How to promote ethical behavior in the workplace

Even though numerous scandals through time, such as Enron or Tesco's accounting scandal, have taught us about the dangers of unethical behaviour, creating an ethical workplace can often fall to the backburner. So, what should you be doing to encourage ethical behaviour in your organisation? Find out with our 5 top tips.

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1. Embed good ethical practice into organisational culture
2. Management should lead by example
3. Effective communication
4. Effective whistleblowing process
5. Polices and auditing

1. Embed good ethical practice into organisational culture

Corporate culture is a complex mix of factors which combine to form the shared meanings, attitudes and beliefs that your team holds. It's important to monitor your organisation's public face, internal structures, and the unwritten rules of your business to make sure the expectation of ethical practices are encouraged through all components of your organisation's culture. Clearly stating your organisation's ethical codes in corporate objectives and sharing them as policies makes expectations clear and facilitates ethical behaviour throughout the organisation.

2. Management should lead by example

Managers are often the role models for their employees and should set an example of honesty and openness. If senior staff are seen adhering to ethical values and policies, this is likely to be followed by others in the organisation. Management should also discourage overly tight deadlines and "challenging" targets to remove the need for their teams to feel like they need to cut corners. Employees should be stretched but objectives and goals should be realistic and achievable.

3. Effective communication

This is more likely to be an issue for large organisations with a bureaucratic and hierarchical structure where senior staff may become disengaged and distant from the employees. In places we lose personal contact, staff may be tempted to conceal failing or dysfunctional behaviour. Staff may feel inclined to tell their managers what they would like to hear. Encouraging effective and open communication throughout your organisation is crucial so your team feel they can trust and report unethical practices to their managers without fear of negative repercussions to them.

4. Effective whistleblowing process

Whistleblowing is a useful source of information about unethical practices in an organisation. Organisations should ensure the process is non-threatening and straightforward to encourage the flow of information, with both formal and informal pathways for reporting. You must trust your team to report honestly, not maliciously, and build up trust to encourage clarity, honesty, openness and fairness.

5. Polices and auditing

Internal audit and management review has a big role to play in the creation and maintenance of an ethical culture. The organisation should have a clear ethical policy that states its framework of ethical values and internal audits can be used to review working practises and make sure these values are being adhered to. Management should also back this up with relevant training and raising awareness. Internal audit and management review involving different stakeholders can help evaluated the effectiveness of such policies.

We must remember that ethics isn't a one size fits all approach and requires careful consideration of your organisation�s policies, culture, communication, and processes.

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From Volkswagen’s emissions fiasco to Wells Fargo’s deceptive sales practices to Uber’s privacy intrusions, corporate scandals are a recurring reality in global business. Compliance programs increasingly take a legalistic approach to ethics that focuses on individual accountability. Yet behavioral science suggests that people are ethically malleable, so creating an ethical culture means thinking about ethics not simply as a belief problem but also as a design problem. The authors suggest four ways to make being good as easy as possible: Connect ethical principles to strategies and policies, keep ethics top of mind, reward ethical behavior through a variety of incentives, and encourage ethical norms in day-to-day practices.

Unethical behavior ruins reputations, harms employee morale, and increases regulatory costs—not to mention damages society’s trust in business. Yet corporate scandals are a recurring reality.

What Doesn’t Work

Compliance programs take a legalistic approach to ethics that focuses on individual accountability—but a large body of behavioral science research suggests that even well-meaning and well-informed individuals are ethically malleable.

A Better Way

Leaders must design workplace contexts that encourage good behavior. Keeping prosocial values top of mind for employees as they make decisions will reduce the likelihood of transgressions while making workers happier and more productive.

From Volkswagen’s emissions fiasco to Wells Fargo’s deceptive sales practices to Uber’s privacy intrusions, corporate wrongdoing is a continuing reality in global business. Unethical behavior takes a significant toll on organizations by damaging reputations, harming employee morale, and increasing regulatory costs—not to mention the wider damage to society’s overall trust in business. Few executives set out to achieve advantage by breaking the rules, and most companies have programs in place to prevent malfeasance at all levels. Yet recurring scandals show that we could do better.

A version of this article appeared in the May–June 2019 issue (pp.144–150) of Harvard Business Review.

By Lynda Moultry Belcher Updated February 01, 2019

It is important for staffers to focus on accomplishing key company goals and developing good working relationships in the office, but it is equally important to ensure ethical conduct among employees. Ethical conduct ensures that your business maintains a reputation for sound professional principles and values that are directly in line with the company mission. There are a few different ways that you can promote ethical conduct among your staff.

You can't expect your staff to act ethically in accordance with your company's code of ethics if they don't know what that code is or why it's important. Hold regular workshops on ethics and how to solve problems ethically. Use examples and role playing to give everyone a chance to choose between tough decisions and explain why one is more ethical than another. The more training and resources you provide, and the greater emphasis you place on being ethical and acting accordingly, the more your staff understands exactly what you expect in the office.

Far too often, companies simply expect ethical behavior; however, if you want to promote this as a prominent behavior among staff, then you need to show and prove, so to speak. Provide rewards for solid ethical behavior; for example, if you have an employee that goes above and beyond to put her personal interests aside to always do what is best for her clients, that is considered ethical behavior and she should be rewarded and held up as an example for others to strive to do the same. The more you reward employees for sound ethical decisions, the more likely the masses will follow suit.

Similarly, don't reward unethical behavior, writes Thomas G. Plante, Ph.D., AABPP, in Psychology Today (July 1, 2015). When staff sees management recognizing and rewarding ethical actions, whether they increased profits in the process or customer relationships, and ignoring or playing down accomplishments gained unethically, they'll get the message that ethical behavior is important to the company.

Expect more of your management team; employees generally follow company examples set forth for them by management employees. Hold your managers to a higher ethical standard so that they are credible when they communicate expectations to their staffers to do the same. Challenge management staff to hold regular discussions with employees to work through potential ethical issues that may come up and find ways to brainstorm through them as a team. If everyone is on the same page, it is more likely that the team as a whole will adopt the same types of ethical behaviors.

Think honestly about the current operating methods in your company. If management is talking about the importance of ethics at work but doesn't treat its own employees fairly, you're just giving ethics lip service. A trusting relationship between management and employees helps to encourage ethical behavior all around. Consider how the company makes decisions to hire, train, promote and pay employees. If these important actions aren't done objectively and fairly, take steps to correct the situation.

Consider, too, if what you're asking of employees is reasonable. If their goals or quotas are set too high for the time they're given to accomplish them, they may feel they have to take drastic measures to meet them, which may cross into unethical territory. Expecting employees to work unreasonable hours to meet their goals, tipping their work-life balance so much that they have little free time to enjoy family and friends, can be viewed as unethical, too. Show them the company wants to do the right thing by them, and by your customers, and they'll begin to understand that the company is setting an ethical standard for them to follow.