What is a Healthy and Ethical Workplace?

A Healthy and Ethical Workplace (HEW) operates following a set of morally and ethically sound principles or values. Let’s take an organization that claims to operate both morally and ethically soundly. Here are examples of how morals and ethics could apply:

Moral examples:

• The company’s founder personally believes that child labour is wrong, even if that would lead to lower production costs.
• They refuse to work with factories in countries with poor labour laws, even if there is no legal obligation not to do so.
• Their moral compass drives them to donate a portion of profits to workers’ welfare charities.
• They have and follow policies and procedures that ensure the wellbeing of their employees.

Ethical examples:

• The company follows legal labor laws and industry ethical guidelines for fair wages and safe working conditions.
• It ensures transparency by publishing annual sustainability reports, even when no law requires it.
• It undergoes third-party audits to verify its supply chain, maintaining credibility in their industry.

Why does it matter to the organisation?

In today’s highly competitive, uncertain and financially challenged world, is it really sensible to focus on having a Healthy and Ethical Workplace; isn’t that more of a ‘nice to have’? 

You bet having a HEW matters! The UK, like many countries, has experienced significant poor employee productivity since the late 80’s.  Despite technological advances in communications, collaboration and information management, that problem persists.  Some technological advances have even made it worse.  There is a growing body of evidence to show that staff attraction, quality of work, productivity and talent retention are higher in organisations with HEWs.

But, let’s not forget the downside of NOT having a HEW.  Breach of legislation and even challenges from individuals or other organisations can be substantial in terms of reputation, penalties, compensation, and legal and other costs. The media keeps us continually informed about the corporate and public sector scandals that organisations without HEWs experience!

Defining what HEW means for your organisation (what those principles, processes and values are and holding everyone to account for them) protects your organisation.

But, why does it matter to your managers?

Managers are frequently promoted into their roles because they excelled at something other than managing staff –  and frequently regret taking their roles because of the challenges that responsibility for people throws up.  Failure to attend to achieving a HEW can lead to breaches of legislation and even challenges from the employer, staff or others.  These can then lead to the risk of dismissal, damaged reputation and even fines.

But, focusing on achieving a HEW typically leads to improved individual and team performance, ease of recruitment and retention, personal reputation, etc.  In short, it makes a manager’s professional life significantly easier.

Why does it matter to employees or volunteers?

We now live in an ever-changing world and one that seems to be creating unprecedented levels of anxiety, stress, depression and all manner of mental ill-health issues.  These are not all triggered or sustained by the organisation or management.  Employees and volunteers can trigger them through their own interactions. So, understanding how they can contribute to achieving a HEW is important to employees and volunteers.  We all have a responsibility to know what HEW means in our organisations; what those principles, processes and values are, living them ourselves and holding ourselves and those with whom we interact to account for them.

Defining your HEW

Step 1 in achieving a healthy and ethical workplace is defining your moral and ethical principles and behaviours.  Whilst there are a few commonly recognised principles or values, most organisations want to be more specific and tailor the language to fit the organisation’s wider culture.  So, even in the public sector, where government approved Nolan Principles apply, organisations often supplement these with their own values such as Respect or Teamwork.  The goal of all of these is to define as clearly and specifically as possible the answer to, ‘What does ideal HEW behaviour look like here?’

How do you know if you have a HEW?

There are many ways of identifying whether or not you have a HEW.  Ultimately, they all come down to answering two questions, “How do people behave here” and “How do people feel here?” Some ways of answering these are:

• Exit interviews
• Employee engagement surveys
• Level and content of employee relations issues and tribunals
• Customer satisfaction surveys or Secret Shopper reports
• Unwritten Ground rules focus groups
• How do you measure the quality of your workplace?

How can Ethical Reading help?

Ethical Reading is a not-for-profit social enterprise dedicated to making Reading a better place to live and work by helping organisations to develop healthy and ethical workplaces. This includes everything from the decisions made at the very top to the way employees treat each other and the people they deal with day to day.

We want to mobilise people and organisations across and around Reading to embed ethics into decision-making processes and everyday actions and kick-start an Ethical Cities movement in the UK and beyond. It’s all about encouraging people to take a compassionate, respectful and responsible approach when making decisions at every level from the boardroom to everyday interactions.

One of many actions that Ethical Reading will take to address those challenges is to run a  series of mini virtual workshops.  There will be an introductory webinar providing a comprehensive background to the concept of Healthy and Ethical Workplaces and explaining the series of mini virtual workshops and what they will cover. This introductory webinar will be pre-recorded and streamed free of charge at least twice per month.

The mini virtual workshops will be aimed primarily at managers and executives.  However, much of the content will be relevant to individual contributors who are interested in how they can help in their organisations achieve HEWs.

Each mini interactive virtual workshop will:

• cover a topic of direct relevance to achieving and sustaining a HEW
• last approximately 1 hour
• have a brief Q&A session at the end
• include a pointer to where further information, help and training can be obtained

See the full list of workshops on the Events page.

Clinton Wingrove – Principal Consultant, Clinton HR Ltd

clinton@clintonhr.com, +44 (0)785 225 8976

• Photo by Jopwell: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-blue-suit-jacket-2422293/