Employer Behaviour: Ethics vs. Aesthetics

My late grandmother, of an old noble family, repeated to me several times what she had been told when a teenager in pre-1917 Russia: you should be courteous and not just polite; politeness is for your coach driver. I pondered this for many years and only understood it many years later on. I saw people in the street apologising to those people who bumped into them themselves; I saw cars (In California) letting pedestrians or other cars pass before them even if those moved on red lights. They let them pass with a smile. I saw also an HR Director of a big cosmetics company in Russia letting go 3-4 lifts only to let others get in first.

Then I also remember 2 fables/tragedies. One is an old Chinese fable of a son whose parents were extremely old, like he was 70 and they were over 100 or so. What the son did was wearing a child’s clothes up until his parents’ death so that they do not feel like they are getting too old. This can be called courteousness, or consideration.  The other is an old Greek tragedy King Oedipus. As we know after he learned to his dismay that he (unknowingly!) killed his father and made love to his own mother, and because of this a plague was sent on his city, the king plucked his eyes out, threw them onto the ground and walked away from the city. This may be conscience. 

So we could say that some people, more than others, have this very big feeling of overwhelming conscience, for themselves and for others, and they will do their best for others to feel, and be, good and well. I would call it ethical behavior. Politeness is different – you say hello to people when you enter a room and say goodbye when you leave. This is politeness. Strangely, even in the animal world this ethical behavior can be seen. Some animals eat their children, or don’t mind when their small ones die from hunger. Others (some bears for instance) adopt orphan cubs. 

Same with companies. Company culture and tradition mingled with human attitude and actions (usually top management) produce employers with varying degrees of ethics. Ethics when applied to companies means, literally, how they treat their clients and employees. Rather than bore you with theory (already brilliantly explained in Charles Handy’s Gods of Management) please let me give you some vivid examples.

3 companies in 3 different points in time, location is Moscow, time is 1997, 2015 and 2019. One is a major American life sciences company, two others are Russian companies, one a major metals producer and the other a major retailer. In all 3 cases a general manager calls CFO in one case and HRDs in 2 others to his office. All 3 people were currently having other meetings. In all 3 cases the people were ladies wearing high heels. In all 3 cases they not only dropped what they were doing but literally ran so that broke a heel in their shoe (each one of the three). I asked only one of the 3 why she felt she was obliged to run. She explained, “you probably think our GM is a monster, a tyrant. But he is not. He even goes shopping on his own. We love him and respect him. We just think that his time costs so much that when he calls we have to literally drop everything and run.”

One major international professional services company, year is recent, location is global. As we can see the coronavirus made life difficult for most businesses. Maybe some are affected worse than others. So what the management does is announcing worldwide salary cuts even for those who were paid minimal salaries, like assistants, saying that this is a way to safeguard the company and to make sure that all keep their jobs through the summer (if not their lives). A week or so later the company announces 50% personnel cuts globally saying their initial calculation was wrong. (Monty Python: “Sorry, did I say the money or your life? – You did. – Sorry, slip of the tongue. The money and your life.”) 

What is more the same company offers the dismissed people to continue to work without salary on commission fee from the new business these people will bring, whereas only a month ago the management told the people not to worry if as long as the pandemic lasts no new business can possibly come in. Same company sends sample of resignation letter in which the employee has to write “I wish my employer the very best in its further progress” or something like that. 

Now this leads me to picture a dog’s master in a home amidst a particularly frosty winter. The master thinks he cannot afford to keep the dog and lets him out in the open, most probably to die from hunger. Now was the employer’s decision right? Most probably yes, since the dismissed people were not bringing enough business for the employer to be happy. Ethical? I wonder where, taken the crisis time which made the employer behave so in the first place, would the fired folk find another employment.

Interestingly another major international company did the same thing – a medical devices producer, just recently. So ethics is not connected to industry.

Another consulting company – its top manager announced to his personnel that in crisis times companies change – for all, he said, profit was most important. Now they put their clients first. Good news! Any who put employees first? 

Yes there are such companies out there. Three recent examples but there are more I am sure. One - UPS (not the courier service, the Uninterrupted Power Supply) – in the year of a major economic crisis in Russia (1998?) closed its office here, and all the employees were given a choice – leave the company or relocate to another country. Two – Colgate Palmolive in the Ukraine in the late 1990s, also deciding to close its office. The general manager, who before had hired all the people, made it a point to do his best to find new jobs for every one of them, before he fired them. Three – the year is 2020. Due to coronavirus all restaurants are closed except for carry out and drive through. McDonalds keeps all their employees, even the ones who are staying at home and even the ones who do not work from home, because there is no work.

And three more vivid pictures.  A major software company considers trial period to be the trial period for the company not the employee. Apple founder said once “we are paying high salaries for the employees to tell us what to do not vice versa.” A major Russian machinery producing company’s CFO, in a private conversation: “I do not advise you to work with us. Our management style is to humiliate people, to make them afraid and obey.”

Is there a point in all this? No, there is no point. I am too old or too young to make points. What is clear is that maybe ethics does not exist. Maybe it should be replaced with aesthetics. Maybe business is like the animal world, or like politics, where the strongest survives eating the weakest? I am not so sure. I have seen, and maybe you have seen this too – when a dog is very ill, for instance hit by a car – many other street dogs gather around it, as if trying to help, and to comfort. There is absolutely no logical explanation to that. 

Was not avarice in the fourth circle of Dante’s Inferno?