Yay! It’s pay-day! But is business just about money?

I’m comfortably into the second half, maybe the final third of my career. A great deal has changed since I started work, and the pace of change is exponentially increasing.

As I have aged, I have become more reflective. I realise that some of my behaviours at work in the past weren’t right, or at least not in the context of how I view the world today. Whether my previous actions were conscious or unconscious, or simply appropriate for a different time, I now can consciously act differently to make today and tomorrow more positive than yesterday.

Sometimes we need to make a conscious effort to change default behaviour, even if that behaviour is not or was not consciously wrong. I have never seen the need for aggression in the workplace. I’m sure that most people agree with me, and good leaders will have always taken action to deal with this when they saw it. Something like behaving ethically and sustainably as a business is more subtle than that though, and our barometer of what is right and wrong changes over time as we become more informed and enlightened as to the consequences of our historical actions which may have been innocent at the time, but which are wrong from our current perspective.

I used to work for a company who had a perk of Pre-Payday Pizza. The day before pay-day each month, the company would get pizza into the office (yes, this was in a time when most people were in the office) for all employees as a celebration that we would be paid the following day: A well-intentioned and well-received perk. It always struck me though that there was an underlying implication that on the day before pay-day, nobody could afford to buy their own lunch, and so the company should provide it to make them feel better. Perhaps a pay-rise, or help with budgeting and financial planning would have had a more lasting impact, but the pizza was always welcome, nonetheless.

The opportunity arose for us to respond to a tender for a well-know payday loan company. It was a great commercial opportunity for us and was something that fitted well within our capabilities, and we would have stood a good chance of winning. The immorality of payday loan companies was clear, and for us to so directly support them felt wrong to me. I rationalised that if we were to work for this client then we should amend our Pre-Payday Pizza policy to one that required all staff to pay for the company’s shareholders to eat in a Michelin-Starred restaurant the day after pay-day.

My analogy was obviously a good one, or maybe the ethics of the situation were just obvious, but we decided not to bid for the work. In today’s #ESG landscape though, ensuring that our businesses are well governed and behaving in an ethical and sustainable way can be more complex. Whether it is ensuring that we maintain professional relationships with suppliers and are not coerced into doing something that is right for them rather than the customer, or making sure that the decisions that we make every day have a positive impact on climate change, equality for the people involved, or the security of our business data and that of our clients, the difference between making the ‘right’ or the ‘wrong’ choice is not always obvious, even if in hindsight it seems to be. In that moment when we decide, we need to make a conscious effort to do what has a more positive outcome now and for the future.

Whilst travelling on the Tube yesterday, I saw someone wearing a lanyard embroidered with the title ‘Ethics Champion’. This invoked several reactions for me, so-much-so that I took a covert photo. Maybe this was, in itself, an unethical thing to do? Given that there is nothing personally identifiable about the person in the photo, I think that impact that the photo will hopefully have will be greater than any potential invasion of that individual’s privacy. After all, they are wearing the lanyard to make a statement. They have, I assume, volunteered to be an Ethics Champion because they realise the need to remind colleagues, or even fellow Tube passengers of the need to make conscious decisions day-in-day-out so that we and the businesses that we represent have a more positive impact on the world today and tomorrow than we did yesterday. Conscious decisions are required to drive any change because of the unconscious bias within all of us to do the same as we have done before, but when we are enlightened to the impact of those actions, we see that change is required.

Thank you to this fellow traveller who unconsciously made me make more conscious decisions to improve my today and tomorrow. Who knows what great things they will achieve today??