By Brendan Keating, IntegTree, LLC

2020 has been a roller coaster of a year in many ways, from geo-political drama, stunning stock market swings, civil unrest, presidential primary chaos, murder hornets, and, of course, the COVID-19 Pandemic. There is an art in life of trying to find some kind of good in the bad, and in the case of the pandemic, we do not have to look too far. Beyond an increased focus on the general importance of handwashing, another small fringe benefit of the pandemic is the open societal discussion on the concept and importance of business ethics within the public sphere. From broader social discussions about whether grocery store workers deserve hazard pay, to when retail businesses should be allowed to reopen, large numbers of the public are, often unwittingly, engaging in very practical discussions about ‘the right thing’ in regards to business conduct. At the same time, businesses are grappling with internal policies in relation to the pandemic, namely how to safely facilitate the return to work.

    For many companies, the answer is simply: no time soon. Tech giants like Google and Facebook have amended corporate policies to allow individuals to voluntarily work from home until the summer of 2021, with Facebook even giving workers a stipend to offset costs for at-home office needs. Twitter and Square have also gone down this road, with the CEO of both companies, Jack Dorsey, toying with the idea that his employees may be allowed to work from home in perpetuity. The magnitude of this type of shift cannot be understated, with Google’s announcement affecting around 200,000 workers alone, while dozens of other large companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Paypal are also making significant changes to their remote work policies.

    As companies struggle to navigate the health risks their customers and workers are exposed to in relation to the pandemic itself, they may be opening themselves up to considerable organizational risks with such policy changes. Productivity concerns aside, the continuity of organizational climate poses a very real challenge to businesses with remote workers. Broadly speaking, organizational climate could be defined as a perceived feel and affective experience of workers, while organizational culture encompasses the traditions, stated values, beliefs, and so on, of an organization. These concepts are slightly more nuanced and intertwined, but even with such an oversimplification, it is obvious to see how both may be altered in a remote-work environment. Providing a continuity of climate and culture – that is maintaining social connections in a sense – is just as important for organizational health, as it is for individual psychological health. And yet, as companies focus on the practical, logistical elements of remote work, they often ignore these latter concerns – the effects of which may echo for quite some time, especially in relation to the ethical climate of a company where insidious behavior can fester. 

Repercussions

 A great many of these issues are difficult enough to grapple with even when it is business as usual, and organizations do have proper policies and procedures in place. Therefore, it is understandable that many companies feel overwhelmed and unable to address ‘fringe’ concerns related to fostering and maintaining an ethical business climate, especially when workers are remote, when they have more seemingly pressing concerns on their hands. Unfortunately, concurrently when these lapses in organizational culture and ethical climate are potentially occurring, the economic reality of concerns about unemployment, decreased economic activity, and so on, all apply even more pressure on workers to squint, look the other way, or outright engage in unscrupulous behavior, from which they might normally refrain, but for the unique situations we find ourselves in — a ‘just this once…’ kind of mentality. Kickbacks, bribes and other forms of unethical business behavior to secure critical contracts may (wrongly) seem like reasonable courses of action in desperate times, and actors may rationalize their behavior by thinking that these issues can be rectified when things calm down. Workers may even feel pressured to engage in time sheet or billing fraud for their own benefit with an economic downturn. Across the board, there is more pressure and incentive to engage in unethical behavior, there is less oversight for those working remotely, and less overall connection to a firm and its values due to the physical distance between staff — a perfect storm for wrongdoing.

Integrity Report Results

The threat of this is very real; Ernst & Young recently released an integrity report, which surveyed business leaders to get a sense of the ethical challenges faced in the pandemic environment. The report found that “90% of respondents believe that disruption, as a result of COVID-19, poses a risk to ethical business conduct”, while a little over a half of board members “have confidence in management teams to demonstrate professional integrity”, but at the same time “only 37% of junior employees share the same sentiment”. The distinction between board members and junior employee sentiment is striking — those closest to the ground feel less comfortable with their own managers ‘doing the right thing’, which makes one wonder what behavior or attitudes they are observing that make them so skeptical of the climate? These concerns have not even targeted specifically the challenges faced by remote teams, where the risk of ‘lack of oversight’ moves from merely conceptual, to also a physical problem!

Preemptive Actions

What can businesses do to address these potential challenges? 

1. Taking additional time out of hectic days for webinars or virtual meetings to discuss the broad cultural values and ethical climate your organization wishes to foster can be very impactful – think of them like an inoculation against an illness.
   
2. Additionally, utilizing psychometric testing to discern if you have an incipient problem in the attitudes and beliefs of your workers may be worth exploring in some instances, or as a random audit. Psychometric testing is an assessment methodology to identify deeper employee beliefs and motives, as well as organizational bottlenecks, which could impact the effectiveness of ethics training programs, and by extension your ethical business climate.
   
3. Finally, refresher courses and online modules related to ethical business practices can help reiterate the values your company wishes to reinforce. Particular focus should also be paid to the onboarding process of new employees, or contract workers, who may bring with them baggage from their prior organization – and who now are working side by side with people they very literally have never met. Ensuring that these employees know the way that your company does business, the expectations and oversight management has, and so on, can all help bring them into the fold of the values by which your organization strives to do business.
   
4. For long standing employees, virtual company-wide meetings and events can help reinforce the feeling of connectedness, while smaller teams can reiterate and reinforce their organizational culture via facilitating remote, safe connections between employees and their supervisors. 

In essence, remind workers that they are not alone (even if they are apart), but are still integral, interconnected elements of a larger organization with good values and a proper ethical orientation. This will help organizations maintain a continuity of ethical climate despite the physical distance between staff. And for those more nefarious types that may feel that they can take advantage of the chaos and upheaval of the traditional office environment, you are sending a message that you are watching, even from afar.

As organizations navigate the difficult straits ahead, they would be wise to spend time and effort on fostering, and perpetuating, their ethics program. Well kept gardens, tended day in and day out, produce plants that flourish with deep roots. Similarly, businesses that carefully tend to their programs on a regular basis, root their businesses practices in ethical behavior, and so are best situated to weather the storms ahead.

Brendan M. Keating is President of IntegTree LLC, an ethics, compliance and sustainability consulting company. He has worked on ethics and compliance courses for university programs, and has published a variety of works in several fields, including articles in the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics’ Compliance and Ethics Professional Magazine. He can be reached at Brendan.Keating@integtree.com