because they “represent innovation,
higher than average commitment, unusual industry practice or a comprehensive
approach to ethics training."(BSR Staff, 2001) The report states:
"BellSouth integrated its ethics and compliance training
materials into multiple delivery sources to demonstrate to employees that
ethics is integral to every part of the business and to leverage existing
infrastructure. Using media such as CD-ROMS, videos, and the company's
Intranet, BellSouth blended its ethics and compliance training into new
employee orientations, general management courses, sales training, and other
learning modules. The ethics and compliance team saw Human Resources as a key
partner in its work, and continually looked at ways to include ethics and
compliance topics in other employee training programs. In addition, each
operations unit had a compliance executive and a coordinator responsible for
ethics and compliance oversight in that operating division. These managers drew
information from "the bottom up," conducted risk assessments, and
reported back to the compliance office when gaps in training or communication
were discovered. If the subject could best be handled on a small scale, the
compliance coordinator would take care of it. However, if the corporate
compliance office saw that many areas were addressing similar issues, time and
money would be saved by creating cross departmental programs. Examples of this
included antitrust and environment training. While the company used technology
to deliver the message, it viewed that the most productive work came from face
to face meetings, where employees were giving the time to sit and discuss the
nuances of various ethical dilemmas." (BSR Staff,
2001)
Effective ethics
management implementation strategies include recognizing that managing ethics
is a process, implementing formal ethics management program, establishing an
ethics committee, having chief executives that fully support the program,
integrating ethics management with other management practices, using ethics as
a regular organizational assessment tool and using cross-functional teams when
developing and implementing the ethics management program. (McNamara, n.d.)
Helping
employees comply with organization standards set by laws, policies and codes of
conducts is an obvious benefit of an ethics management program. Furthermore,
formal ethics management programs enhance an organization's workplace culture,
public image and ultimately their profit. An ethics management program is good
for business, ensures the best use of company resources and maintains quality
and productivity. A strong ethics management program ensures good and proper
relationships with employees, customers and vendors, boosts morale and promotes
teamwork. (Hunt, 2012) The benefits of
establishing an effective ethics management program in an organization is not
only vital to the organization's prosperity but also to the prosperity of
society. Organizations that practice ethical behaviors impact the safety and
well-being of its employees, consumers and environment as a whole.
Implementing a
quality ethics management program does not come without its challenges. Ethics
is a behavior that is difficult to enforce and assess. Miranda Morley (2011)
notes that such ethics compliance “can be cumbersome, contradictory and
ultimately ineffective when people, including supervisors who cannot enforce
the codes and still have a productive workplace, abandon them in favor of
‘common sense’.” Like most interventions, implementing and maintaining an
ethics management program within your organization can be expensive and
time-consuming. Ethics management
programs must be continually updated to comply with laws and changes in the
organization. Proper management of ethics requires commitment of company
financial and personnel resource to contribute to hiring of ethics management.
(Root, n.d.) Another disadvantage is that ethical businesses may not have
access to as many strategies as unethical businesses. “In a period of economic
crisis they cannot adopt unethical practices without damaging their reputation,
and it can be harder for them to intentionally change their image when the
market demands such an action. They are overall more stagnant entities which
become bound to single viewpoints, products and platforms for better or for
worse.” (IAC Publishing, n.d.) Unethical organization prioritizes
short-term thinking and quick profit where ethical organizations prioritize
durability over time, strong relationships with their target markets and
reputable reputations. If not managed properly, establishing codes of ethics
may actually lead to unethical corporate behavior and unequal application of
the code of ethics amongst employees. Upper-level management may be allowed
certain behaviors that are restricted for other employees or some workers’
rights may be infringed upon by the organizations’ ethics code. (Morely, 2011)
With the increase of social media influence,
global connectivity and media coverage of corporate scandals, ethics has become
a critical issue to organizations worldwide. Human performance practitioners
must always consider how the culture and values of an organization has the
ability to influence and impact society when suggesting organizational
changes. The significant and positive
changes that an effective ethics management program has on employees,
organizations and society as a whole should not be underestimated nor
overlooked when applying performance improvement interventions.
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