Americans today are rarely surprised upon hearing of any incident of unethical, fraudulent, or illegal behavior in the workplace. Instead, we just accept it as normal and routine if you will. Instead of being proactive in eliminating those threats, we sit about waiting for the next unethical, fraudulent, criminal act to hit the news.
Defining Unethical Business Behavior and Unethical Behavior in the Workplace
Before getting too deep, what even is ethical behavior in the workplace?
Most people are not surprised by the next incident of workplace violence whether it is an obvious act of shooting, sexual harassment, abuse, or the more subtle incidents of unethical billing, violating safety practices, or tolerating harmful behavior.
What Constitutes Unethical Behavior?
Unethical behavior in the workforce is not restricted to overt acts. It includes workers acting out and aggressively confronting supervisors, supervisees, and colleagues, and it includes more subtle behaviors that compromise people, productivity, and organizations.
- Sexual harassment and sexual harassment allegations have been tolerated in multiple companies, including 21st Century Fox, NPR, the US Congress, Bank of America, and Fox News.
- A credit-reporting company, with previous knowledge about system flaws, allowed personal information of 145 million people (about half the US population) to be hacked. This company was fined $700,000,000.
- A steel company falsified information on items sold to airline and auto companies.
- International automakers were forced to recall 1.6 million vehicles, reporting they allowed unqualified inspectors to conduct final inspections on vehicles.
- A top-10 US bank charged up to 570,000 consumers for auto insurance they did not need. The same bank revealed it created up to 3.5 million accounts without customer permission.
- A cell phone company slowed phones to compensate for decaying batteries.
- A hospital management and ownership company provided kickbacks to physician groups for patient referrals.
- OSHA issued fines for safety violations that employees were aware of but either failed to report or ignored in their reporting.
How to Avoid Illegal and Unethical Behavior in the Workplace
Workplace (and school) shootings, sexual abuse, and bullying can all be avoided if information is shared and acted upon. Still, too often, we respond with “All the signs were there.” Now, if organizational members see all the signs, why the reluctance to report and intervene?
An organizations tolerance of misbehavior (impulsive emotional reactions, poor decision-making, gossip and rumors, exaggerated speculation, bad supervisory behavior, inappropriate remarks, and compromises to relationships) remains a core reason why productive employees quit, why employers pay fines (and are forced to reserve funds), and why personal and organizational reputations are lost. Compromising and inappropriate behaviors additionally places a company at risk for willful negligence, negligent hiring, and negligent retention.
Steps You Can Take to Reduce Unethical Behavior at Your Business
It can be difficult to tackle these issues, and even more difficult to gain the necessary insight into your company culture to properly identify these issues before addressing them. So how do you start the process of preventing unethical business behaviors? The first step is by completing comprehensive exit interviews as well as stay interviews and consistent pulse surveys. All of these play a critical role in gauging the successes and shortcomings of your company culture and will allow you to better understand what is going on behind the scenes. These different interviews all contribute to improving employee engagement, which will result in employees who wish to align more with company values and business ethics.
Work Institute uses four core drivers as indicators of an organizations culture, precursors to employee engagement, and factors that influence employee retention. As you can see from the chart below, core driver scores are on the decline which indicates that companies need to step up their efforts to create the conditions where unethical behavior is less likely to occur.
Additionally it is worth noting that by having better onboarding practices, you can also avoid a lot of the headache around these issues to begin with. Bringing in people who are already ethically minded means you can help minimize the chance of any illegal or unethical behavior arising in the future.
While these interviews and surveys are essential to identifying the underlying problems and signs that unethical or illegal behavior may be occurring in your business, how do you leverage this information to fix the problems at hand? First and foremost, you must approach business ethics from the top down, by engaging in leadership and managerial development. By dedicating time and funds to improving the quality of your leadership teams, you can ensure that your managers and leaders are properly prepared to handle these issues of unethical behavior with an appropriate reaction.
If your organization requires assistance performing these interviews or developing your leadership team, reach out to our workforce experts today. Additionally you can access our success stories and interview resources to gain more perspective on how to properly prevent and address unethical behaviors. Whatever you’re needs, Work Institute can help.
How to Promote Strong Work Ethics Among Employees
Fostering strong work ethics in employees is an ongoing effort that combines effective teaching and continual support. Here are practical methods to instill work ethics in your team.
Clearly Identify Goals and Objectives
Setting clear goals and objectives is essential for developing strong employee work ethics. When expectations are defined, employees know how to focus their efforts. Clear goals also provide direction, keeping staff engaged. Managers can foster strong work ethics by collaborating with employees to establish meaningful goals aligned with the organization’s values. Regular progress reviews reinforce accountability and improvement. For instance, a software manager might aim to reduce bugs by 50% in a quarter, breaking this into manageable steps like enhancing code reviews. Tracking progress and celebrating milestones can further motivate the team to maintain a strong work ethic.
Practice Effective Mentoring
Effective mentoring is a great way to promote strong work ethics in employees. Mentors can guide and support their mentees in developing skills and attitudes for success and help them overcome challenges. Mentors can also foster accountability and responsibility. As a manager, you can encourage mentoring relationships and provide opportunities for mentorship and coaching to promote strong work ethics.
To promote a strong work ethic among new employees, a manager could assign a seasoned team member to mentor them. The mentor would guide the company culture, work processes, and expectations and offer feedback on the new employee’s work performance. Regular check-ins and coaching sessions would enable the new employee to develop a strong work ethic and feel supported.
Are you Aware of Any Harmful, Unethical, Illegal, or Financial Impropriety in Your Organization?
Employers need to ask this question to current and former employees. Anytime an organization conducts Stay Interviews, Exit Interviews, Pulse Studies, and or Engagement Studies is the time to ask about legal and financial behavior. Our Exit Interview data reveals that reports of unethical or illegal behavior is on the rise. Since 2021, reports of compliance or misbehavior have increased 63%.
But what about current employees? What do they know?
Some employers may never know if there are more actual incidents of workplace misconduct than in prior years or if notable social movements like #metoo, #neveragain, #Icantbreathe, etc. led workers to report incidents at a greater rate than in prior years. What is known, is that many productive and marketable employees no longer need to tolerate unacceptable behavior because they can choose to go elsewhere as market conditions remain strong and job opportunities continue to increase.
Identifying Issues with Employee Engagement
The Work Institute has identified the major limitations to employee engagement and the strategies to eliminate them. While these factors are certainly important to consider, there are many more possible variables that may affect the success of your employees, and in many cases, there may not be just one solution or strategy to solve potential barriers. Keep reading to learn more about possible barriers that are keeping your employees from reaching their full potential for your business.
Lack of Clarity
Employees cannot perform their jobs to their full potential if employers don’t provide clear objectives. It is disheartening that many supervisors and managers are inaccessible when employees need them most. The combination of an unapproachable manager and poor communication breeds a frustrated, confused, and demotivated workforce.
Solution
Redefine the hiring process. When new employees join the organization, ensure their job description is clearly defined. In addition, assign an approachable and helpful mentor to guide the newbie to understand the employer’s expectations.
Establishing communication channels between managers and staff is essential to prevent ambiguity. These channels allow employees to seek clarification or raise their issues within the organization; however, if you have many employees potentially facing this barrier, there could be more under the surface that needs to be evaluated and addressed.
Lack of Business Alignment
Some employers fail to communicate their mission, vision, and core values. Employees in such organizations lack direction considering there are no defined objectives they should strive to achieve. Additionally, employees like working in environments whose ethics and beliefs align with theirs.
Employees might develop certain perceptions if your organization’s principles and visions are not articulated. This is risky, as it can ruin a company’s culture, values, and mission, and causing problems for overall productivity. Clashing expectations can create chaos in an organization, disrupting the production process, so it’s crucial to address this problem as soon as possible.
Solution
Create a vision, mission, and core values to motivate your staff and provide them with a sense of belonging and purpose within the company. Communicate the organization’s vision, mission, and core values from the business executives to the employees and other stakeholders. Employers should also motivate their employees to promote and cement their organizational culture.
Lack of an Employee Engagement Strategy
The lack of a sound employee engagement strategy creates confusion, as employees lack direction. Poor employee engagement creates employee dissatisfaction, which has far-reaching consequences on the firm’s production capacity and longevity.
Solution
The first step to developing an employee engagement strategy is developing the engagement goals you want to achieve.
An employee engagement survey can help you create an effective employee engagement strategy, as it is founded on employee input. One of the essential components of the employee engagement strategy is an employee recognition program.
Employee recognition increases job satisfaction within an organization, which, in return, improves the organization’s production capacity as employees feel noticed, valued, and appreciated. The human resource department can collaborate with other organizational executives to develop an effective recognition program.
The following are some approaches to increase the level of employee engagement:
- Employees whose actions are proportionate to the fundamental values should be rewarded.
- Develop a real-time system that sends accolades to performing employees, especially those who hit their targets.
- Transform your data into actionable insights
- Have tangible prizes
Employers Need to Remain Proactive
Organizations need to provide employees with ongoing avenues to report misconduct. And I do not mean passive and rarely utilized 1-800 lines. Companies must proactively and routinely solicit and document awareness and absence of harmful, illegal, unethical, and noncompliant behavior. When organizations create ways for all employees to bring forward concerns about questionable behaviors and act on employee feedback to minimize harm, they create a positive work environment. Workplace violations rise and continue to occur when organizations tolerate misconduct.
Ongoing Exit Interviews and Stay Interviews incorporate behavior risk analysis and are both foundational to an organization’s human and financial vulnerability analysis. It is vital to proactively promote ethical behavior before the organization is potentially destroyed by tomorrow’s headlines. For assistance with these interviews and other business development services, contact us today.