How many times have you heard the phrases: “Culture of ethics,” “Culture of trust,” “culture of support,” “culture of caring,” and “culture of understanding?”
What exactly do they mean? What do ethical leaders do differently to motivate, retain, and support their employees? What does it take to create a similar positive environment in your own organization? Why do people love showing up at work?
The fact is, ethical leadership goes beyond simply checking off your compliance boxes. It involves genuinely caring about your people. Here, we discuss what goes into becoming an ethical leader and how to harness the power of ethics to create a lasting culture of caring.
Build True Human Connection
A caring culture rests on the foundation of ethical leadership.
When leaders value ethics, teams across the organization operate with a strong human connection. How? Team members working with ethical leaders feel heard, understood, and supported. When they feel respected, their sense of trust and loyalty increases, leading to better productivity and bottom line.
Leaders must genuinely prioritize the success and development of their teams, actively supply them with support and guidance, listen intently to concerns, and focus on building an environment of support and positivity.
Promote Transparency and Open Communication
Transparency and open communication are two key factors that influence the way employees interact with each other, their leaders, and their organization. When this interaction is full of positivity and understanding, the by-product is a strong culture of caring.
Leaders must focus on maintaining an open dialogue. They must be willing to disclose information their teams need to get their tasks done. Leaders must also be willing to give and take honest feedback to ensure constant improvement.
Ethics Should be In Your Organization’s DNA
The more ethically a business functions, the more likely it is to build an army of loyal (and happy) employees. While most organizations strive to build a culture of trust and caring, it can be challenging to ensure people behave ethically across every level of the organization.
This is why leaders should focus on “deep-rooting” ethics in their company’s DNA. They must model ethical behavior, maintain transparency across the company, actively fulfill their DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusivity) efforts, place ethics at the top of their value system, ensure team-wide accountability and create an environment where everyone feels safe to address their concerns.
Training and Education
How to ensure the culture of ethics, transparency, trust, and caring you’re building stays consistent at all times? Ensure the ethics and compliance training system your team receives starts during onboarding and remains ongoing throughout their lifecycle.
Before welcoming new hires, ensure they’re well-trained in ethical behavior and managing ethical dilemmas. Some trainings to implement include:
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Code of conduct training
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Harassment prevention training
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Diversity and inclusion training
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Anti-bullying training
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Anti-corruption training
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Security awareness training
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Workplace violence training
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Conflicts of Interest training
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Anonymous reporting of misconduct training
Remember, training should always be ultra-engaging to ensure your people retain what they learn. Instead of offering “boring” content-heavy sessions, focus on making them interactive by using games, videos, case studies, role-plays, quizzes, and more.
Craft Clear Policies and Procedures
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Your organization’s policies and procedures act as a road map for your people to behave ethically, operate with trust, and feel fully protected (and supported) in the workplace. Make sure your policies and procedures are clear and well-documented. Outline the ethical standards and expected behaviors everyone must uphold and ensure these guidelines are easily accessible to everyone at all times.
Create a Safe Space for Employees to Report Issues
Creating a culture of caring goes beyond just reinforcing ethical mechanisms across the company. As a leader, you must ensure your employees have a safe outlet to report any concerns they may have.
According to the EEOC, up to 70% of employees choose not to report misconduct. Why? Because they fear retaliation. Now, what happens when misconduct gets swept under the rug? The workplace becomes toxic, unsafe, and unproductive. Employees start to quit in droves and the organization faces the risk of reputational, financial, and legal losses.
How can you ensure none of this happens? The answer: build a strong anonymous reporting system via channels such as anonymous hotline, email inbox, and other digital whistleblowing tools. Aside from implementing anonymous reporting systems, leaders must also ensure their people are well-trained to use them in their hour of need.
Reward People for Doing the Right Thing
It’s a common practice to encourage teams to do the right thing. But is it equally common to reward them for it? Unfortunately, not.
Leaders must understand that what gets rewarded gets repeated. It takes some degree of mental battle to bring an ethical dilemma to light. When someone truly does that, leaders must take a moment to appreciate it publicly. The gesture can be as simple as acknowledging good behavior in front of everyone. When you show your people their efforts matter, they feel more encouraged to repeat similar behaviors down the line.
Create a Culture of Empathy and Trust
Leaders who have a great relationship with their people have two key things in common: empathy and trust.
Understand that your employees are motivated by things that go beyond money and status. A large chunk of today’s workforce – especially millennials and Gen Z – prefer working with organizations that can positively impact their quality of life. This includes feeling heard, understood, and supported at work, enjoying positive workplace interactions, and working with companies that prioritize ethics.
By consistently modeling behavior that comes from a place of integrity, genuinely caring about their team members, understanding and resolving their concerns, and making them feel respected at work, leaders can build a workplace that their employees can come to love.
Improve Constantly
A culture of caring doesn’t emerge overnight. The process demands setting the tone from the tone, operating with integrity, proactively mitigating misconduct, and consistently making your people feel heard, respected, and supported. In other words, the journey of building an ethical culture never quite comes to an end. Instead, it evolves and gets stronger with every consistent effort a leader and their teams put forward.
Over to You!
Where to start with building a culture of caring? Simple: Genuinely care for your people. Empathy, integrity, respect, understanding, and wanting to see their team succeed come naturally to ethical leaders. Before expecting their people to walk the ethical path, these leaders constantly model similar behavior.
By pouring sincere efforts into the well-being of their people, ethical leaders create an environment where people naturally feel motivated toward doing the right thing, contributing to the organization’s overall success along the way.
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Author Bio:
Giovanni Gallo is the Co-CEO of Ethico, where his team strives to make the world a better workplace with ethics hotline services, sanction and license monitoring, and workforce eLearning software and services.
Growing up as the son of a Cuban refugee in an entrepreneurial family taught Gio how servanthood and deep care for employees can make a thriving business a platform for positive change in the world. He built on that through experience with startups and multinational organizations so Ethico’s solutions can empower caring leaders to build strong cultures for the betterment of every employee and their community.
When he’s not working, Gio’s wrangling his four young kids, riding his motorcycle, and supporting education, families, and the homeless in the Charlotte community.
