First, it is important to recognize that “every company, every organization, already has an ethic of some kind, even if it’s unwritten” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 1, page 14). This ethic is represented in the company’s corporate culture, which describes and regulates the behaviour of its employees and managers. Does the organization expect and reward doing the right thing? Many companies have now taken the next step by writing down and recording their normative or desirable corporate culture in the form of a code of ethics, code of conduct, responsibility statement to stakeholders, or code of responsible practices so that it is available and accessible to all employees, the public or whomever would like to investigate the company in question.
Early codes of ethics “typically address corrupt, illegal behaviour” as well as “employee’s obligations under the law, with particular focus on bribery, false expense claims, insider trading and political donations” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 4, page 57). More advanced codes of ethics tend to cover four major areas of ethical behaviour: “issues of equity and fairness, rights, honesty, and the uses and exercise of corporate and managerial power” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 1, page 14). Equity and fairness relate to the way the corporation or organization treats its stakeholders, including “minority shareholders, customers, suppliers, the families of employees and the community in which the corporation operates” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 1, page 14). Rules must be established that outline the company policy towards its stakeholders so as to ensure that all stakeholders’ interests are taken into account when corporate decisions are made. Rights refer to issues such as the right to privacy of employees and of stakeholder or customer information as well as to the obligations the corporation has to uphold this right. Honesty pertains to the transparency of corporate policy and actions to the public. Finally, corporate and managerial power refers to how a company uses its power. Does the corporation use its power inappropriately or abusively “when dealing with employees, customers, partners or competitors?” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 1, page 14). Or does it use its power in a socially responsible manner? Additionally, many codes of ethics contain references to company policy regarding “product or service standards, corporate citizenship goals, and norms of employee conduct” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 4, page 57).
However, many companies are lacking an important part to their code of ethics, namely a way to ensure that their code is implemented on an individual level. This is why it is necessary to address questions of training and internal communication. In other words, to “expose employees to the underlying rationale, or provide training in how to apply that rationale or ‘sniff test’ in daily decisions. This leads to reinforcing proper behaviour with recognition, performance appraisal, and reward systems” so that the code is not simply a piece of paper. Desirable behaviours need a management implementation framework that is regularly employed by both the corporation and its employees (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 4, page 49). The widespread use of codes of ethics and their integration into the workplace has meant that companies can “recruit and retain the kind of staff (especially at entry level) that they particularly want to attract” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 4, page 59). Therefore, as a company turns over or replaces its staff with new employees who are literate in the company’s code of ethics, it will be better equipped to apply this code on a daily basis if it is reinforced with initial and regular or ongoing training.
Creating a code of ethics for a company or organization involves seven main steps. We offer an article on these steps when you sign up here!
Ombudsmen can address internal (staff) or external (client and customer) problems. Internal ombudsmen – the more common of the two – serve two major functions in a corporation: they provide impartial advice to employees with all types of issues and dilemmas and they assist management with cases of legal and ethical violations of codes of conduct and corporate policies.
An ombudsman needs to be credible, neutral and independent. In addition, he or she must keep information confidential, give good service, serve on a relatively longer term basis and avoid all conflicts of interest. Often ombudsmen will be former senior executives, judges, public officials, professionals, academics, human resources managers, engineers, theologians or human rights specialists. This wide range of options means a corporation can pick and choose an individual from a profession that would afford him or her the best practical experience for serving as an ombudsman in that particular corporation.
An ombudsman most frequently deals with complaints of a communications or management related nature. In terms of frequency, this is followed by inquiries of a legal or fraud-related nature and, then finally issues related to infringement of rights. If an employee decides not to move forward with a more formal complaint in one of these or many other areas, the ombudsman must respect that person’s decision. However, if the complaint deals with fraud or harassment, the ombudsman could approach the board or CEO as long as the confidentiality agreement is not broken.
An internal ombudsman’s office runs in a fairly simple manner. He or she receives all complaints confidentially from anyone in the organization regarding illegal or improper corporate conduct. This provides employees with a channel to voice ethical, moral or legal complaints without fear of repercussion and without having to immediately resort to whistle blowing. Then the ombudsman typically conducts a fact finding investigation and reports his or her results to the board of directors or CEO. It is then up to the board or CEO to make a decision regarding what action will be taken in light of the ombudsman’s report. Typically, but not in all organizations, the ombudsman does not have a decision making role but is limited to advising employees of their rights and options as well as assisting the board with options in a given situation.
The benefits of an ombudsman office are numerous. Some include serving as an early warning device, demonstrating an organization’s commitment to corporate social responsibility, and acting as an independent verification of corporate social responsibility. Others include increasing the knowledge of the board or CEO on the state of the corporation, reducing the need for increased government regulation, institutionalizing ethics training, and reinforcing an ethical corporate culture.
Not all ombudsman programs are equally effective. For instance, ombudsmen for public institutions tend to be more effective than their counterparts in private corporations because their jobs and salaries are more secure. Because of this security, the public ombudsman can afford to be more independent than the private one who more often than not has to report to the CEO who is in control of the hiring, promotions and salaries of management. Moreover, it is easier for the public ombudsman to report directly to stakeholders because of his independence. A private ombudsman is often limited to reporting to the CEO with no guarantees that his or her findings will be made available to the stakeholders.
However, if more private ombudsmen were able to report directly to the board of directors instead of to the CEO, their independence would increase greatly, making them more effective ombudsmen. Furthermore, ombudsman programs tend to work best if they exist within a generally ethical and trusting corporate culture and if they are in conjunction with other stakeholder programs.
As more and more corporations explore the idea of an ombudsman program, there is no doubt that the program and the individual ombudsmen themselves will grow in importance and influence in the business community.
David Nitkin, EthicScan’s President, draws attention to the way this Supreme Court decision highlights differences between the law, ethics, and morality. The Justices affirm the requirement in law that, in jurisdictions which have Consent and Capacity Boards, physicians must get consent for removing life-sustaining interventions, like ventilators and feeding tubes.
Nitkin Notes: “Family and human rights advocates are likely pleased with the decision, but health care professionals must surely sigh upon reflecting on complex end of life dilemmas. Many patients are too far gone to communicate their wishes. A lot of patients have never given directions when entering hospital about what are their end of life wishes. And the often contradictory advice of adult children about what are the needs of their father, mother or child is a minefield of tension and quandary that may conflict with other important professional and societal values”.
Given the affirmation of the patient’s interests as paramount, health practitioners and facilities will have to learn how to manage an increasing demand for “doing everything.” The process in these situations is important as no single decision making tool or model will suffice. For Physicians who are reluctant to challenge SDM decisions at the CCB for various reasons, this webinar will help you understand that there are things you can do internally to help resolve many of these disagreements before going to the CCB.
EthicScan has scheduled five courses or webinars on this topic. The common thread through these program offerings in Canada and the U.K. is that there are things you can do internally to help resolve many of these disagreements before going to the CCB, and attending one of these EthicScan courses/webinars is a good start. These education programs are particularly useful for professionals from smaller hospitals that don’t have ethicists on staff and may not even have fully functioning ethics committees – they are the organizations who will be in most need of help, and this is an opportunity to support them in particular.
Ethical issues are common in health care because the stakes are high and values regularly come into conflict when decisions must be made. Differentiation between minimizing harm, doing no harm, and doing good often needs to be assessed. In the course of provision of these health care services, problems or disagreements will occasionally arise with respect to the moral or “right” thing to do.
The Supreme Court of Canada announced today that Judgment in the Rasouli v. Sunnybrook Hospital appeal will be delivered on FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2013. The decision is about whether physicians have to obtain consent from patients before withdrawing their treatment that the physicians believe to be ineffective or even damaging to the patient—when doing so will result in the patient’s death.
Obtaining informed consent to treatment decisions [as well as decisions about admission to a care facility] is the cornerstone of any ethical health practice—not only for physicians but also for nurses, therapists, dentists and all other regulated health practitioners. But, it takes a detailed knowledge of the relevant legislation that is not thoroughly taught as part of the practitioners’ education or qualification to practice.
These problems can cause “ethical distress” for health care workers, patients, families, and the community. Ethical stress can have a negative impact on patient care by affecting relationships amongst health care workers, patients, families, advocates, chaplains and other stakeholders. And, health practitioner decisions that do not accord to legal requirements also lead to unnecessary litigation.
A family issues consultant is a new form of consulting that came on the market in the late 1980s in order to serve the needs of large and medium sized corporations who wanted to provide childcare, eldercare, concierge, and other family related support for their employees. Family consultants provide direct counselling to employees, make family care arrangements, or provide reports on local services so that employees can be informed and supported in family care services choice. Furthermore, the consultant can provide internal audits of a corporation’s services to see how satisfied the employees are with them. Family issues consultants allow the corporation to contract out the services that they cannot provide as well. In other words, they let service providers and experts in the field provide the best services for their employees in order to get the best results from childcare, personal arrangements, travel and personal services scheduling, eldercare, and other work-family related programs.
Employment equity programs are used in Canada to promote equality in the workplace. They tend to focus on integrating four under-represented groups in Canadian society: women, visible minorities, aboriginals, and persons with disabilities. In order to determine whether an organization is properly using an employment equity program, it is important to look at the type of job and the physical or other skills that the particular job requires instead of focusing on the traditional gender of those who perform the job. Naturally, some jobs may tend to have more males or more females depending on the particular type of work or skills. Therefore, employment levels may not be representative of the population at large, and yet still be equitable under an employment equity program. The same analysis of employee demographics can be applied to the three other large minority groups in Canada.
Employment equity in Canada differs greatly from American affirmative action programs, which are based on a quota system. A quota system attempts to ensure that all corporations have a specified number of minority group individuals working for them, with that number being determined by each groups’ percentage of the general population. Both systems have their pros and cons. Since affirmative action tends to focus on numbers of workers by disadvantaged group whereas employment equity focuses on equity by type of skill equivalents in and between professions, a successful affirmative action program gets a more representative workforce in each profession whereas a successful employment equity program gets a more representative workforce in general even though a specific profession may be unrepresentative of a particular minority.
An employee wellness program incorporates the ideas of a health promotion program (HPP) as well as an employee assistance program (EAP), in order to help employees remain healthy, focused and able to do their jobs on a daily basis. A detailed explanation of an HPP and an EAP is available through the above links. Employee wellness programs can cover a wide variety of health topics and services. For instance, some employers subsidize gym memberships or build a workout facility in their office building. Others sponsor informative programs like CPR and stress management classes. Still others provide on-site psychological counselling or an off-site referral program. The main goal of all these programs, and the many more included in a complete employee wellness program, is to provide the employee with the best services possible so that s/he can do his/her job as well as possible without sacrificing his/her health or family life.
An annual employee signoff serves three major purposes.
It highlights the importance of the code of ethics if an employee has to acknowledge reading it on an annual basis, discussing it as part of an annual performance appraisal, and demonstrating knowledge about to whom to go when facing certain dilemmas, as well as acknowledging relevant corporate policy documents like insider trading, anti-harassment, and privacy rules.
It refreshes employees’ minds so the goals and ethics in the code are not forgotten and gradually become less important in daily decision-making.
Such a signoff makes it easier for changes to be regularly made and implemented if the employee must be reviewed annually. Unfortunately, many companies, even those with extensive codes of ethics, do not have such an annual signoff.
“Codes that are formulated and then stuck in the back drawer of the director of human resources or VP of legal affairs appear to be little more than public relations exercises” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 4, page 58). One simple way to tell if a corporation is serious about its code of ethics is how often employees apply it, assess it, and signoff on it as well as how often the code is reviewed, updated and/or amended. Therefore, not only is an annual employee signoff important to the success of a code of ethics, it is also an indication of the success of a code of ethics.
Employee assistance programs involve giving confidential advice on personal, family and other employee problems, usually through an independent third party. EAPs are designed to deal with the fact that “an estimated 68% of all employees will, at some time, experience workplace problems severe enough to see them struggle and fail to cope with day-to-day performance duties” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 3, page 39). Furthermore, “at any time, 15-20% of Canada’s adult population age 18-65 years will be performing at a reduced level, whether because of mental depression, family difficulties, or substance abuse” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 3, page 39). To a corporation or organization this means loss of efficiency, productivity, and eventually profits. The idea of employee wellness “predates the modern corporation and the industrial revolution” but official programs began appearing in the 19th century with “education, housing, moral guidance and other benefits [for] workers” and moved into such areas as “alcohol and drug programs focused primarily on identifying, motivating and rehabilitating alcoholics” in the 1940s (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 3, page 40).
Modern employee assistance programs encompass all of these services or topics and more, including drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, daycare referral programs, psychological or stress counselling, counselling for family members, and group seminars on health related, retirement, and other issues. Some companies prefer to have “off-site programs or formal and confidential on-site programs [because they] offer more visible, credible, and professional expression of corporate concern with an employee’s well-being” while still allowing the employee to keep his or her problem completely private from his peers, the company nurse or doctor, or supervisor (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 3, page 41). Privacy and job security are especially important when marital, mental health or physical health problems are the issue in question. On the other hand, “other employers who opt for an in-house, [more informal] solution do so, in the opinion of Sam Klarreich, former psychologist at Imperial Oil, because of the morale-boosting message the program gives to staff – ‘the company values you’” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 3, page 41). It is up to the individual corporation to decide which approach best suits the needs of the company and its employees.
Corporations or organizations that wish to set up an employee assistance program should consider what specific services their employees say they want as well as what needs they are likely to suffer beyond the general problems that could affect any employee, no matter what their occupation, such as mental health or drug abuse problems. Specific problems could range from stress management seminars for high-stress work environments to extensive health and safety services for high-risk jobs. Above all, an employee assistance program needs to respond to the needs of the employees.
When an employee assistance program is being designed, regular consultation with employees or employee leaders should take place to guarantee or encourage a greater chance that the program succeeds. When there is a “lack of joint participation in program planning between management and employee groups,” such programs are little more than “sophisticated mechanisms for controlling employee attendance, productivity or loyalty” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 3, page 43). In order to avoid these weaknesses, the most successful employee assistance programs include “good planning, strictly confidential employee counselling, labour-management cooperation and workshops for company staff on how to manage troubled employees” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 3, page 40).
A health promotion program’s main concern is “health promotion and preventative medicine rather than treatment,” which is the focus of an EAP (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 3, page 41). An HPP tends to “employ different professionals [than an EAP]: recreation therapists, vocational counsellors and nutritionists as distinct from psychologists, social workers and addiction counsellors” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 3, page 41). Often peer counselling or group seminars are involved in providing employees with a broad range of programs including weight loss, stress management, healthy living classes, smoking cessation, exercise classes, fitness club subsidies, back care and CPR seminars, and on-site fitness facilities. As a general distinction between an EAP and an HPP, the former focuses on treatment and the latter on prevention.
An HPP can be cost effective because a healthy employee is more likely to perform his or her job well, be less frequently off work due to illness, and be more productive, creative, and committed. For instance, “smokers are absent from work 33-45% more often than non-smokers,” “heart attacks account for at least 10 million lost work days each year in Canada,” and “troubled employees have two to four times the absenteeism rate, six times the accident rate and three times the sickness and accident benefits of their non-troubled peers” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 3, page 41). Therefore, if employees take advantage of health promotion programs, employers can save substantially because employees “get help before performance problems or distress becomes unmanageable or chronic” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 3, page 41). In fact, “such programs can yield a 150-500% annual return on an initial investment on the order of $15-$150 per employee per year” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 3, page 42).
Above all the most effective programs to help employees often incorporate HPP, EAP, and family-work initiatives. For instance, preventative and treatment programs in combination can be beneficial to two types of employees: those who are likely to seek help before a problem becomes chronic and those who will only seek help when a chronic problem forces them to do so. It would be beneficial economically to a corporation to have programs in place to address the needs of both types of employees. Therefore, the corporation that is considering developing an HPP and/or EAP should first decide, through consultation with employee groups, what are employees’ needs and then base its programs on those determined needs.
First, it is important to recognize that “every company, every organization, already has an ethic of some kind, even if it’s unwritten” (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 1, Issue 1, page 14). This ethic is represented in the company’s corporate culture, which describes and regulates the behaviour of its employees and managers. Does the organization expect and reward doing the right thing? Many companies have now taken the next step by writing down and recording their normative or desirable corporate culture in the form of a code of ethics, code of conduct, responsibility statement to stakeholders, or code of responsible practices so that it is available and accessible to all employees, the public or whomever would like to investigate the company in question.