What's behind the current buzz about ethics? A number of
factors, really. On the evolutionary front, the days when one could
argue that conscience and business don't mix are gone for good.
Although the social responsibility movement of the late 1980s and
early '90s hardly qualifies as news anymore, its message has
become part of our popular consciousness: Businesses need not exist
for the sake of greed alone. Consider the bar permanently
raised--Ben and Jerry, thank you very much.
As standards have gone up, public awareness has also
intensified. "It's not necessarily that we care more about
ethics today," says Laura Pincus Hartman, director of the
Institute for Business & Professional Ethics at DePaul
University in Chicago, "but that, because of [better
communication], we know more about companies than we once did. With
the World Wide Web, more information gets out to more people than
ever before. Anyone can log on to the Internet and find out almost
instantaneously about libel suits, harassment suits and all kinds
of information that would have been difficult to uncover in the
past."
Meanwhile, your company's ethics may have a direct impact on
employee loyalty. In a 1997 Walker Information survey of 1,694
employees, 86 percent of respondents who had favorable opinions of
their companies' ethics were strongly committed to their
organizations; only 14 percent of those who rated ethics low felt
likewise. A full 42 percent of respondents said a company's
ethical integrity would directly influence their choice of
employers.
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No longer can you assume that your competition is ethically
challenged, either. Of 747 human resource professionals interviewed
for a 1997 Society for Human Resource Management/Ethics Resource
Center survey, 73 percent of respondents said they work in
organizations that have written standards of ethical business
conduct. Nearly four in 10 work for organizations that provide
ethics-related training; 31 percent work for companies that have
either an ethics office or an ombudsperson.
And there's more. When Walker Information polled 1,037
consumers in 1994, 47 percent indicated they would be much more
likely to buy from a "good" company if quality, service
and price were equal. On the other hand, 70 percent of consumers
would not buy--at any price--from a company that was not socially
responsible. "Apparently you get some credit for being
good," says Walker, "but you really get clobbered for
being unethical."
Not wanting to get clobbered in court is another motivation for
cleaning up your act. According to ethics consultant Victoria
Wesseler, president of Ethics & Compliance Strategies, a
consulting firm in Indianapolis, federal sentencing guidelines that
went into effect in 1991, which apply to companies with as few as
10 employees, provide financial incentive to companies that make a
concerted effort to prevent and police unethical conduct within
their organizations. (See "Code Of Conduct" on page 121.)
"I would hope the primary motivator for improving a
company's ethics would not be to meet these guidelines--there
are other reasons to become more ethical," says Wesseler.
"But [companies that meet the guidelines] may see a reduction
in [criminal] fines of up to 95 percent."
For ethicist Robert C. Solomon, professor of philosophy and
business at the University of Texas, Austin, and author of
It's Good Business: Ethics & Free Enterprise for the New
Millennium (Rowman & Littlefield), these various threads
weave together into a single truth: Ethics is at the very core of
successful commerce. "Ethical managers and ethical businesses
tend to be more trusted and suffer less resentment, inefficiency,
litigation and government interference," says Solomon.
"[Being ethical] is just good business."
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