Let’s look at ethics-based training in two ways. First, if we presume that high quality ethics training can be truly successful, what is the potential impact it can have on your staff and the way your organisation operates within the Chinese market? Second, even if it can only have a minimal impact upon your staff, how can ethics training be symbolic and send a message to your employees and customers?
Breaches of ethics have already been in the news this year. In France, Societe Generale trader Jerome Kerviel lost 4.9billion Euros through fraudulent share dealings and here in China Chen Tonghai, the former Chairman of Sinopec, faced charges of bribery and abuse of power. However, to assume that such ethical breaches are confined to rogue traders and corrupt officials is a mistake. Many multinationals here in China have also been guilty of operating with some less than perfect practices on a far wider scale. For instance, in Guangdong province last year, local media reported that McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut were paying low-level employees 40% below the province’s statutory minimum wage. Peter Loescher, newly appointed CEO of German electronics giant Siemens, last year acted quickly to stamp out any financial misdemeanours after reports in China Daily raised allegations of China operations being “tainted” by financial irregularities. And, Danish brewers Carlsberg and soft-drinks producer Pepsi both featured in reports by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs’ report on major organisations violating waste discharge rules.
Ethics Training
If ethics are intangible and defined largely by an individual’s personality, how can you train your staff in them? The first step is to ensure your employees are familiar with your organisation’s corporate ethos and it’s approach to business ethics. This means they must be intimately acquainted with some important documents, such as your mission statement or CSR policy. It is HR’s responsibility to ensure that all staff have access to these documents and, more importantly, that they understand what they represent. Listed below are a series of excerpts from CSR policies established by multinational organisations operating in China. These are key sections of each policy that define the organisation’s goals. It is vital you can do something similar with your company’s policies. Make them clear and available, but also highlight relevant passages and make it clear exactly what they mean to your employees.
Bayer - At Bayer, we believe our technical and business expertise involves a responsibility to work for the benefit of humankind and contribute to sustained and environmentally friendly development.
IBM - IBM always adheres to the principle of "From the society, back to society, and benefit human being".
Novozymes - Novozymes holds that sustainable development needs to be achieved through all businesses taking responsibility for the process of balancing economic, social, environmental, and ethical interests for long-term growth.
Panasonic - The 21st century saw the growing importance of environment, the protection of which is not only a public activity, but also a responsibility that falls on enterprises, administrations as well as citizens.
Getting Acquainted
Ensuring that your employees are well acquainted with the relevant documents and company policies is a great start to ethics training. However, this only goes so far. How can you ensure they understand what these mean to them and how they conduct themselves? Taking a traditional lecture style approach is unlikely to have the impact required. Therefore, a slightly different, two-step approach may be more productive:
Provide case studies and examples of team members – these can be from just your site or from around the world - who have exhibited the qualities required by your organisation. Also, show examples of what you are not looking for (you will hopefully not be able to find too many of these amongst your current team). Doing this provides your employees with an ethical road map, telling them the direction in which to head.
After giving your whole team these ethical examples, it is time to test them and to see if all the information you have provided them with has sunk in. According to the US based ‘HR Magazine’, American construction company Caterpillar adopted a fascinating ‘scenario’ based approach to ethics training. This involved giving a series of specific situations to each employee – these focused on events they are likely to face in their jobs. The employees then had to choose the course of action they would take from four possible alternatives. They described this, as being a little like a ‘quiz show’. However, the interactive element helped trainees develop a deeper and more practical ethical knowledge.
Ethical Impact
Successful ethics training can help to ensure your employees behave ethically and maintain the high standards demanded by a major multinational organisation. However, even if the training is not as successful as you hoped, it can still have a major impact. There are two particular areas in which this can be the case – (i) finding and keeping customers (ii) attracting and retaining employees.
Finding and Keeping Customers:
As the Chinese market expands and diversifies at pace, Chinese people are developing far more of a consumer conscience. A 2006 survey by market-researchers TNS revealed that 91% of Chinese consumers would refrain from buying products from companies they knew to be violating environmental and ethical standards. Take, for example, the companies listed above that were guilty of under paying employees or violating environmental safety standards. These are certainly the type of issues that could impact upon custom. A clear and well-publicised ethics-training program communicates an organisation’s desire to operate ethically. Let’s use the city of Beijing as an example of this. With the Olympics fast approaching, concern still remains over the levels of service in China’s capital. Because of this, the city’s authorities set out to train over 800,000 service workers. One of the key facets to this training was occupational ethics. However, as important as training these staff was on a practical level, it was equally important that Beijing showed the world it was making the effort to address this issue. Beijing authorities see these service workers as “windows to the city” and are keen to show the thousands of tourists who will pour into the city in August need not worry about unfair or unethical treatment.
Attracting and Retaining Employees:
It is not just your customers who may have concerns about the way your organisation operates within the Chinese market. Your current and potential employees may have them too. The Chinese workforce is increasingly educated and sophisticated. New graduates are far more likely to understand the ethical implications of your organisations practices and many will factor this into their employment decisions. In a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey undertaken earlier this year amongst graduates from the United Kingdom, the United States and China, 87% of the Chinese respondents said that they would actively seek out employers whose sense of ethics and responsibility matched their own. By installing a clear and focused program of ethics training, you are showing these potential employees that you take their concerns seriously and that your organisation matches their own levels of ethics and responsibility.
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I believe I can bring the War for Talent to a peaceful end. I came to this realisation two
months ago after I was invited to present at the ‘Corporate Travel and Technology
World' conference in Shanghai. The topic, "Selecting Potential Leaders and Turning a Company from Good to Great", was
provided some months earlier, giving me time to source opinions from
around China. Read More
