Ethics is about choice. What values guide us? What standards do we use? What principles are at stake? And how do we choose between them? An ethical approach to a problem will inquire about ends (goals) and means (how we achieve these goals) and the relationship between the two. Beyond this, ethics involves a consideration of the consequences of our choices from a range of stakeholder perspectives. At the personal level, ethics looks at how we choose to live in relation to others.
As social scientists, Managing Values believes that ethics is the depth dimension of any organisation, only truly tested in times of crisis. We invite our clients to anticipate such crisis and avoid the ethical meltdowns we have seen in the past by reflecting on their organisation today guided by deep lever questions such as:
- How sound is your organisation’s corporate personality?
- Where are the risks to your image and reputation?
- How trusted is your brand and what values are associated with it?
- How well do your people know why the organisation exists, how it succeeds, how people should be managed?
- How do external stakeholders add or subtract value from your business?
These are some of the fundamental questions we help you to answer.
Managing Values has developed an Ethics Training Kit that presents a range of workplace ethical dilemmas that are centered on typical organizational scenarios employees may find themselves addressing. These dilemmas pose several possible resolutions all with specific consequences for the organisation. They encourage participants to review issues from multiple stakeholder perspectives and encourage participants to make decisions that are informed by the organisation’s stated values.
Group co-operation in scenario solving encourages a greater insight into the different perspectives that can co-exist within a team and which can cause its members to misunderstand each other and respond in different ways to similar issues.
Participants quickly learn that, although there may be consensus around a decision, not everyone operates from the same motivations. This reveals the complexity of group dynamics and its implications on performance is critically highlighted.
Our approach:
At the centre of our approach is a scenario and dilemma bank of over 300 of the typical ethical issues that we have identified as arising in Australian workplaces. These cover all sectors and all industry and are used as source material to overlay with each organisation’s cultural context – choosing the risk areas and scenarios that best fit a client’s business and context. In designing new programs we look to ensure:
Relevance: This is the key to employee engagement with the ethical dimension. Specific dilemmas and scenarios must be credible and based on day to day issues that can escalate into unethical patterns of behaviour.
We ensure there is a selection of materials designed for different workplace audiences and we target different risks to different levels within the organisation.
Skills Transfer: Ethical competency is based on a set of skills that need to be honed like any other skills. Our training programs are based on adult learning principles and processes in conjunction with relevant case studies and scenarios to maximise engagement and skill development. Our experience is that staffs need to participate in relevant scenarios in order to contextualise their own meaning, working through their personal responses and how these compare to company policy. Addressing pertinent issues also provides the necessary opportunities to identify and implement recommended frameworks.
Setting the tone from the top: All materials can be customised to include introductions and commitment statements from senior executives. Securing such commitment is key in setting the tone from the top and confirming core commitments to compliance, organisational values and ethical business practices.
Values Congruity: Managing Values interviews selected representatives and stakeholders to assess immediate awareness of how an organisation’s way of doing things is currently understood and applied. This process typically highlights any perceived tensions between the stated values that can lead to ethical grey areas and informs the selection of content for later ethics training initiatives.
Engagement: To maximise engagement, our programs are designed for personal as well as organisational learning. For many this begins with drawing the boundaries between personal and organisational values; assisting people to understand how they impact on each other and where and when each set of values takes priority.
Flexibility: All materials are capable of being delivered in various formats including:
- “Toolbox talks” by immediate managers
- Face to face workshop with workplace trainers,
- Multimedia or online formats
- Quizzes.
Learning Objectives
- To skill all employees in ethical based decision making using the organisation’s stated values
- To differentiate business ethics from morality discussions and locate workplace ethics within the wider realm of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and modern day governance accountability’s
- To develop participant skills in identifying possible ethical challenges in the workplace and how to apply ethical problem solving models, including the organisation’s stated values, as a decision making mechanism
- To develop skills in raising ethical issues within the organizational context
- To determine appropriate accountability’s and channels for referral of potential breaches of the ethical code
Learning Outcomes
- Heightened understanding of the broad arena of workplace ethics today and how organizations from all sectors are responding to the challenge of social relevance and legitimacy in the face of dwindling public confidence in major institutions. This involves honing a better understanding of contemporary concepts such as “social license to operate”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “reputation stewardship” and the rise of “the civil economy” as part of the broad area of applied business ethics.
- Heightened understanding of the boundaries between organizational and personal values and where each takes priority and how it shapes personal accountability.
- Skill development in responding appropriately to what is expected in meeting the principles and values embedded in codes of conduct and codes of ethics
