Guidelines for an Ethical Workplace

Darnell Lattal, CEO of Aubrey Daniels International, can be pretty passionate about seeing organizations become more ethical. One reason, she says, is that when people work to learn what makes a genuinely ethical decision and slowly become more adept at it, they feel better about themselves and lead better lives. Acknowledging that it’s a lot of work, she outlines some simpler guidelines:

• Managers and supervisors must be trained not to judge subordinates and colleagues too quickly. As HR pros know regarding performance reviews, the key technique is to point to specific behaviors, rather than label people. “You haven’t been meeting your deadlines” rather than “You’re lazy.”
• Managers must be held to the same standards as employees. For example, if the code of conduct provides for respectful treatment of everyone, don’t allow managers to curse and be verbally and be verbally abusive.
• Noting that this one’s tougher, Lattal recommends that high-level officers who are offered unfairly high compensation or extravagant perks speak out against them. In an economy where workers are being asked to make sacrifices—and an era in which income differences among Americans are at an all-time high—executives should step up to the plate.
• And, in a variation on the Golden Rule, treat and reward employees as they want to be treated/rewarded rather than as you would want. Everyone’s different.

In her book, Ethics at Work, Lattal offers two examples of common unethical behavior. One is an auto mechanic who, when asked to check over a vehicle, advises the owner to trade it in as soon as possible, because there are major repairs on the horizon. But he shades the truth about mechanical problems and then offers the vehicles for resale in a side business. The second is a wholesale produce distributor who hires many seasonal workers and then lays them off without warning, often in the middle of a day. He feels he must be ruthless in order to sell the best produce to his customers at the cheapest prices.

In both cases—and many others, Lattal advises—“People frequently underestimate the extent to which scrupulous honesty enhances profit, especially over the long run.” In other words, too many business people shade the truth and cut corners in the mistaken belief that it’s the only way to make a living. Further, Lattal urges organizations to put all functions under the ethical microscope. An oft-neglected area, she finds, is worker safety, which may be relegated to a couple of posters and some lip service. Suppose someone were severely injured or killed on the job? The bottom line is that organizations that work hard on behaving ethically avoid the risk of a scandal, an expensive lawsuit, bankruptcy, a jail term.

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