Ethics and Integrity – 3 Ways to Make 2016 Better than 2015

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Ethics and Integrity – 3 Ways to Make 2016 Better than 2015

By Sindey Dranoff
SDranoff@meliorgroup.com

We began 2015 with the infamous “under” inflated footballs and ended it with a political staffer allegedly abusing a technological flaw to obtain competitive information for the benefit of his candidate. In the middle of the year we had the Volkswagen scandal, a pharmaceutical executive choosing to raise prices to astronomical levels because he could – and then being arrested for misleading investors, and of course those in power at FIFA were finally banned from professional soccer.  We could all probably think of many other examples of unethical and/or illegal behavior, some of which likely happened much closer to home.

These incidents (and others) all have one thing in common – each of them occurred in a culture which provided people the opportunity to ‘break the rules’ for their own betterment.  The Democratic National Committee now “expects each campaign to operate with integrity” going forward.  Why do they need to say this?  What does integrity mean today?

Individuals who commit ethics and integrity violations can create serious consequences for their employers, not the least of which is fines and public scrutiny.  It is the responsibility of leadership to ensure that there is a culture of ethics and integrity in their organizations, and that ALL employees are on board with this culture.  Creating the culture is a start, but sustaining it is crucial to long term success.

Here are three things you can do in 2016 to help ensure that everyone in your organization is acting with integrity:

  1. Leadership needs to walk the talk and lead by example. The tone at the top should demonstrate a commitment to integrity and set proper expectations for employees.
  2. Include employees in the process – employees are more likely to act in an ethical way if they feel they are included in the design of the culture. Organizations that incorporate employee input and evaluations within their Ethics and Compliance programs are more likely to sustain a culture of Ethics and Compliance.
  3. A few ethics questions on a Corporate Culture survey is a good place to start – but a stand-alone employee survey dedicated to Ethics and Compliance establishes a baseline measure that allows for a better understanding of whether integrity resides in the organization and what employees need in order to feel a part of the process and allows the organization to track improvements over time.

If you want to address situations before they become real problems, there’s no replacement for knowing what employees think and feel, and are likely to do when confronted by an ethics issue.  While utilizing the results of a stand-alone employee Ethics and Compliance survey can’t eliminate all potential ethics and integrity issues, it is a way to help your organization start 2016 in the right direction.

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Sindey Dranoff is a Senior Project Director at The Melior Group (www.meliorgroup.com) The Melior Group has developed, conducted and analyzed standalone employee Ethics and Compliance surveys for the past nine years.

2 COMMENTS

  1. One of the common mistakes we see is where companies conduct “ethics surveys” that are not well implemented and thus the results are skewed and the impact on the organization spotty, The biggest blunder is where the survey becomes the main goal and focus for the organization, rather than just a piece of information for the E+C team to include in its ongoing analyses. Who conducts the survey? What restrictions are placed on managers during the period preceding the survey, so they can’t try to influence results? What are the confidentiality protocols, and do employees believe them? How are the results analyzed and reported? What about focus groups? It’s important to manage surveys like these correctly.

  2. As Nilsen mentions in his book, Ethics of Speech Communication, “For humans to communicate truthfully, some fundamental demands must be met: good intentions; ability to appraise evidence objectively and to employ rigorous reasoning; knowledge of facts, values, purposes and feelings; and, most important, exercise of disinterested good will”(ch. 2). When all of these practices are excercised by both parties, the communicator and the audience, your organization may reach the goal it is seeking. Although one may think that ethical communication should be a natural instinct for people placed in higher positions, as this blog has pointed out, unethical choices are made by people with power more than they should. You should keep in mind that any training you provide to your personnel must include the persuasion of respect, freedom,fairness, and the ability to understand one another. In Ethics in Humans, written by Richard L. Johannesen, Kathleen S. Valde, and Karen E. Where’d bee, ethic is described as a theory that “does not tell a person what to do in any given situation, but neither is it completely silent; it tells one what to consider in making up one’s mind what to do”(p.5). Good luck on your approach to improve your organization.

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