All eyes are on you. The ethics you display at work are going to have a direct impact on the way your employees work. Today’s troubling economy has resulted in hundreds of lost jobs, decreased incomes, and vanishing bonuses and raises.

Take a few moments to ask yourself a few questions in an effort to assess your own ethics in the workplace:

1. Do I have a specific set of beliefs? If so, what are they? Do you think about your beliefs as you work towards the goals you have set for yourself in life?

2. What are my goals? Do you have them written down so that you can remind yourself of them whenever necessary? Having goals will encourage you to work hard and make sure that everything we do is of the highest quality.

3. Do I need to enhance my skills? Are there skills that you need to develop in order to reach your ultimate goals? Do you need to take a few classes or ask for additional training? Are you committed to developing those skills so that you can move forward?

4. What are my standards? Do you have a set level of standards that directly reflects the ethics you have put in place for yourself? Would you prefer mediocrity or only the highest quality of work? Is there ever a time to make an exception?

5. Do I practice what I preach? Do you tell your employees to set standards, deliver high quality work, and treat each other respectfully and then give them a model to look at? Do you act the way you want others to act and treat them as you would be treated?

Take some time each evening to look back at your day and ask yourself what you could have done differently. Think about what you can do the next day to improve yourself.

Are you setting a positive example for your employees?

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

Today I want to address ethics one more time, and then we’ll give it a rest for a while. How you treat your employees is imperative, and how your employees regard you as an organisation is important as well. But have you ever given any thought to how your employees and organisation, together, treat the rest of the world as a whole?

Anyone not directly associated with your company should be treated with some level of respect. These people may include your actual clients, board members, brokers and suppliers, and even your competitors. This means making reasonable business decisions without succumbing to negative influence.

Let’s look at an example. Perhaps you are the person within your organisation in charge of ordering supplies. You’ve asked two major widget suppliers to give their best quotes. Company A has quoted a very reasonable price. Company B has quoted a price that is a few pounds higher, and the sales representative, upon realizing you might have a better quote, calls and offers you two tickets to the ballet. Both companies have impeccable reputations and provide excellent customer service. It’s your anniversary weekend, and tickets to the ballet would be the perfect gift for your significant other.

Which company will you go with? Technically, Company A has provided you with the best price and will continue to do so in the future. While those ballet tickets may seem appealing, Company B is merely offering you a bribe. If you take those tickets, you may feel obligated to choose Company B even though they won’t be the best for your organisation in the long run. Choosing Company B solely because of the ballet tickets would be considered unethical.

Other examples of how unethical behavior impacts business within the economy include the high costs of pharmaceuticals due to “research,” the inability of financial institutions to report correct numbers to the public, and business in foreign countries regularly (and legally) operating on systems that thrive on bribes.

How you view the rest of the world will show in your work and customer service. Make sure that your new managers receive the coaching necessary to identify and deal with unethical situations. Working as ethically as possible will keep your company off of the front page of the newspapers.

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

Not you personally, but you as an organisation. Do they respect you; do they love their jobs? Or do they go home at night and complain about their days and put down the company when they speak to their friends?

There are three main concerns you have when it comes to your employees and they way they regard your organisation:

1. The disgruntled employee. An unhappy person is likely to tell more people about his bad experiences than his happy ones. You’ve likely heard this concept in terms of sales, but it applies to employee management as well. Are you sure your team members are happy with their jobs?

2. Conflicts of interest. It’s not unusual for an employee to have a second job in order to support his hobbies or pay his bills, but you will have problems if that second job is within the same industry or with a competitor. You risk having your company secrets disclosed to others or possibly even having your team members steal clients.

3. General dishonesty. Are your employees coming to work on time and, if not, are they filling out their time cards accordingly? Are they making personal, long-distance telephone calls on company time? Are they going home with office supplies tucked into their purses or brief cases?

It’s usually easy to tell if an employee is unhappy, and most workers are honest more often than not. Are you prepared, however, to deal with the conflicts and issues created by those who simply can’t help themselves?

Having an employee publicly degrade your business can be difficult to deal with. Do your best to communicate with your employees regularly, staying abreast of the changes in their lives and assessing whether or not they’re happy in their work. If not, you may be able to make changes; but knowing is half the battle.

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

The other day we approached the idea of ethics in the workplace, breaking the concept down into three main categories. Today I’d like to take a look at how you, or your organisation, treat your employees.

When you consider whether or not you are treating employees in an ethical manner, you have to take a look at your main managerial roles. They are to hire and/or fire employees, make sure they are given fair wages and safe working conditions, to protect their rights to privacy, and to treat them with respect.

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

What happens when you hire an employee with a bad attitude or with a different set of religious values that make you or other employees uncomfortable? Can you fire him? Most people might agree that if an employee doesn’t “fit in” with the work group, he or she will not be successful. The problem is in the fact that whether or not you all get along with each other has nothing to do with whether or not your employee is doing his job effectively. What if that same employee was the best research assistant in the entire department, working at twice the rate of your other employees? Is it fair to discriminate against him just because he has follows a different religious path or has a surly attitude?

Another example of poor ethics is displayed when one demographic group is paid less for the same job as another. Women and immigrants, for example, may find they are making much less than men in the exact same roles with the exact same job duties. In some countries, the difference in pay ranges from anywhere from an astounding 25 to 50 percent.

What if, as a manager, your employee discloses some information about his medical history or personal life? He may need to give you this information so that you can work with him on a schedule or work load change, but should the information go any further than your office? In most cases it should not, but in many instances that information makes it to the water cooler, where mangers swap stories about their employees. One person vows the next person to secrecy, and so on – until the entire office knows someone else’s personal information. Not only was the sharing of information unethical, but it was a blatant breach of privacy.

Neither of these situations is fair to the employees who are being judged. If your employees feel as though they can’t trust their manager or company, they’ll begin to develop an attitude of discontent. No one wants to work in an unethical environment.

Make sure that proper ethics courses are included in your new hire and management training programs. Acting properly will save you and your company a lot of time and aggravation.

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

We’re going to spend a bit of time this week discussing ethics in the workplace. As a manager, the ethics you portray, or the way you behave, has a direct impact on the reputation of your company and your ability to build a team.

There are three main things you need to keep in mind when it comes to ethics and the way they impact the workplace:

1. How does the company treat its employees?
2. How do the employees treat the company?
3. How do the company and its employees treat the rest of the world?

As a manager, you represent the company. The actions and displays of morality you personally make are going to play a significant role in the way the company is perceived by both other employees and the outside world.

Over then coming days we’ll take a closer look at different facets of managerial ethics. Hopefully you’ll be able to identify changes you need to make in your workplace before they ruin your business or team.

Let me know if you have any current ethics concerns within your workplace. Leave a note in the comments or click the box on your right to ask me a question. We’ll do our best to help.

Thanks again,
Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”