According to the English Dictionary, ethics, studies the “moral value of human conduct and of the rules and principles that ought to govern human behavior.” It studies the moral – as distinct from a particular religious – code appropriate to a specific walk in life. Doctors, lawyers, and other professions have ethical codes that define motives behind difficult decisions. Even Human Resources professionals have a Code of Ethics:
As HR professionals, we are responsible for adding value to the organizations we serve and contributing to the ethical success of those organizations. We accept professional responsibility for our individual decisions and actions. We are also advocates for the profession by engaging in activities that enhance its credibility and value (SHRM 11/16/2007).
However, until you are tested on the job, ethics remains an intellectual scholarly discussion without much practical value.
Big Problems
You have to understand that the most senior Human Resources officers had to be part of the unfortunate decisions at tobacco companies, the river pollution generated by General Electric, the anti-union labor practices at Wal-Mart, the financial corruption at Arthur Anderson, Countrywide, Enron, Martha Stewart, and too many more – Microsoft, Apple, Johns Manville, Ford, General Motors, IKEA, and Nike. Silent in the face of unethical practices in business or actively enabling those bad decisions, HR played a significant role.
- Now, there is nothing new about ethical violations, but their scope and impact have grown exponentially.
- Small ethical violations can eventually build a culture where big violations are ignored or institutionalized.
- Ethical violations often happen innocently because there is no clear understanding of how ethical standards apply to big and small decisions.
Hence the problem: in the absence of ethical behavior on the part of the senior leadership, the Human Resources professional still has an obligation to carry the flag.
A Personal Discipline
In, Human Resource Management: Ethics and Employment, the editors (A. Pinnington, R. Macklin, & T. Campbell) propose three ethical standards for HRM.
- Make decisions that advance the organization’s stated objectives.
- Enhance the dignity of those who may be harmed by the action.
- Sustain the moral sensibility of those who execute morally ambiguous tasks.
Ethical behaviors govern HR professionals’ everyday behavior. They are required to respect the confidentiality of their employee-customers, to apply compensation standards without favoritism, to hire, fire, and discipline without regard to race, gender, or age, and so on. In fact, it is hard to think of a daily HR task that does not have an ethical tone.
A Personal Challenge
The more senior the HR professional the more exposure there is to ethical challenges in the corporate suite.
- When you make decisions aligned to the organization’s stated standards, you add value to the decision and provide a standard for the direction it will take. For example, an employee layoff or facility closure gains ethical value to the extent that the decision clearly furthers the corporation’s stated business standards. For example, if the layoff will save the company from significant financial loss or the facility closure will improve the company’s ability to survive, it adds value to an otherwise morally neutral act. This requires leadership to weigh all corporate standards – not just those of the owners or stockholders. HR management is not the arbiter of this, but you cannot participate in the move if you are not fully onboard.
- In large impacts or small, there is an obligation to bring dignity to those harmed by the action. It is an ethical standard – larger than you are – that people should be treated consistently and equitably. People generally accept bad news – a demotion, layoff, termination, and more – when treated with dignity. When treated consistently and equitably, people are managed with procedural justice, a core human ethos. But, when you add focus to the harmed individuals’ ability to operate constructively and effectively thereafter, you add dignity to the outcome. Starting with the expression, “This is very hard for me,” does not enhance the employee’s dignity whereas outplacement and/or severance will. Demotion, transfer, or reassignment leaves no positive perception, but when the decision is reached after a weighted struggle, the decision can be sold with some satisfaction.
- Managers and supervisors – as well as HR personnel – will have to dispense the bad news even when the decisive news is borderline ethical. HR needs to train other dispensers in the criteria for decisive action and in the psychological burden incurred by those who implement the decisions. All those who deliver the negative outcomes should have the opportunity to question the rightness of the decision. (They might question the practical or moral correctness, or they may ask why it is their job to disperse the news.) HR has an obligation to prepare those who deliver negative news to do so without allowing their own emotional issues to be the central issue.
All people want to avoid negative experiences. This avoidance comes from concern about the debatable decision and from being witness or party to the employee’s experiences. Whatever training capacity the organization enjoys must equip the staff responsible for delivering difficult bad news. If such work is part of anyone’s job description, they should be helped with how to do so with empathy and not qualms, with enhancement and not contempt, and with respect for corporate objectives and without personal disdain.
