Christopher Bauer's Ethics Nexus

Ethics and Social Networking: Can You Afford Not To Have A Policy?

The age of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, and myriad more social media and social networking sites has opened a whole new range of opportunities for ethical problems on the job. Inappropriate comments and disclosures of every imaginable type are just a few easy keystrokes away and employees seem to have become desensitized to the visibility, 'searchability' and longevity of their online words and images. Libel and non-disclosure violation risks are problematic with social media and social networking while reputational risks - for companies and individual employees alike - are both constant and extreme.

Despite the above omnipresent risks, most companies seem to be yawning their way through the many very real ethical and legal risks presented by social media/networking sites all day, every day. In fact, "all day" may be a poorly chosen phrase since those same risks extend to what employees are also posting all night, away from the job, through those same networks.

Here are a few frightening figures from Deloitte's 2009 Ethics & Workplace survey:

• Only 22% of executives in their sample said they had formal policies regarding employee use of social networking.  
• 24% of their employee sample did not know if their company has a policy for social networking use on the job and another 11% believed that their company has a policy but did not know what it was. 
• Although 74% of employees surveyed believed that a company's reputation could be damaged by social media posting, 53% still felt that their posts were none of their bosses business. (!) 

There are plenty of other interesting (and disturbing) data in that study but I think you can get the general drift from these few findings above. For what it's worth, the Deloitte findings are entirely consonant with the anecdotal reports I hear day after day from frontline employees and executives alike.

To make matters worse, many of the companies who have, in fact, developed social networking policies have created ones that are either overly ambiguous or absurdly strict and unenforceable. Neither can reasonably be expected to accomplish what a well-conceived and appropriately implemented policy should (i.e. reduce the risk for ethical and legal problems).

It seems to me that this really isn't rocket science...

For starters, why would you ban the use of social media and social networking on the job? Used appropriately, effectively and ethically, they can be among of the most powerful tools currently available for building your reputation and brand alike. Employees need to know how and how not to use them, not find themselves prevented from using them. (Besides, if you think your employees aren't using them, you are - at best - fooling yourself. Get over that delusion and, instead, use your time to help employees harness social media in a manner that is positive for your company as well as for both their professional and personal reputations.)

Like with any other policies and procedures worth writing, make sure that your social media policies are clear, enforceable, and that you can and will hold all employees to them, no matter how high or low their stature or role in the organization.

Something else to think about... Consider the possibility that problems with social media postings represent real problems in the organization and not just poor judgment on the part of those posting. Just because something shouldn't be posted in public doesn't mean that it shouldn't be taken seriously. If a post suggests a serious issue, don't punish the person making the post - look into the problem! (Mind you, you may also need to counsel the person doing the posting about other, more appropriate ways to report problems but that's a different and necessarily separate issue.)

Also, consider that inappropriate use of social networking and social media sites on (or about) the job might be more a reflection of your hiring, training, and supervision practices than a problem with your social media policies or lack of them. If you are hiring and training with an ethically-attuned agenda, you really shouldn't need to be telling employees much about what to say or not say online. That doesn't mean that a well-written policy isn't still a good idea, just that - at least ideally - it should only need to be a formality. Perhaps needless to say, dealing with social media/networking use on the job should really be no different than handling most any other potential ethical and legal risks in your business. Meaning? Ultimately, the most effective risk reduction will always come from your company's culture and not a rule book.

So, can you afford not to have well-conceived, well-implemented, and appropriately enforced social media and social networking policies? Sure - but only if you happen to have developed a culture that effectively provides whatever those policies would have stated had you, in fact, developed them. (Such cultures do exist, of course - Zappos.com comes immediately to mind.) What you can't afford to do, though, is blandly ignore either the significant ethical and legal risks - or, for that matter, the significant potential business benefits - these social networks so easily provide.

Are We Losing Our Legal and Moral Protection?

Politicians have long been the butt of jokes about integrity to the point that we largely yawn when yet another corruption scandal emerges. When our eyebrows raise, it's usually because the offender was such a vocal advocate of fighting corruption or a similarly vocal advocate for moral values, however defined. Elliot Spitzer comes to mind as an example of the former and examples of the latter are legion and ever-growing.

Religious leaders have their own history of fallen scoundrels from the middle ages up through modern times, even long before factoring in allegations of sexual abuse in various churches.

Given all of the above, it should be no surprise that we are subject to a seemingly nonstop parade of greed, avarice, and corruption from all quarters, including from those who are presumably charged with guarding our legal, ethical, and moral fiber. Yet, even despite my moderate state of jadedness about such matters, I found myself catapulted past my comfort zone yesterday when I read in short order first about politicians and rabbis caught up in a major New York and New Jersey money laundering/bribery/you-name-it-and-it-happened scheme (Body parts are alleged to have been sold for cryin' out loud!) and then about Deborah Duffy, a corporate chief compliance officer who has now entered a guilty plea to charges of money laundering, securities fraud, and conspiracy. Maybe it was simply a matter of seeing too many charges for too many people in too many positions of trust, all in rapid order, but somehow it got to me.

Maybe I'm actually not as jaded as I have come to believe. Or, maybe the age of instant, worldwide news simply makes us more aware, more quickly of how many lapses in our protection have been occurring right along but without our catching either their numbers or breadth. Or, maybe we really are dropping - notch by notch - into times where the number of proverbial foxes guarding our legal and ethical henhouses is climbing. 

Frankly, I don't care for any of these options. (Well, okay, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if I were a bit less jaded...) However, my fervent hope is that the last option is by far the least likely of the three. Time, I suppose, will tell.

Is Your E-Discovery Strategy Modeled After Ostrich Behavior?

In preparing for an upcoming edition of my Weekly Ethics Thought on electronic records and communications essentials, I talked with several executives about their e-discovery strategies, policies, and procedures. While I wasn't surprised to hear that they are getting ever-changing and often-contradictory information about how best to develop relevant and appropriate policies and procedures, I was surprised to hear how many of them have no clear strategy at all simply because they felt that the case law hasn't yet clarified enough of the relevant issues. This strikes me as extremely dangerous. As always, sticking one's head in the sand is neither legally nor ethically defensible.

At the absolute very least, even the experts who are at war on everything else seem to agree on some essential basics so those can be a starting point for any set of policies and procedures:

• If you wouldn't write it, sign it, or initial it on paper, don't write, sign, or initial it electronically. Even though it's true that case law continues to emerge in this area, the trend clearly points the way towards all electronic communications carrying the same responsibilities as hard copies have.

• If you wouldn't throw out a paper version, don't delete the electronic version.

• Assure that electronic communications can be safely stored for as long as required by current mandates and good judgment, the latter sometimes supporting the case for longer retention than the former. 

• Develop systems allowing both easy and effective searches of your electronic data so that accurate and complete data can be located quickly, confidently, and securely.

• Makes sure that everyone with access to electronic communications is fully trained in your policies and procedures pertaining to those communications. (I know that probably sounds obvious but, as is true with so many other kinds of training, many companies seemingly arbitrarily decide who will get essential training and who won't...)

Will your policies and procedures need to change as ethical and legal mandates become more clear? No doubt, just as they will need to continue to evolve as electronic communication and related technologies continue to evolve. If your company is waiting for either one of those to slow down before developing a strategy, though, you'll never have one - and that spells all kinds of trouble down the line.

Ethics Training: Are We Expecting Too Much From It or Too Little?

One of Chris MacDonald's ever-thought provoking blog posts ("What's More Important: 'Social Responsibility' or Basic Honesty?") quoted and led me to Peter Foster's recent post ("Trading Honesty for 'Social Responsibility"). Though admittedly not the central idea of Foster's post, the quote that caught my eye was this:

"It is surely also intriguing that the current financial crisis should have come after an explosion in the business ethics industry and the steady rise of the corporate social responsibility movement up the corporate hierarchy. You would be pushed to find any financial institution involved in the current debacle who was not dedicated to the very latest in independently monitored and internationally benchmarked governance practices, complete with high-sounding “codes” and commitments to carbon neutrality and fighting child poverty. And wasn’t the regulatory side of corporate governance meant to have been rendered cast iron by Sarbanes-Oxley? "

Of course there is plenty to ponder in this comment - as well as the rest of the article - but what stuck out to me was the recently-familiar implication that ethics and compliance training programs are simply not an effective piece of the response to the ever-rampant ethics problems to which we seem to see no end.

I think we all know by now that Enron had what could reasonably be called a model ethics code and that Sarbanes-Oxley hasn't miraculously made corporate fraud a thing of the past. Okay. But does that really tell us anything about whether we are expecting too much from ethics programs? I don't think so...

So, are we expecting too much from ethics training programs? Absolutely - if you think that these programs are supposed to somehow keep criminally-minded fraudsters from plying their trade. No ethics training program I know would have kept Bernie Madoff from being Bernie Madoff any more than they would have kept Al Capone from being Al Capone. However:

1. I know of no credible ethics training program that claims to magically convert the criminally-minded into the saintly. (And if you know of one, I'd suggest that their own ethics need some serious adjusting...)

2. A well-conceived and appropriately implemented ethics training program ought to help those wishing to do the right thing to be more easily and persistently able to do so.

3. Such a well-developed ethics training program ought to also help those honest folks more easily recognize and respond to the inappropriate actions of others, thereby reducing the potential impact of wrong-doers, whether or not that wrong-doing was intentional or a matter or either poor training or bad judgment..

4. The how-can-a-company-attending-to-ethics-still-have-Enron-like-problems question doesn't really wash in the fist place. Why? Because research shows repeatedly that the percentage of ethical problems caused by truly criminally-minded folks is barely even a blip on the statistical screen. A number of those folks will always be out there and, true, ethics training or a "high-sounding code" is unlikely to do a lot about them. However, for the overwhelming majority out there who really want to do the right thing, an appropriately conceived and delivered ethics training program can be extremely beneficial. Don't buy it? Look at the research from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the Ethics Resource Center, and others showing - over and over again - that companies with ethics programs sustain dramatically lower fraud loss costs, etc. Quibble if you like that most of the data are correlational but I don't believe that significantly dampens the findings - it still makes the case that attending to ethics is related to improved employee behavior.

So, are we expecting too much from ethics training? Sure, if you want it to do more than it reasonably can. However, I think the far bigger problem is companies who merely give it lip-service or, perhaps, a half-hearted effort at implementation because they see it as either irrelevant or probably ineffective. With that attitude going in, any program's effectiveness will be hobbled right from the start. Once organizations see the the huge ROI of programs that are actually well designed, appropriately targeted, and fully implemented, I think they often come to see that they've actually previously been expecting far too little from ethics training.

Your thoughts?

GREAT Ethics Video Clip From The Los Angeles Schools!

It's gotta be tough figuring out how to make a commentary video on the importance of ethics education actually be cute, let alone cute and effective at the same time. However, the Los Angeles Unified School District has made it happen. I gather that this has been out for a while but I just stumbled onto it now.

Give it a look... Great stuff, I thought!

Has The Global Financial Crisis Helped Change Corporate Ethics For The Better?

The question I seem to be getting over and over these days is whether or not I feel that the global financial crisis has yet had a positive impact on corporate ethics. The best answer I can give is that I only wish it were so.

Despite the perpetual wringing of hands, statements of grave concern, and well-publicized vows of better controls, I can't say that I've actually seen much change. In fact, things remind me more and more of the period following the Enron collapse. Then, as now, ethics were on everyone's lips and bold commitments were made to shore up badly needed repairs in the corporate fabric. Though we got Sarbanes-Oxley out of it here in the U.S., the reality on the front lines was that not much else had really shifted. The primary change, as I have maintained ever since, was that there was a dramatic increase in the number of folks professing to be concerned about the ethics of their companies and industries. Otherwise, most things were pretty much business-as-usual on the front lines. 

Even when post-Enron professions of interest in better ethics were heartfelt, in most companies they never actually translated into much. In fact, we have seen ethics problems move back to pre-Enron levels in a variety of industries as I have posted about previously. Sadly, it's been a dismal showing all-in-all and, of course, we have the current global financial crisis as yet another flamboyant measure of that.

Being the pathological optimist that I am, I continue to hope that the current global financial meltdown will have significant, positive, and lasting impact on corporate ethics. However, at least to date, no matter whom one asks, ethics continue to always be someone else's problem rather than the problem of the individual or entity with whom one is speaking. Until that shifts, I'm afraid that we haven't got the remotest chance for positive changes, let alone lasting ones.

Edelman's 2009 Trust Barometer - A Reflection of Ethics and the Global Economic Crisis?

Edelman has released it's 2009 Trust Barometer and, as always, it is essential reading. 

It can't come as a surprise that trust in corporations is at an all time low and it certainly doesn't seem like a stretch to suggest that this lack of trust is simultaneously a cause and effect of the current global economic meltdown.

As always, there is a lot of good reading to be done through reviewing the entire document but a few of the highlights (or, perhaps, lowlights...) are that:

• there was a 20% plunge in their sample's trust in businesses to do what is right. Mind you, that would be a huge enough issue but remember that the figure was already at an alarming 58% previously. Now it sits at a terrifying-but-hardly-surprising 38%. 

• Only 27% of their sample felt that information coming from a government official was credible and 29% felt it was credible coming from a corporate CEO. (That latter figure drops to a mere 17% when looking at the U.S. sample of 35 to 64 year olds.)

• Globally, 62% of their sample said that they trust corporations less in the last year than the year before and remember, this is relative to the year before. We're talking about a level of trust that was already heading south out and has simply continued to fall.

Though these figures shouldn't be big surprises, sometimes it's helpful to have some specific support and metrics for what we simply presume to be true.  

As one of the innumerable steps needing to be taken to somehow quell the current economic crisis, trust in companies needs to be restored. Mind you, this was already a problem of significant magnitude prior to the meltdown but it's now gone from being a really good idea to an essential component of the equation. The foundation for increasing that trust? A fundamental shift to cultures of unbending ethics in those companies. Among so many other things, this means not just promoting corporate social responsibility as a PR tool but a true, systematic and system-wide shift in how these companies do business. (And, of course, this also requires coming to the realization that CSR, in itself, in no way means that there is a culture of ethics. CSR programs are an extension of corporate ethics - and an entirely optional one at that - not a substitute for them.) 

Will all this be easy to do? Certainly not. But it'll beat the pants off of going under which is what so many of these companies face doing unless they make the shift to to functioning with highly, conspicuously, and persistently ethically-based operations.

Ethics Training for Social Workers, Counselors, Case Managers, and Psychologists

Happy New Year!

As some of you may know, my background is in clinical psychology and, outside of my work in business ethics and values, I have maintained an on-going involvement in the world of mental and behavioral health. As one part of that, I have long-provided ethics training programs for behavioral health providers and administrators. Until now, those programs have been provided solely as in-house seminars and at professional conferences. Starting in '09, I'll also be providing these programs to the behavioral health professionals' community at large. (Or, perhaps more plainly stated, I'll be providing public seminars as well...)

Know anyone who might have an interest? These programs will be directly applicable to those in the fields of social work, mental and behavioral health counseling, rehabilitation counseling, mental health and rehabilitation case management, and clinical psychology. Information is available here!

Meanwhile, back at the business ethics ranch, the end of '08 has - sadly - given us plenty of new material to fuss and be fearful over. Our friend, Mr. Madoff may have scored the highest points for sheer personal gain - even while using one of the oldest and simplest fraud schemes even devised - but ethical and legal scandals of all shapes and sizes continue to populate virtually every news publication I see. 

May 2009 bring us all a world that is more peaceful and less dominated by the seemingly omnipresent legal and ethical scandals of the recent past.

Greenwashing - Whitewashing - Hogwash: What Are You Doing About Them?

In writing up a forthcoming edition of my Weekly Ethics Thought, it occurred to me that I was really writing more commentary than anything (read: blog material...) so I decided to post it here instead. Here 'tis:

Last year, TerraChoice Environmental Marketing published an interesting study of ways in which companies suggest that products are environmentally safe when, in fact, they are not. The study is called "The Six Sins of Greenwashing".

Among the things I found fascinating about their study is how the types of greenwashing they discuss are really no different than the ways in which individuals and organizations whitewash things all day long when the picture isn't as pretty as they'd like others to imagine. Here are the six greenwashing techniques listed by TerraChoice with my interpretation of what they mean in everyday whitewashing terms:

• Hidden Trade-Offs - Using the exception to prove the rule or using 'selective' statistics to make a point that the full range of data can't really support.

• No Proof -  Your point may or may not be correct but even if right, there aren't actually data to support it. (Of course, there is never anything wrong with making unsubstantiated statements - just be sure that they are clearly labeled as opinions and not facts!)

• Vaugueness - Maybe if you just make things a little less clear, others will assume that your bewildering arguments and behavior are okay when they aren't. Sins of willful information omission probably fit in here as well.

• Irrelevance - Give 'em something that looks or sounds really meaningful and hope they don't realize that what you've given them isn't actually at all relevant to the issue at hand. Magicians, fraudsters, and politicians all seem to be good at this. (Now that I see those three categories in print, side-by-side, it's kind of a scary-looking trio!)

• Lesser of Two Evils - Find a way to label something in a more positive light - or, at the very least, in a less negative light - and it will start to look much better by contrast against other similar, bad ideas, products, or behavior. (Here, I'd suggest the slightly different lot of marketers, fraudsters, and politicians as the most adept practitioners.)

• Fibbing - Here, the kindhearted folks at TerraChoice were far more delicate with their wording than am I. I believe that the somewhat more blunt term for this type of behavior is lying!

The original study is extremely interesting and is certainly recommended reading. However, whether you read it or not, my point is that we all need to think about whether we are engaging, or allowing others around us to engage, in these types of deceptive, evasive practices. If so, ethics demand that that we take every reasonable step to confront those actions. After all, if we see greenwashing, whitewashing, or just plain old hogwash being handed out to believing customers and don't credibly try to stop it, that automatically makes us one of the liars, too.

There's No Business LIke Slow Business (Or Is There?) - More on Ethics and the Financial Crisis

Common sense says that ethical and legal problems will skyrocket as companies make compromises to deal with the current business and financial crises around the world. Sadly, tough times are periods when folks are increasingly likely to allow or require shortcuts on the following of policies, procedures, and legal mandates if they believe that money can be saved that way. This is a growing risk among managers as much as for business owners and the current business and financial crises make this a time when there needs to be a particular vigilance when it comes to monitoring for 'red flags' for both ethical and legal problems.

Here's a somewhat jarring counterpoint to the above, however...

Data from the Ethics Resource Center's 2007 National Workplace Ethics Survey shows a whopping 11% increase in the observation of misconduct in companies experiencing mergers, acquisitions, transitions, or restructuring. Interesting data in and of itself. However, my point here is that those activities (mergers, acquisitions, etc.) are just as likely to occur on companies doing incredibly well as in those on tough times. In some circumstances, of course, they are actually more likely to occur in companies doing well. 

It would be foolish to turn a blind eye to the growing risks for ethical and legal lapses related to the current financial crisis. However, it would be equally foolish to forget that any times of major change - in both good times and bad - are highly related to a wide variety of ethical and legal misconduct.