Building an ethical workplace culture
An organisation's ethical culture rests on trust and integrity, and much of the work of building and enforcing it falls to the human resources function. Social media, bullying and other misconduct test the culture, deliberate measures improve it, and a code of conduct supports it without ending misconduct. The culture is the employer's and the workplace's; one writer's decision in a single case is in working through an ethical situation, and what employers do with what a search finds about a job candidate is in what a search already returns about you.
Ground the culture in trust and integrity
The account of how an organisation builds an ethical culture comes from an ethics column of Winter 2019 by a professor emeritus. An organisation's culture frames its ethical standards, which rest on values embedded in the organisation's DNA and expressed in its code of ethics and in relations between management and employees. Trust and integrity matter most: employees must trust that the organisation will treat them fairly, judge them on the quality of their performance rather than on conscious or unconscious bias, pay equally for equal work, and have a system for reporting misconduct without fear of retribution. The ethical issues every organisation faces, small or large, are discrimination by sex, age or race, sexual harassment, health and safety, and compliance with federal and state regulations. The Winter 2019 (volume 34, number 4) and Winter 2023 (volume 38, number 4) AMWA Journal issues were each converted from their PDFs by layout-aware Poppler XML conversion and admitted without content repair, in which figure labels can be inlined into prose, cover and contents columns can interleave, and reference URLs can be malformed or truncated.
Expect the human resources function to carry much of it
Human resource specialists recruit, screen and interview, and they are often responsible for planning, directing and ensuring compliance with ethical standards, including violations of the code of ethics. The work includes promoting core ethical values, strengthening ethical leadership, building trust into human resource policies, modelling ethical behaviour, promoting fair and impartial practice across the organisation, and communicating acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, so that the message is clear that ethical behaviour will be rewarded and unacceptable behaviour not tolerated. Many organisations have a separate ethics department with an ethics and compliance officer, but either way human resource professionals are often responsible for enforcing a culture of ethics and compliance, by designing and implementing the policies and processes that support good governance and fair practice.
Human resource professionals are often a company's first contact with candidates and new hires, and any perceived disreputable practice can hinder the company in obtaining and retaining talent: qualified job seekers are unlikely to apply to a company they believe condones unethical practices, and current employees may not stay.
Expect social media to test the culture in hiring and at work
Social media can affect a workplace's culture, and employers often read a candidate's social media for a sense of their character, so a candidate should expect potential employers to look at their activity during hiring. How many employers researched candidates on social networking sites, what they looked for and what led them not to hire are given from CareerBuilder's surveys in what a search already returns about you. In the survey CareerBuilder reported in 2018, the discriminatory comments that cost candidates the job concerned race, sex, religion and the like, and the four less frequent reasons were criminal behaviour (30%), lying about qualifications (27%), disparaging a previous company or fellow employee (25%) and sharing a previous employer's confidential information (20%).
Inside the job, an effective social media policy is a balance. A Pew Research Center survey found that workers used social media at work mainly to take a mental break (34%) and to connect with friends and family (27%), and for work reasons less often: to obtain information needed for the job (20%), to build or strengthen relationships with co-workers (17%) and to get answers to work questions (12%). Employees have been reported to spend one to three hours a day on personal web use during the working day. Monitoring that time can signal distrust and may harm the organisation's culture, yet an employer may need to make sure employees do not post offensive comments about colleagues, customers or others the organisation deals with, particularly where privacy is at stake. Employees can hardly be expected to engage in no online activity during the working day, so the balance accepts some.
Recognise bullying and misconduct for what they cost
Workplace bullying is a persistent pattern of mistreatment from others in the workplace that causes physical or emotional harm, unprofessional emails that create a hostile environment included, and the rise of social media has contributed to it. A 2014 survey found 6.5 million workers who said they were affected by workplace bullying, and 61% of respondents said their employer had failed to react to abusive conduct. Posting provocative photographs or visiting pornographic sites can also harm employee and employer, bringing a negative work environment, charges of sexual harassment and potential lawsuits.
In the survey reported in the Ethics and Compliance Initiative's The State of Ethics & Compliance in the Workplace, 47% of employees had observed misconduct at work, and 67% of those said it had been multiple incidents or part of an ongoing pattern. The most frequently observed kinds were lying to employees and external stakeholders (26%), abusive behaviour (21%), internet abuse (16%), conflicts of interest (15%) — buying materials from a family member rather than the lowest bidder, for instance — and health violations (15%), such as unsafe working conditions.
Improve the culture deliberately
The Ethics and Compliance Initiative's report also sets out recommendations for improving the culture: promoting a statement of values throughout the organisation and setting ethical standards to guide employees' actions; including ethics and compliance in performance goals; regularly surveying employees' attitudes about pressures to disregard ethics; assessing the ethical culture and supporting any weak areas; reinforcing the norm that performance without integrity is unacceptable; and making sure the ethics and compliance programmes are of high quality.
Unethical behaviour should be discouraged, but establishing an ethical culture also takes rewarding proper behaviour. One way is to move from periodic formal performance evaluations to routine, ongoing feedback from supervisors, so that employees know where they stand and how to improve without waiting for the annual review, which can also help build trust in the evaluation system. Human resource professionals, in partnership with management, should lead by example to create a culture of mutual respect and motivate colleagues to do the same.
Expect a code of conduct to limit misconduct rather than end it
The case for a corporate code, and its limits, come from a medical writer's editorial of Winter 2023. The corporate code of ethics comes at the end of a long line: ethical principles go back to the ancient philosophers — Plato and Aristotle, who saw virtue as a guide to ethical action, and Kant, who developed the concept that obligation instructs people how to behave — and the terms "professional ethics" and "medical ethics" were created by the English physician Thomas Percival in 1803, which led to the American Medical Association's adoption of its first code of ethics in 1847.
Many corporations and organisations have established codes of ethics for their employees and members, which guide what to do and what not to do in a given situation. Adherence strengthens the company culture, minimises risk and helps protect the company's reputation, and beyond potential damage to image and public trust the financial consequences of unethical behaviour can be extensive: one medical device manufacturer and its subsidiaries had paid more than $60 million in settlements over kickback and fraud allegations. A code does not eliminate the potential for misconduct, though: in a national survey of business practices among more than 14,500 employees across many industries, reported by the Harvard Business Review in 2020, nearly 1 in 4 respondents had felt pressured to do things they knew were wrong.