Workplace
decisions test employees’ ethics
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
By Michael Kinsman
Copley News Service
cantonrep.com
Compensation expert Anne Ruddy likes to tell the story about the
employee who missed a deadline to file for her company’s stock options.
The woman, an assistant to the company’s chief executive, visited the
human-resources office the morning after the deadline, apologized for
being so busy that she overlooked the deadline, and then asked to file
for the stock options.
“What was the person in HR supposed to do?” Ruddy says. “Should she
violate the law to accommodate this woman, although no one would
probably ever know it? Or should she risk offending someone in the
company who might be in a position of power?”
The HR person chose to deny the request — and the employee went
straight to the CEO to appeal.
“Fortunately, the CEO stood behind the HR decision,” Ruddy says. “If
he’d made an exception and allowed her the stock options, it could have
caused real problems.”
Ruddy, president of the nonprofit World at Work benefits and
compensation association in Scottsdale, Ariz., says this story
illustrates how the seemingly insignificant decisions we make every day
test our ethics.
HR employees, especially, must be constantly aware of the ethical
decisions that are part of their jobs, says Roy Burchill, senior
manager for compensation and benefits for Accredited Home Lenders in
San Diego.
For example, Burchill says criminal background checks sometimes reveal
minor crimes that individuals didn’t report on their job applications.
“It’s usually not a crime that would stop us from hiring them,” he
says. “But the fact they lied on their application raises a lot of red
flags. We are then in a position of deciding whether we would hire this
qualified person knowing that they might wind up lying to us down the
road. It’s a powerful ethics issue that we face.”
Ruddy says that too often we treat ethics as a theoretical concept but
that ethical issues surface in our jobs regularly.
While chief executives need to assume responsibility for creating a
culture of ethical behavior, that task cannot be left to them alone,
says Ruddy. “Ethical issues pop up all over the company, to everyone,”
she says.
In a survey of 418 World at Work members who work in human resources,
65 percent said they face ethical dilemmas in their jobs at least once
a month, with 19 percent reporting ethical issues surfacing at least
once a day.
“These can be very subtle and seemingly insignificant, but they are all
important in how you handle them,” Ruddy says.
Ruddy says there are some powerful incentives for companies to promote
ethical workplaces. She says that public companies that suffer ethics
problems can see their stock prices decline for up to six months after
the public learns of unethical behavior.
And a study from the Walker Loyalty Institute of Indianapolis finds
that 42 percent of workers take ethics into account before accepting a
job with a particular company.
Yet, Ruddy fears, companies just don’t pay proper attention to
cultivating an ethical atmosphere inside their companies.
“It’s not enough just to have a policy, you have to make sure everyone
knows what it is and how to apply it,” she says.
Burchill says his companies and others have set up third-party
reporting options, allowing people to anonymously report ethical lapses
or inappropriate conduct.
“A lot of issues that get reported are not ethics-related, but it’s
good to have a forum where people can vent their complaints,” he says.
But it’s also important that workers know the difference between
acceptable and unacceptable behavior on the job and can report
violations when they see them.