Ethics @ Workplace

  “To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society”

-Theodore Roosevelt, Ex President Of USA

Mr Roosevelt was very true when he highlighted the importance of morals. An illiterate person, if morally corrupt will do petty crimes or even heinous crimes and will get caught by the law enforcing agencies sooner or later. But if the so called highly educated people and intelligent people are morally corrupt, they can cause havoc in the society. At times, they will hide under the garb of their education, social, political or religious status and continue to exploit the society and continue to perpetrate their crimes without getting caught. I am sure by now many faces would have come up in your mind who are considered to be educated but are very low morally. It may sound that this happens only in India. No, the truth is far from true. The moral and ethical values in most other countries are no different.

One must have goals and ambitions but when one gets blinded by one's ambition for lust, money or power, the thin line separating ethical from unethical conduct disappears. Uncontrolled desires to accumulate money and thus acquire power and prestige blur the boundary between legal and illegal, moral and immoral conduct. Many highly placed famous people sometimes cross this blurred boundary without realising that they could be caught and they may face the worst level of humiliation and even go behind bars. Who doesn’t know the episode of ex IIT Delhi graduate and Harvard Business School alumnus, Rajat Gupta found guilty of insider trading. He reached the greatest heights of the highly competitive world of Corporate America as the head of McKinsey and then the board member of Goldman Sachs and Procter and Gamble and special adviser to the United Nations. The list of such educated defaulters is also endless. You just look around you and you will find many more who haven’t been caught. Some of them are doing much more damage to the society than the illiterate labourer or a rickshaw puller or even a dishonest policeman. What a shame! 

The problem according to me is that there is very little stress on ethics and moral values during our days at school or college or hostel. How can an engineer be a good engineer if he is not a good human being? How can a management graduate be a good manager if he is not a good teammate or a good citizen of the society? How can a doctor be a good doctor if he has no desire to serve the humanity? How can a teacher or a professor be a role model for his students if he himself is morally corrupt?

In the corporate world, the boss expects that all his employees follow the ethical behaviour at the work place. Does the boss also advocate that the company should follow Business Ethics while conducting their business too? It is quite possible that business ethics are compromised to achieve the sales targets quarter after quarter. And does the management of the company follow the corporate level ethics that as a company, we are supposed to follow the rules and laws of the land. That all the taxes will be paid in full and there shall be no duplicate ledgers for any transactions. Very few companies will come forward and claim that they follow total ethical behaviour at the corporate level and even while doing business. In many companies a lot of stress is given than all the employees follow Ethics @ Workplace. And then it is assumed that you have to compromise on business ethics to win the business from the competitors. As far as corporate level ethics are concerned, it is conveyed that the employees and managers need not worry about this aspect.    

The employer is interested in Ethics @ Workplace only. Coming a bit late to work occasionally, personal phone calls during office hours, surfing the Web too often and spending too much time on tea/coffee/lunch time etc are some of the examples of compromising with work ethics. Remember that as an employee, you are a party to a contract. The employer is paying you and devoting resources for your maintenance. In return, you owe it to that employer that you put in a full day of work, every day five or six days a week. It is expected that we use the Web and Internet as resources for doing our job as and when required; and not to use them to kill time.

As an ethical person, I must ask for more work if I feel that I am under occupied. We should be willing to help anyone in the company if we have spare time to achieve the ultimate objective of the growth of the company. Vandalism of any kind, falsifying of records, breaking confidentiality, ignoring safety rules, misuse of official merchandise and wastage of official resources are some of the examples of unethical behavior. Irresponsible behavior with other employees and particularly towards lady employees, addiction of any kind: be it alcohol or drugs is not an acceptable behavior in a good organization.

There are some organizations where use of abusive language, back biting, gossiping and filing false claims for travel, medical claim etc is considered a routine affair. But all this sows the seeds of unethical behavior and what time an employee crosses all the boundaries and brings a bad name to the organization will not be known. If ethics become the founding pillars of any organization, it gains a lot in the long run in all respects. The organizations where they lay a great stress on ethics at all levels earn the loyalty of their employees. They give them fair wages & benefits. You won’t find any cases of any favoritism for anyone and fair justice and treatment is meted to all employees. Such companies have a culture of mutual appreciation and rewards/recognition is done for good work. They have a family type of atmosphere.

There are times when you are in a dilemma whether a particular type of behavior is ethical or not. Many times you may be legally correct but ethically wrong. So how do you decide whether it is ethically correct or not. Here is a simple way. Just think for a moment that how will this action of mine be perceived by my teachers, my parents, my wife, my children and above all how shall I feel if the news about this action of mine appears on the first page of all the News Papers or becomes the breaking news on TV Channels. If the answer to the above is that they will all Feel Happy and you will also feel good about it, then it is totally ethical: JUST DO IT.

So it is important that when the law enforcement agencies force us to be legally correct in our behavior, let us try all the time to be correct ethically too.