Source: Harvard Business Review
Category: Corporate Culture
From Volkswagen’s emissions fiasco to Wells Fargo’s deceptive sales practices to Uber’s privacy intrusions, corporate scandals are a recurring reality in global business. Compliance programs increasingly take a legalistic approach to ethics that focuses on individual accountability. Yet behavioral science suggests that people are ethically malleable, so creating an ethical culture means thinking about ethics not simply as a belief problem but also as a design problem. The authors suggest four ways to make being good as easy as possible: Connect ethical principles to strategies and policies, keep ethics top of mind, reward ethical behavior through a variety of incentives, and encourage ethical norms in day-to-day practices.