9 Apr 2009 in Corporate Culture
In our first blog (January 1, 2008), we asked, Why do employees continue to remain silent in the face of corporate ethical lapses? We cited data from the Ethics Resource Center’s 2007 National Business Ethics Survey which found that more than half (56%) of employees witnessed what they believed to be serious misconduct in the previous twelve months, and nearly half of them (42%) refused to report that misconduct to anyone.
The situation appears to be worse than the ERC data reveals. KPMG, in its most recent Integrity Survey (2008-2009), found that 74% of employees witnessed serious misconduct, and the KPMG survey didn’t leave it to the judgment of the respondents, whether what they witnessed was wrong or not. As Scott Avelino of KPMG reported on this blog, “The survey instrument was designed in such a way that respondents had to choose from specific, pre-defined categories of misconduct….Respondents were only offered categories of misconduct that were more serious in nature (e.g., deceptive sales practices, falsifying financial reporting data, circumventing supplier selection rules)….As an added measure, we asked employees nationally whether what they observed was serious enough that it could cause ‘a significant loss of public trust if discovered.’ Half of the respondents (50%) said yes….The lack of significant risks coming through the hotline may not mean that those risks aren’t out there – it may just mean that they aren’t surfacing until it’s too late.”
In an insightful article, “Why Employees Are Afraid to Speak” ( Harvard Business Review, May 2007 ), James Detert’s and Amy Edmondson’s research at one high technology company reveals that half of employees fear to speak, not only about misconduct, but even to share ideas that would improve their company’s business. Some employees reported that they had experienced negative consequences from speaking-up; for others, their silence was responsive to a “culture of collective myths” about the bad experiences of others. The authors conclude that “Making employees feel safe enough to contribute fully requires deep cultural change that alters how they understand the likely costs (personal and immediate) versus benefits (organizational and future) of speaking up.”
How does one effect such deep cultural change? How can we make employees feel safe enough from negative consequences for speaking up? What do we do about a culture of collective myths? How do we take an organization from dangerous silence to a culture of trust?
Recently, I have been reading widely about the subject of trust. In subsequent postings, I will share some of what I have learned from many authors, including Francis Fukuyama (Trust), Adam Seligman (The Problem of Trust) and Stephen M. R. Covey (The Speed of Trust), about the nature of trust and its critical importance in societies and companies, and what you can do to nurture a culture of trust in your own organization.
GE
