Last month a Chicago-area hospital lost an incredibly talented physical therapist. Her patients were babies suffering from conditions that would rent the soul of most of us. Even years later the parents of these babies beamed when they saw my friend, forever grateful at what she did to help their children.
This column is not a eulogy for my friend. She is still alive. It is more like a eulogy—no a pre-eulogy, a Code Blue—for the hospital she left. And perhaps for your organization.
She left because she felt the hospital no longer cared about making things better. Her ideas for improvement were often met with “Do you know how many people would like to have your job?”
The callous attitude reflected by a manager who says “Do you know how many people would like to have your job?” is pervasive today. It is pervasive in the United States, where a combined unemployment and underemployment of close to 20 percent has millions in fear of losing their jobs, and then their homes and health care because job alternatives are few and the social safety net has holes. It is also common, if more subtle, in the challenged economies of Europe. And even in the fast-growing BRICs and CIVETs, employees live in fear of the day when they say or do the wrong thing, or get crossways with their manager and are out on the street.
As ethics and compliance professionals, we recognize that this fear presents a risk for our organizations—the risk that employees who know about misconduct won’t report it. So we spend a lot of time and money offering helplines, web reporting options and alternative reporting channels. We promote them through training and other communications. We assure anonymity and nonretaliation. But these efforts fail in the face of a culture where employees believe they will be replaced if they don’t keep their heads down and just do their jobs.
Understanding your organization’s true culture and working to shape it in the right direction is the only effective way to counter this risk. I have written and spoken about this many times, and doubtless will again.
“Do you know how many people would like your job?” raises two additional risks, seldom discussed, that I will emphasize today. The first is that such an attitude increases the risk of bad—and perhaps illegal—conduct by supervisors and managers. A recent story about Amazon seems to be just such a case. In one incident this hot summer, an employee called OSHA because the heat index inside an Eastern Pennsylvania warehouse was 102 degrees, and 15 employees had collapsed. A week later a local emergency room physician called OSHA because he was concerned about the number of Amazon employees suffering from heat-related illnesses he was seeing.
The company responded. The employee reporting to OSHA said that employees sent home for heat-related causes received disciplinary points. And Amazon paid a local ambulance company to station an ambulance outside the warehouse on very hot days. According to the ambulance company, they took about 15 people to local hospitals and treated 30 people onsite.
In a statement responding to the story, Amazon said, “The safety and well-being of our associates is our number one priority.”
Perhaps Amazon’s managers at this warehouse did not receive or believe this message. The attitude of “if you don’t like working in the heat, we can find somebody else who will” seems to describe the situation in its Eastern Pennsylvania facility. What message do your managers hear—and transmit?
The second risk that “Do you know how many people would like to have your job?” raises is actually an opportunity for ethics and compliance professionals who struggle for attention and resources. Because this attitude is not simply a compliance risk—it is a business risk.
Every organization knows that almost all ideas for improvement in quality, efficiency, cost or service come from employees. The vast majority of innovation comes from employees willing to take a risk. Your executives understand this. Your board does too. The efforts of ethics and compliance professionals to create a culture of openness reap business benefits far beyond the legal.
Time to get to work. Because if you don’t, I know lots of people who would like to have your job.
© 2011 Steve Priest
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