EXHIBIT
Employee Behavior Policies
Employee Behavior Policies
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by Jeffrey L Seglin (August 23, 2000)
This article copyright © 2000 by CMP Media Inc., 600 Community Drive, Manhasset, NY 11030. Reprinted from PLANET IT with permission.
It'd be remarkable if your company didn't have some policy meant to govern employee behavior. The question is, do such policies work?
Many corporate behavioral policies are triggered by a major event within the company or the business community at large. Policies based on experiences that managers and employees immediately perceive as relevant are often quite effective.
Say, for example, that an employee drives away from a company function having imbibed too much of the alcohol-laced punch. If he plays a part in an automobile accident that results in injuries not only to himself but to others as well, the company will find itself exposed to the possibility of litigation for negligence in monitoring the quantity of alcohol its employee consumed at the company gathering. Should this company subsequently impose a no-alcohol-at-company-functions policy, there would be no confusion or question about its meaning.
But, says Tama Starr, president of Artkraft Strauss, a sign-making company, some behavior can't be legislated from on high. "In all matters ethical and judgmental," she says, rules from above "can never be as effective as the discipline individuals impose on themselves from within. If we believe there is essential goodness in people, we have to believe they have an ethical core, and that expressing it leads to happiness. People have to figure this out for themselves."
Nevertheless, many companies do create specific employee behavior policies as a result of external forces that don't resonate quite so clearly with employees. Take, for example, the companies that developed policies about workplace romance as a result of the dalliance between the country's commander-in-chief and an eager-to-please intern. Granted, a survey conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management revealed that at the time, only 27 percent of the companies polled had workplace romance policies in place. With 55 percent of those companies reporting that the most frequent outcome of a workplace romance is marriage, a noble result, you have to wonder why they bothered with a policy in the first place. Most of us know that it's ridiculous to presume that companies can regulate romance out of the workplace. After all, work is where we spend most of our waking hours with people of similar interests.
Just The Facts
Company policies that govern behavior go far beyond outlawing office romance. In July 1998, the Society of Human Resource Management surveyed companies about their policies for giving references for employees. While 98 percent of the human resources professionals who responded said they regularly give out the dates of an employee's employment, only 19 percent said they give the reason for an employee's departure; a mere 16 percent discuss an employee's qualifications for a particular job; only 13 percent comment on an employee's work habits; and just 8 percent comment on bizarre or violent behavior. Presumably, the justification for such name, rank and serial number policies is to avoid rampant litigation due to errant reference checks.
"I don't have to tell you how many employer decisions and policies these days are driven by fear of lawsuits," says Starr. And she, too, starts speaking in code. "I owe it to fellow employers to communicate the reality. So I say what I hope will enable the other party to read between the lines. About someone who was as dumb as a box of rocks, I said, 'Ms. X is one of the nicest people I have ever met. She is so nice! She is really nice. She always smiles. She is so pleasant.' When the prospective employer asked about her competency, I repeated my praise of her niceness, and I think he got the picture. About a slippery accounting person, I emphasized his 'creativity.'"
Others, such as Cristi Cristich, who in 1985 founded Cristek Interconnects, a manufacturer of electronic connectors, establish policies that permit the company to say only what individual employees want it to say about their tenure there. Cristich asks each departing employee to sign a form on which he or she has indicated what information beyond the basic name, rank and serial number may be released. "They can specify what type of info they would like us to make available if we are contacted," says Cristich. "If someone leaves on good terms, we will provide a reference letter if asked. I find this is the best way to handle this."
But the truth is that fears of lawsuits may be unwarranted. C. Patrick Fleenor, Peter Arnesen and Marlin Blizinsky, professors at Seattle University, conducted a study of court decisions and settlements in Washington, Idaho and Alaska during 1995 and 1996. Their review of the records turned up not one such suit. Those authors also cited a study conducted by Steven L. Willborn and Ramona Paetzold, which examined federal and state court cases from 1965 to 1970 and from 1985 to 1990. That nationwide review found only 16 defamation cases regarding reference checks. And in only four of those cases, according to the study, did the plaintiffs prevail.
Nobody could object to employers' concern for being careful and truthful about former employees, but is a fear-driven policy that constrains employers from releasing all but the most basic details in anyone's best interests?
Minding Employees Online
As a result of a few highly publicized cases of companies' removing employees who had abused workplace e-mail or Internet access, most employers have either already imposed a usage policy or are contemplating one. In this year's annual survey of electronic monitoring and surveillance in the workplace, the American Management Association found that nearly three-quarters of major U.S. corporations record and review their employees' phone calls, e-mail, Internet connections and computer files. That's double the number of companies that scrutinized employees' electronic behavior in 1997.
"Internet access is limited to people who can be trusted not to waste company resources," Starr says about Artkraft's policy. "If anyone does such a thing, I would disconnect them. If their job depends on it, I would disconnect their job, after a warning. Toys should be played with at home; this is a workplace." Starr reports that when they are in doubt, her people ask. "Not long ago a customer sent a bad-taste joke," she says, "and after a brief discussion, the Webmistress, instead of forwarding it to the intended recipient, sent it back with a polite note saying we don't accept that kind of joke."
Like many other companies, Cristich's also has an Internet usage policy. "After working hours, employees may use the company Internet and e-mail for personal use," she says. "We have a dedicated T1 line and like to extend the speed and quality of this resource to employees who would like to use it before or after work. Pornography, obscenity and profiteering are never allowed with the company resources. When we introduced the policy, a special memo was circulated for each employee to sign."
But in another Internet usage policy survey taken this year, Elron Software, a company that publishes monitoring software, found that a tenth of the workers surveyed said they'd seen co-workers viewing adult Web sites at work. And more than half of those reported that their companies had explicit policies forbidding such use of company equipment.
And that, of course, again begs the question: Why bother with policies if they don't seem to be working?
So Why Bother With Policies?
KPMG released its Organizational Integrity (what most of us would call ethics) survey in May, reporting that while five out of six employees surveyed said their companies had a formal ethics program, three out of four of them said that, in the past year, they had observed illegal or unethical conduct on the job. The announcement, questioning the efficacy of ethics policies, stated that "employees are observing widespread illegal and unethical conduct in the workplace despite the presence of ethics programs."
A more ambitious survey by the Ethics Resource Center reported that the percentage of employees who said they'd observed misconduct over the previous year was, at 31 percent, far lower. But still it confirmed that despite emphatic company policies, misconduct still occurs.
Is there, then, any reason for companies to have policies?
Well, one reason for bothering with such policies is that often, when they are well-executed, these policies do work.
"Putting ethics out front as a live issue can help," says Starr. "At Artkraft Strauss, we have started talking more about it, and I think it's helping us be a better company. Managers and supervisors are becoming more conscious of the example they set, and this resonates throughout. Quality people would always rather be in a workplace where standards - all standards -- are high. Then they know they aren't just marking time in life."
The most obvious reason for policies' failing to work is that employees perceive the policies to be nothing more than lip service. This, of course, is clearly the case when employees observe senior management behaving in a manner inconsistent with the policy. And in cases where senior management fails to articulate the rationale for the policy, instead of viewing the policy as a set of standards that say something important about the culture and values of their company, the employees get the impression that the policy is there merely to protect the company against litigation.
Still, when it works, an ethics policy can have a dramatic effect on the company. Consider, for example, another finding in KPMG's survey of organizational integrity. A full 80 percent of the employees who believed that management does uphold the ethical standards of the company also maintained that their current customers would recommend their company to others. That figure is halved among employees who believed that management doesn't walk the ethical talk.
Not reason enough to bother? Perhaps something more relevant to the cause of management -- today's tight labor market -- will make a stronger case. Of the employees who thought management would uphold a company's ethical standards, 81 percent said they'd recommend their company to prospective employees. But only 21 percent who felt their management swayed from ethical behavior would make the same recommendation, a finding that could spell death to any company competing for the best and the brightest recruits.
Kathleen E. Pavelka, chief executive of Telecomp, a company that solicits gifts for charitable institutions and organizations, recognizes the importance of having an ethics policy that her employees know she herself follows. "It was developed really from my own personal values," says Pavelka. "They are the company values that I want. I wouldn't own a company that didn't adhere to strict ethical standards and behaviors. We let employees know about it through written personnel policies, but probably more importantly, through our culture. My own people police our policy to the point that I honestly don't worry about it anymore. It's just part of the fabric of our company."
Pavelka's case emphasizes the fact that policies in and of themselves are worth nothing if they're not backed by management and embraced by employees.
That's why companies should bother with policies. Even more important, they should bother to execute them well.
Jeffrey L. Seglin
Assistant Professor, Magazine Publishing, Emerson College
Business Ethics Columnist, Sunday New York Times
home office: 617.265.9620 Emerson office: 617.824.8240 jseglin@post.harvard.edu home page: http://business.inc.com/seglin
First published at: http://www.PlanetIT.com/docs/PIT20000823S0004
Buy Jeffery's book at: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471347795/themaxletterA/104-7800615-1509512