Capabilities
Skout’s Approach to Ethics and Culture
Skout brings its integrative approach to clients addressing ethics and ethical culture issues. To help companies manage ethics risks as well as maintain high levels of employee commitment, performance, and satisfaction, Skout applies the following principles in its work:
- An ethical culture is a byproduct of a healthy culture. Organizations cannot mandate a positive culture in the same way it can issue compliance standards and policies. A healthy “ethical” culture is a result of the broader and more comprehensive efforts to create a positive work environment overall.
- Healthy cultures emerge when employees are working to their best abilities, consistent with their drives and values. Ethics risks emerge out of the frustrations and fears that individuals have they cannot get their job done without compromising core beliefs or values.
- Organizations consist of multiple sub-cultures, each with different tasks. Managing a “corporate” culture requires deep understanding of how sub-cultures need to be aligned with their tasks and how they relate to other sub-cultures and the corporation overall. For example, though the values may be similar, what drives success in finance is not the same as what drives success in R&D. Thus, organizations should not seek to create uniformity but should enable each sub-culture to develop, consistent with a common set of values, and the demands of its tasks.
- Leaders and employees are conditioned by their own perceptions and drives. One of the challenges in interpreting the results of employee surveys is understanding what drives the behavior of the survey-taker, thus influencing the results. In many entrepreneurial, goal-driven organizations, for example, any structure and rules are seen as “too much,” and therefore bureaucratic, potentially skewing an employee climate survey.
In our work, we help clients make the connections between corporate and strategic goals and the factors that drive individuals and teams to move towards, or detract from, those goals.
