Making a contribution to a more ethical future
Is your ethics training effective enough?

That the deluge of ethical scandals has kept South Africans captivated is more than an unfortunate pun. While there has been a great deal of outrage at the serial greed, there is also the risk that the scale of the corruption can lead to complacency or, worse, that it can encourage lowest-common-denominator behaviour. The key question this should prompt for organisations is what they are doing to strengthen the country’s steps towards a more ethical future. Specifically, what are organisations doing to promote ethics among their stakeholders? Clearly, the answer should not be ‘nothing’.

Ethics training is one of the ways in which ethical conduct can be promoted and an ethical culture cultivated. This has given rise to a growing industry comprising a variety of service providers. The training is, however, not always as impactful as it should be. In order to optimise its impact – and for organisation to make more informed decisions as regards ethics training – they should take the following factors into account.

Ethics knowledge and understanding

Ethics training should build a common platform of knowledge and understanding of workplace ethics. This should be included in induction or orientation programmes so that employees have an understanding of ethics within the organisation at the outset of the employment relationship. Such programmes should address the organisation’s code of conduct and ethics-related policies and systems. This knowledge and understanding should be maintained by short, annual refresher courses, ideally offered electronically (provided the organisation guards against online courses being delegated for completion, for example, to a junior staff member.)

Ethics as a ‘knowing – doing gap’

In designing or procuring ethics training beyond organisation-specific ethics codes and polices, it is important that the distinction between ethics training and other topics is recognised. Attending a training course is generally an effective way to improve one’s ability, for example in finance or labour legislation, by building knowledge and understanding of these topics. However, this does not apply to the same extent to ethics because employees almost always already know what is right and wrong in the workplace (which is the essence of ethics). Phrased differently, unethical conduct is very rarely the result of an absence of knowledge. The employee who steals from the company or lies to a client knows full well that the conduct is both unacceptable and unethical.

This illustrates the concept of an ethical ‘knowing-doing gap’. Knowledge is not the problem. It is the choice that follows, between good and bad or right and wrong, that directly shapes the consequent action. The implications of this ‘knowing-doing gap’ should be taken into account in designing ethics training. Ethical knowledge warrants some attention – for example to build a better understanding of a concept such as conflict of interest which is often not well understood – but training should not be exclusively or even primarily focused on ethical knowledge.

Rather the key focus should be on influencing the choices employees make, with the goal of improving the quality of their ethical choices

Training for ethical conduct

As noted above, mere knowledge of what is right and wrong is not a predictor of ethical conduct. To this needs to be added a key factor: that the ultimate goal of ethics training is not just ethical knowledge: it is ethical conduct, which is the essential ingredient for an ethical culture.

Ethics training to shape conduct is very different from training aimed at cognitive competence, and organisations should incorporate this difference into their training and development.

Training to influence behaviour includes building clarity about how the organisation’s values translate into behaviours and what this implies for the individual employees within the scope of their roles and responsibilities. Crucially this training would focus much more on intrinsic factors to achieve a change of attitude about ethics and to build increasing levels of personal buy-in to ethics and the creation of an ethical workplace.

Such training needs to be delivered quite differently from ethical cognitive competence. It would typically prioritise experiential learning with (relevant) case studies and a variety of exercises.

Ethical leadership: a four step competency model

Leaders need a greater knowledge of ethics beyond the basics of legislation and the organisation’s code and policies. The fact that they exert the greatest influence in shaping ethical conduct within their organisations represents one reason why leaders should also have regular ethics training. Another reason is the fact that the majority of ethical scandals are perpetrated and facilitated by senior staff, not by junior employees.

Yet, ironically, many leadership teams only recognise the need for employee ethics training. To get past this resistance the author developed an Ethical Leadership Competency Model which reflects the four levels of ethical competence for leaders around which their training should be designed.

1. Leaders obviously need a sound knowledge of workplace ethics. This should extend to understanding the key ethical drivers, the implications of the primary concepts and top ethics trends.
2. As regards conduct, leaders clearly need to act as good, conscious, consistent role models. Their impact is such that leaders need to deliberately make ethics visible to all their stakeholders: they need to be active ethics advocates.
3. The leadership role crucially also extends to developing ethical followers and to fostering and maintaining an ethical culture within the organisation.
4. Finally, leaders need to create an ethical brand and reputation for the organisation with all its stakeholders (internal and external).

A typical workshop format is not ideal for leadership ethics training. More innovative approaches, such as ethics conversations, is far better suited to this audience.

The real impact of ethics training

The current ethical climate can lead to a despondent attitude that ethical change is unlikely or too difficult. But, as the author noted at the end of her book, Ethics Can:

Granted, transforming one organisation ethically may not change the industry, the region or the country, but it can make a difference – and not only in the workplace. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the positive impact of ethics on employees was such that they took those ethical lessons back to their homes and communities? What a great achievement it would be to hear an employee standing up for what is right on the basis that “it is not the way we do things at my work”.

For those organisations that are advancing ethics within their organisations, they should recognise that the C³ ripple effect applies since improved ethics benefits not only the company but, potentially, also employees’ communities and our country.

by Cynthia Schoeman
© Ethics Monitoring & Management Services (Pty) Ltd, 2019