Do you adhere to workplace ethics?
By Kukil Bora, SiliconIndia   |   Tuesday, 08 March 2011, 13:40 IST   |    14 Comments
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Do you adhere to workplace ethics?
Bangalore: Have you been asked by your boss to fudge a number on a report? or check a box and say a test was done when it was not? As a sales guy have you been told to "always" exaggerate the capabilities of the product? Is it normal to disguise personal entertainment and dining/drinking expense on expense reports so the company pays for them? These are scenarios employees face every day and very often turn to be an ethical dilemma and perhaps traumatic for the .employees Everyone would have to agree that ethics are a core value of our society and they greatly influence the outcome of our every action, be it in domestic life or at work. Encouraging ethical behavior can result in greater productivity in organizations, while at the same it helps individual growth as well. But despite the hundreds of pages of policies and codes of ethics, there are lapses that occur in workplace ethics every day and the question remains-Are you able to adhere to work place/business ethics? A recent survey conducted by Fuld & Company, a competitive-intelligence consultant based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, provides the answer. Executives from 104 businesses were given a few hypothetical scenarios that would give them an opportunity to collect intelligence about a competitor and asked to rate the scenarios as "normal", "aggressive", "unethical", or "illegal". What came out as the result was that all the businesses have different senses of what's right and wrong. According to the survey, executives in financial and technology services were the most aggressive in collecting intelligence about competitors, while pharmaceutical executives and government officials were the most timid. In one of the scenarios, the executives were asked whether it was all right for the executive to remove his identification badge during a trade show, which would make it easier to speak to competitors without them knowing his identity. Surprisingly, most of the executives rated removing the ID badge as merely aggressive. It is the manner in which some businesses conduct themselves, and that brings up the question of ethical behavior, highlighting the lapses in workplace ethics. The concept of workplace ethics goes beyond the legal framework in the area where the business operates. It inspires communication between employees, promotes customer relations based on honesty and integrity and also allows for respect to be extended to each person within a particular organization. But apart from all these, workplace ethics also get influenced by business ethics, the behavior that a business holds fast to in its daily dealings with the world. Thus, all these core elements tend to define a work-based code of ethics. However, there are differences among various corporate settings regarding the specific expressions of these central values. Recently, the Board of Directors at HP decided to let its CEO Mark Hurd go when the company found that Hurd violated business and workplace ethics. As per public statement from the company, Hurd had to leave because he violated the company's expected standards of conduct, and unfortunately, he is not the first high profile executive to have such an experience over personal conduct in recent years. While there are very few such incidents where employees had to face the challenges experienced by Hurd, all employees in an organization have the opportunity daily to demonstrate that workplace ethics are being followed. It's very important to promote good workplace ethics by every organization. Some ethical lapses affect individual employees, but some other ethical lapses, such as Hurd's, affect whole work groups. As a result, the whole company and all of the stakeholders in the company suffer. Each failure to practice value-based workplace ethics affects your self-image, far more than it affects your coworkers. An emphasis on ethics will not improve the work environment and solve the company's problems overnight, it would be naive to suggest. But a well developed and organized effort to target key ethical issues can make the employees realize that their organization is moving in a positive direction, one that is positive for them also as individuals.

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