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Bradwell Mhonderwa Business Ethics
When companies fail to develop deliberate ethics, management processes that reward ethical employees and admonish unethical behaviour, the message they are sending out to staff is that it is cool to be unethical.
If companies want to have employees who practise business ethics and uphold the values and beliefs of the organisation, they must embrace formal ethics management processes and reward ethical employees.
The business of today must never encourage business practices that promote and reward unethical employees while leaving ethical employees feeling unrecognised and frustrated.
While there are very few companies that would deliberately plan to reward unethical behaviour, it is true that many companies are often found doing just that simply because they lack the ethics infrastructure that should give guidance and direction to staff on what is acceptable behaviour in the organisation.
Sales commission based on total sales which do not account for customer complaints is a good example of how companies end up rewarding unethical behaviour.
Sales representatives are compensated mostly by how much sales they have achieved and not on customer satisfaction. They receive large payouts based on the volume of their sales without any regard for the number of product returns or customer complaints.
Indeed, we hear of statements like “do whatever it takes to win customers” and sometimes the signal is even blunt enough to order employees to engage in outright immoral business dealings.
At Worldcom, accounting officers were rewarded for “creative bookkeeping” when they doctored financial statements which portrayed Worldcom as a vibrant and successful New York Stock Exchange-listed firm at a time when the conglomerate was actually making huge losses inspired by unscrupulous business transactions orchestrated by its leadership.
Ethics should form part of a company performance management system with employees’ ethical evaluations being made part of their performance appraisal records.
Workers are fond of giving more to what is rewarded in the workplace, so rewarding ethics will resultantly motivate them to improve office ethics.
In seeking to recognise ethical performance, companies should nevertheless be wary of ending up rewarding what employees are already expected to do.
For example, employees cannot be rewarded for not abusing company property because this is what they ought to do as dictated by the employment contract.
But an employee who reports an apparent violation of ethical standards or misconduct by colleagues definitely deserves recognition because such an outstanding individual act of loyalty to the business is outside of what is generally expected of employees.
The reward may be as simple as a pat on the back, but it should be reflected in the employee’s performance evaluation record for future reference.
Managers and supervisors must go through ethics training that teaches them to understand how to recognise both job performance and the ethics of doing the job so that they are able to reward both.
Embedding ethics in the performance management system entails establishing ethics performance indicators, developing ethics performance measurements, incentivising ethical practices, and sanctioning unethical behaviour.
All these are key workplace ethics promotional processes that should inform the reward management system of every responsible business organisation.
Employees should be made to understand that both job performance and ethical behaviour matters for one to get a promotion or advancement.
Employee awards can also be used to incentivise ethical practices in the workplace. Companies can design an ethics award system based on peer and supervisor nominations that will see employees who exemplify ethical behaviour being nominated for the ethical employee of the month and/or year awards.
Excitement around this effort could then be created by publishing before hand the incentives employees will receive when they are nominated for the different price categories.
And, instead of using end of year parties as merely events to indulge in boozing and eating, companies could as use these popular annual events to reward employees who exceed company expectations in their respective areas of responsibility including ethics.
Businesses in the country should look beyond their circumstances to embrace emerging global trends and best practices. Businesses must abandon the self-defeating and dissolute mode of endorsing unethical business habits finding excuses on “the need to survive” or the bigoted “bread first, ethics later” mantra.
Competitive 21st century businesses value ethical behaviour and have sound business ethics defining “the way we do things here” of the firm.
Let us conquer our fears and uncertainty and be inspired to grow our businesses for we owe it to our children and future generations. Ethics sends a powerful message to competitors and brings order and sanity to the business environment.
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