Ethics Awareness
An organization can spend money and time crafting organizational purpose and value statements, but all that investment can go to waste if employees and other stakeholders are not aware of the organization's posture.
To make good decisions, those within an organization need, for example, to be be aware of how their organization affects issues such as inequality, fairness, or political polarization in society. Similarly, they must be aware of how introducing algorithmic decision-making for loan approval impacts the trust of their customers.
To build an ethical organization, it is therefore necessary to ensure awareness of ethical risks and of the impacts of those ethical risks for the organization.
Drivers of Awareness
There are four primary drivers of awareness:
Clarity of purpose and expectations.
Diversity of thought.
Organizational memory.
Speak Up!
Clarity of Purpose and Expectation
The ability to connect your day-to-day work with the purpose of the organization is one of the most important drivers of ethical conduct in organizations. Awareness of one’s contribution to the organization’s purpose beyond profit acts as a moral compass for decision-making. It encourages everyone in the organization to hold themselves to high ethical standards. But this sense of contribution to a shared purpose is not achieved by painting a lofty purpose statement on the wall.
Organizations need to make values count. Moreover, leaders need to credibly endorse the purpose. This requires clear and constant communication. But mostly it requires taking action that clearly embodies the purpose. Leaders that credibly endorse the purpose of the organization can share assessments about how the organization is already making good on its purpose, and where it is still falling short. They can use these opportunities to reinforce the ethical expectations of the organization towards every employee, which may also be codified in policies such as a code of conduct.
Three ways in which organizations can drive clarity of purpose and expectations include:
Leadership communication: Leadership should refer to purpose and values as frequently as possible and explain how the organization made crucial decisions in light of purpose and values.
Iconic actions: Identify highly visible actions or policies that encapsulate your organization’s purpose and the expectations on its people.
Ethics moments: Invite members of the organization to raise difficult decisions they faced or currently face in a safe and open forum in the organization. The purpose is to invite members of the organization to reflect about difficult decisions in light of purpose and expectations.
Diversity of Thought
Diversity of thought is the idea that people in a group should bring varying, diverse viewpoints to the table. While diversity and inclusion efforts are not sufficient to achieve diversity of thought, they are crucially important to achieve that aim. Recall how Facebook discovered that a prototype of the smart camera in its video-conferencing tool Portal did not track non-white people reliably. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Technical Business Lead Lade Obamehinti, a person of color herself, noticed the problem. The more diverse the teams working on new technology, the more likely it is that someone will spot an ethical risk.
Yet other types of diversity are also required to achieve diversity of thought. Even if teams that are diverse in terms of dimensions like gender, ethnicity, and religion, they may share a similar mindset if they all graduated from the same university programs at the same few universities, or are from a similar socio-economic background.
Four things that organizations can do to increase diversity of thought include:
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts: Develop a Diversity and Inclusion policy, and provide training on Diversity and Inclusion for all employees.
Encourage open-mindedness and intellectual humility: Insist on every employee displaying respect for other viewpoints, role-model willingness to revise your own standpoint.
Engage stakeholders and outside experts: Invite outside experts or stakeholder
representatives to an open discussion to hear their hopes and concerns first-hand.
Use ethical foresight tools: Employ tools to identify ethical risks, such as consequence scanning and scenario analysis, as introduced earlier.
Organizational Memory
While building ethical foresight into everyday practices allows organizations to anticipate ethical risks, strengthening organizational memory allows them to learn from their mistakes. Organizational memory is the ability of organizations to record, share, and act on learnings from the past. Organizations can learn from mistakes by reflecting on the root causes of ethical incidents, looking at what could have been done differently, and reviewing what can be done to prevent incidents in the future.
Organizations should take the following steps to strengthen institutional memory:
Establish a Review Board: Establish an external ethics review board and/or an internal ethics function.
Investigate ethical failures: Investigate ethical failures to identify individual, as well as structural, root causes.
Share learnings: Share learnings with employees, and embed learnings in ethics training.
Document learnings: Document ethics review and decision-making processes.
Speak Up!
When organizations fail to anticipate an ethical risk, this does not mean that it went unnoticed by everybody. The Challenger exploded because the O-ring seals used in a critical part of the shuttle were not designed to handle the unusually cold weather on launch day. The night before the Challenger launch, a group of engineers met with NASA officials in an emergency meeting. Despite having full knowledge of faulty O-rings on the shuttle, the engineers remained silent.
To avoid speak-up failures, organizations should create an open culture where people can raise serious concerns and be heard. Leaders should place a responsibility on employees to speak up if they disagree. To be credible, leaders must react to criticism in an open and welcoming way. A no- retaliation policy can also help encourage employees to speak up. However, note that encouraging speak-up can get organizations only so far. Organizations should not rely on employees bravely speaking up to correct for fundamental flaws in the organization’s governance or leadership.
Here are two things organizations can do to encourage speak-up:
Foster a culture of trust and candor: Employees must trust and respect one another and the organization’s leadership for candid feedback to flow freely. Receiving challenging feedback constructively is something leaders must learn.
Create safe and confidential reporting channels: Additionally, an ethics hotline allows employees to speak up anonymously. Ethics hotlines should be operated by a trusted third-party vendor.
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