Some pondering on ethics and morality

This months' Human Resource Director Magazine had an interesting piece on ethics interviewing the GM HR of ANZ, Suzette Corr.

The big takeaways from the interview are actually two quotes. They obviously struck the HRD editor as well as he (Ian Hopkins) also referred to them in his editor's note inside the front page.

Firstly was this:

My take on integrity is it's the personal drive to do what's right. It's to advise on in what's right. It's to advise without fear or favour and to have the moral character to not just know right from wrong, but to speak up and challenge as necessary... It's in the actions you take rather than just a trait of who you are. 

What really struck me from this quote is it moves beyond just an ethical stance but rather looks towards one's actions and to be able to take those actions with courage of unbiased thought. 

The other was in reference to how CHRO's and HRD's can often find themselves leading organisations of thousands or tens of thousands of people and their capacity to drive positive change is particularly significant. 

Imagine the powerful force for good HR could be if these people, whose profession is humans, embraced an understanding of ethics and integrity and acted upon and spoke up to ensure the right thing was done?

This got me thinking back to a podcast I heard from Radio National's All In The Mind years ago about morality and so I went on a search. Fortunately I found it surprisingly quickly! It's titled Moral Minds: The Evolution of Morality and while it doesn't directly reference the organisational context, I believe it still has worthwhile items to ponder on. Here All In The Mind interviews Mark Hauser, Professor of Psychology and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and Richard Joyce, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney.

Below are two extracts from the show. Both have differing and interesting implications when we look back to the workplace. With Marc it relates to distance (physical and hierarchical/organisational), action vs inaction and why sometimes people might be inclined "put things under the rug". With Richard it delves into areas like organisational politics, unwritten cultural norms and conflicting obligations.   

Marc Hauser: 

So where we're making progress on this is that we built about three years ago a website called The Moral Sense Test which now after about three years has somewhere like 300,000 subjects from around the world. And on that website people log in and tell us where they're from, their religious background, or educational background, age and so forth. And then they proceed to take many of the kind of classic moral dilemmas that you know people like Richard and other moral philosophers have invented to try to get some purchase on the nature of people's intuitions. 

Here's some examples of the kind of things that seemed to cut across culture, at least with the sample we have. 

As far as we can tell across this very large sample of people, people judge actions that cause harm as worse than omissions of an action that caused exactly the same harm. People consider a harm that is intended as worse than the same harm that is foreseen... 

...why is it that people think that using somebody as a means to an end is not OK, whereas something that maybe harms one but for a greater good, under certain circumstances, it might be OK.

Richard Joyce: 

If it's true that human ancestors lived in an environment where reciprocity was extremely important to them, which almost certainly they did, then there's a question of 'well, what does morality actually add to the reciprocal exchange'? And the idea that I've been examining is that it bolsters motivation. It's all very well to give something to somebody cause you like that person, but if in addition you feel that you're morally obligated to pay them back in exchange for something they gave you on a previous occasion - that is perhaps the evolutionary function of the moral faculty. That it bolsters motivation in the social sphere to make us better co-operators.

If you have the time and interested in the subject, I highly recommend you check out the article and podcast.

What makes your employees highly engaged?

This infographic I came across on LinkedIn is rather self-explanatory so I'll save an introduction.

Click on the image to enlarge

What I do find interesting however is the bottom statistic, knowing what is expected of them at work, which is the only element shown as being almost identical between engaged and disengaged employees.

When you contrast that against the highly engaged experiences - talking about progress, encouraging development and praising work there is a clear pattern. It's not so much about the 'what' but instead the 'how' and 'why' that can really help drive engagement when talking about management direction. Do employees still need to know what's expected of them? Yes of course they do but if you want highly engaged employees you'll need to deliver much more than that. 

I also took note of the phrase They have a best friend at work. This puzzled me a little bit however in my quick search for the original image source was not able to find further information. I can only think this refers to having a trusted friend in the colloquial sense. 

My final thought is some of these statements are almost truisms such as Their manager cares about them however even so there were a number of respondents who clearly answered in the negative. It would be fascinating to take a deeper look at some of these respondents and cross reference answers against other data points. Are these 'lone-wolf 'engaged employees who plough their own destiny or just unavoidable statistical deviations? Without knowing more background on these numbers I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps I'll have a new perspective in a few years when I have run through number of new engagement pieces both individual and organisational. 

Post Ulrich HR?

This post is a link to Lucy Adams' article titled Kissing goodbye to traditional Ulrich - Next Generation HR Organisation Design.

This enjoyable read takes the core elements of the Ulrich model then explores and projects them against current HR trends and observations. 

What I particularly like about this post is that apart from being bit a bit tongue in cheek, it's also slightly controversial. There are a number of elements I agree with such as the argument HR advisory work needs to be more than a transnational service. 

It's easy to answer a technical question, push out a contract or read out a policy paragraph, however it's not until an HR Advisor considers these items in the context of the people, culture and organisation they are actually value adding. I believe managers and staff often come to HR for advice because they need a trusted and informed or different perspective beyond the obvious - if it was obvious they probably wouldn't be calling.

Other items I'd like to challenge such as when Lucy states that "But most critically, we forgot the fact that when a line manager is asking about a policy - they are not actually asking about a policy - but how to get round it!". For me good policies are about best a practice framework for presumed situations and are built upon justifiable fundamentals, aligned with an organisations culture (and legislature where relevant). Perhaps Lucy was just making a generalisation of a few, however I would argue that her statement a surface level assessment. In my experience, most of the time managers of the disposition that Lucy describes don't really just seek to get around policies. Rather they either have a conceptual disagreement with what the policy is trying to achieve or the policy itself is a troubled answer to the unique situation at hand. One then has to ask, is the policy really meeting its purpose? It's rare that I've come across a manager that doesn't genuinely have the interests of the organisation at heart - the goal often remains the same, it's the perspectives, philosophies and values that change.      

  

That being said however I am aligned on Lucy's comment on trust:  

...any of us who have had to draft interminable employment policies recognise that this comes at a cost – to our capacity to focus on building the capabilities of line managers. I am often brought in to provide fresh challenge and ideas for HR teams. Whilst they like the innovation, they equally are concerned about their ability to deliver as their managers “wouldn’t do it”. They may be right but this means we are stuck in this vicious cycle where - we don’t trust managers to manage - we therefore produce rules and processes that make them do it - we spend our time enforcing and monitoring the process to make sure they have – which means we don’t have the time to develop their capability – so we don’t trust them to manage – and so on ….

Some of the most enjoyable HR memories I have is where a manager who I once worked closely with develops new levels of confidence and capabilities due to our joint learnings and experiences. It's important to remember we hire managers to manage, sometimes this can get lost in the noise of a busy HR practitioners' schedule or desire to craft the perfect policy.