Let the sunshine in: The pitfalls of radical transparency
“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” So wrote United States Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in his 1914 book critical of the concentration of power in banks and financial institutions, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It.
Over a century later, sunlight is experiencing a resurgence in popularity as a disinfectant through the concept of radical transparency. This movement towards greater transparency is increasingly being adopted by a wide range of businesses from the technology, legal and environmental sectors as well as the banking and finance sector that motivated Brandeis’ book.
The movement has received a surge of attention in recent years due to policies promoted by pioneers like Ray Dalio, the founder of asset management firm Bridgewater Associates. Dalio sought to improve decision making by encouraging all employees to express their opinions freely about all aspects of the business, creating what he calls an “idea meritocracy”, where the best ideas rise to the surface.
Other pioneers include the US media streaming company, Netflix, and Finnish software consultancy, Reaktor, both of which have implemented wide ranging radical transparency policies covering everything from wage transparency to radical candour in internal communications to releasing employee emails to the public.
And the idea is growing in its appeal. The 2018 Future of Work Study, commissioned by online communications platform Slack, found that “80% of workers want to know more about how decisions are made in their organization and 87% want their future company to be transparent”.
However, there’s no single definition or implementation of radical transparency and it is employed in different ways in different contexts, and each has its own ethical implications.
The virtue of openness
In its broadest sense, transparency simply means openness, especially when it comes to revealing and sharing information. What makes it “radical” is when information that was previously closely guarded is systematically opened up to a wider audience, whether that’s within the organisation or without.
The primary ethical virtues of radical transparency are that it improves accountability and prevents corruption, in the sense of the improper use of power.
A culture of radical transparency not only makes it harder to conceal wrongdoing or compromising information, it also encourages a greater sense of honesty in dealings with others because of the anticipation that all information about those dealings will be revealed.
Radical transparency can also help counteract some of the power dynamics that influence decision making within organisations, whereby individuals might be reluctant to challenge the ideas and opinions of their leaders. A culture of radical transparency can improve decision making, as is claimed by Bridgewater, but also encourage people to speak up if they see something they believe is inappropriate.
Another form is wage transparency, which can promote fairness by giving employees more bargaining power in negotiations, placing them on a more even informational playing field with the employers. This is especially beneficial for those who are less inclined towards aggressive negotiation and can help counteract biases based on gender, racialisation and disability.
In an environment where trust in institutions, government and business is increasingly strained, radical transparency directed towards the public can serve to rebuild some of that trust. More organisations are laying bare information such as their employee diversity data, the results of internal or independent reviews – such as conducted by The Ethics Centre on behalf of the Australian Olympic Committee in 2017 – or details of their supply chains and environmental record.
Virtues and vices
Openness is a virtue. However, as Aristotle pointed out, any virtue taken to extreme can become a vice, and pushing transparency into “radical” territory steers it towards several ethical pitfalls and trade-offs that can easily be overlooked.
For a start, transparency sits in natural tension with privacy. Privacy is not just about restricting access to information but it can be thought of as the right of each individual to exercise some control over their personal information. This means they should have some power to choose whether or not to reveal their personal information. Some examples of radical transparency, such as wage transparency or the sharing of internal emails, can violate that right to privacy.
Privacy also enables us to protect ourselves from those who might use our personal information in bad faith to exclude, discriminate or persecute us. Radical transparency risks bleeding over into the personal space, such as if health, sexuality or religious attitudes are revealed that have no bearing on someone’s professional performance but which could expose them to unjust persecution.
One of the goals of radical transparency is to promote trust, but ironically it can also work to undermine it.
There are many kinds of special trusted relationships that are dependent on privacy, such as the relationship between patient and doctor or priest and parishioner. Should these conversations be made open, many people would end up concealing information for fear that it would be made public.
While no-one is suggesting radical transparency in the doctor’s surgery quite yet, it underscores that transparency in inappropriate contexts can actually cause people to suppress information rather than share it. There is already evidence that some workers in radically transparent workplaces change their behaviour to conceal information from their peers and act in a performative way that will be seen in a favourable light by others even if it’s not productive.
Trust in others is something that is learnt and must be cultivated through experience and practice. Should radical transparency seek to make trust redundant by making all information public, there is a risk that the virtue of trust will atrophy. This represents a real ethical risk should those individuals return to a less transparent environment where the virtue of trust is required once again.
Respectfully disagree
Radical transparency also requires an organisation to establish appropriate norms and culture in order to execute it in a safe and non-toxic way. In many instances, we modulate how we speak, how honest we are and what information we share on the basis of the relationships we have and the respect we owe to the other parties. In many contexts, deference, sensitivity or an ethic of care – or just the norms of good manners – trump candour, such as when we are speaking to a senior or vulnerable individual.
If we have implicit norms that promote deference to senior management, for example, or that encourage us to be sensitive towards a colleague who has just lost their job, these can come into conflict with the norms of radical transparency. There are accounts of employees feeling tremendous awkwardness when they’re thrust into radically transparent meetings where they’re expected to criticise managers or give reasons why a colleague should be fired.
It can take considerable time and effort to change the norms of discourse within the workplace to enable something like Dalio’s “meritocracy of ideas” in a way that is not overly confronting, where people feel like disagreement is tantamount to a personal attack.
These norms require that people feel respected, secure and safe to speak, which can also be threatened if radical transparency is executed poorly.
If implemented in a targeted and systemic way, radical transparency can deliver considerable ethical benefits in terms of elevating trust, improving decision making and encouraging constructive disagreement. But the most radical and hasty implementations carry serious ethical risks. Arguably, the point of the radical transparency movement is not to continually drive towards ever greater levels of transparency in every domain but to make openness an ethical norm that is, itself, no longer radical.
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BY Dr Tim Dean
Dr Tim Dean is Philosopher in Residence at The Ethics Centre and author of How We Became Human: And Why We Need to Change.
A foot in the door: The ethics of internships
It’s just to get my foot in the door, I tell myself for the fifth time today as I offer my brain, my degrees and time to someone for free.
It’s a phrase that I’ve always found to be so incredibly visceral. I picture a door just about to slam shut in my face, that I have to hastily shove my foot in before it swings to a heavy close. Or a door that is slightly ajar, an unknown little me comes knocking and I have to slip my foot in and pry the thing open – to beg for an opportunity.
A foot in the door to do tasks which by now should be compensated. Because somehow in my years of trying to find a suitable job, no-one deems my skills to be transferable.
None of these scenarios really paint a picture for a healthy work foundation.
One would think that multiple arts degrees and years of casual jobs following instructions, would qualify me for an “entry level position”.
But it doesn’t. It leaves me cold emailing organisations, asking if they can send their off cuts to me so that I can get exposure. So that I can build a portfolio. So that I can earn a living and build my career.
But in my thinly veiled bitterness I digress. I chose the arts. I chose the creative field where getting your foot in the door is seen as a ‘privilege’. Having worked actual entry level jobs such as gallery host, our role was held up on a pedestal, yet we were not. We were made to simultaneously feel so lucky to have this job and yet so small and very replaceable. Why? Well, because it looks so good on the CV.
But in reality, it hasn’t really done anything to help my long-term career. And while I’ve had some wonderful bosses who have helped mentor me to learn and grow, this no longer seems like valid proof that I can, in fact, progress my career. It also doesn’t help that the pandemic cut arts positions in half.
The issue that lies here is often the refusal in hiring processes to acknowledge transferable skills. Which leaves you wondering, where do you gain these industry specific skills if no one will hire you for entry level jobs? Internships, of course.
Internship or Indenture?
Internships are fascinating mostly because of their prevalence, lack of regulation and lack of overall purpose. A report for the Fair Work Ombudsman by Adelaide Law School in 2013 states that “In Australia, as elsewhere, the term ‘internship’ is without fixed content. It has a broad and uncertain meaning covering everything from unpaid or paid entry level jobs to volunteer work in the not-for-profit sector”. This covers such a breadth of options that no wonder those starting out in their careers can fall into the trap of being exploited.
Internships are rife, particularly in the arts and on a global scale. Note when referring to the arts I include any creative industry, because they all bleed into each other – skills intersect and majority of skills learned are transferrable. There would be no issue with internships… if they were paid, but they rarely are.
In the UK, Sutton Trust is a non-for-profit organisation that fights for youth social mobility. Their work spans research on the prevalence and the social impact that internships have on recent graduates or those looking to change their career. Their 2018 report found that that 86% of arts internships are unpaid. The issue with unpaid internships is that life isn’t free.
Putting numbers on this, to live in London for a month whilst doing an unpaid internship costs £1,019 (about AUD$1800). And to make matters worse, due to the lack of legal clarity surrounding internships, there are concerns that some employers are exploiting this grey area. A harrowing ethical dilemma – getting an extra pair of hands without even attempting to understand their own responsibilities towards interns.
Due to the lack of legal clarity surrounding internships, there are concerns that some employers are exploiting this grey area.
It’s interesting to note that internships are always perceived as a stepping-stone. The Australian National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) has a fact sheet on internships and what to expect, stating that they can be either paid or unpaid but the ‘crux of the situation is that it is an educational exchange’. NAVA go further to highlight the Fair Work Ombudsman’s criteria of an internship as a ‘meaningful learning experience, training or skill development’. This sounds completely reasonable, except when there is a precarious edge that tips easily into exploitation.
Researcher at the University of Montreal, Mirjam Gollmitzer recently detailed the precarious entryways into journalism. Often internships are seen as a socialisation into an industry or workplace, but Gollmitzer states that whilst that is ideal, research shows the opposite.
Through interviews with interns within the journalism industry, she finds interns who are ‘starved of mentorship and training’ and often left to their own devices. She highlights a powerful observation arguing that ‘the tacit assumption is that workers, not employers, are tasked with making the internship a success’.
How do we determine the success or value of an internship? To be seen as a meaningful learning experience, interns require mentorship, an environment to gain confidence and an understanding of how an industry works. Instead, Gollmitzer finds interns are often merely an extra pair of hands doing menial tasks, “with their experiences marred by haphazard interactions with time-strapped colleagues and arbitrary decisions by supervisors.”
The onus should be with employers to ensure interns are offered a valuable and structured experience where they can come out having truly learnt something and be given a genuine leg up in their career.
Instead many interns are left with a bitter taste in their mouth. They’re overworked, under paid (or not at all) and don’t walk away with skills or tangible experience they can take into an entry level job, which seems barely adequate. Which leads to the questions… when did jobs stop being a place of meaningful learning experiences and skill development? And how did we palm this off onto unpaid internships?
How did you get your start?
The above two questions are integral in understanding the shift that has occurred in the workplace. When listening to boomers talk about their start in the industry, often we hear those anecdotes about how they started in the photocopy room and someone noticed their intelligence and they were given a chance. Or how they were internally trained and given qualifications within the organisation.
The fact of the matter is that entering the workforce has been increasingly difficult for young people. The latest statistics from the HILDA Survey by The Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic & Social Research shows that only about 40% of graduates find full-time work in the first year out of full-time education. Their median hourly earnings are about two-thirds of median earnings of all workers, which is abysmal since our cost of living is ever on the rise. But this is certainly part of the discussion surrounding internships. With more and more people unable to find full-time work, we turn to casual work, to subsidise rent and to simply make a living, despite these casual jobs often not actually having relevance to one’s degree or career aspirations.
Casual work is the backbone of all unpaid internships. We all know someone who has worked in a pub whilst doing an unpaid internship in their desired creative field. But this leaves young people with burnout, and a distaste for a particular industry. Imagine that – already having doubts about something you studied just because from the get go you’re told you’re lucky to be working for free.
Nothing in life is free, therefore internships shouldn’t be. Making internships unpaid ‘learning’ experiences often leaves out entire demographics of people who simple cannot afford to work for free. It perpetuates the elite nature of industry, and the idea of the grind straight off the diving block. It’s cruel and unnecessary. Particularly because it wasn’t quite as brutal in different generations. For the first time ever, gen Z are running the risk of earning LESS than their parents, something that has never happened in the course of history.
How do we fix this? While I’m not well versed in economics or capitalism, I do know that people need to be paid for their work. Don’t take on an employee if you don’t have the bandwidth to mentor or financially compensate them. We need to start treating entry level jobs as a first stepping stone into an industry and leave the exploitation of young workers in the past, where it belongs.
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BY Althea Kuzman
Althea Kuzman is an emerging curator and arts writer. She holds a Master of Curating and a BA in Communications and International Studies.
Game, set and match: 5 principles for leading and living the game of life
Ash Barty’s shock retirement from tennis while seemingly at the peak of her powers left the sporting world reeling.
But from all accounts it was no surprise to those close to her. From what we’ve learnt about her throughout her career, and especially through her retirement announcement, the lack of surprise from those close to her is a testament to Barty’s principles of leadership.
In times of uncertainty and unpredictability we often look to our folk heroes to provide guidance and inspiration. However, all too often we default to sportspeople as the exemplars for lessons in how to live, cherry picking attributes of heroism and resilience on the field of play only to find our heroes’ winning lustre tarnished when the invariable accounts of various misdeeds or behaviours kept private between teammates invariably surface.
Exemplary people play a key role in the branch of ethics known as virtue ethics. Its head coach, Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, gave exemplars a starting guernsey in his philosophical line up because they are people who can practically demonstrate to others how to live a life well. For Aristotle, ethics is not simply a matter of internalising a rule; but is about doing the right thing at the right time, in the right way and for the right reason. Moral exemplars help show us the way.
Both on and off the court, Ash Barty is a moral exemplar in the full sense of Aristotle’s term. In her humility, good will and clear-eyed purpose that she demonstrated in her retirement announcement, we can see five fundamental principles for how to lead in our work, and how to live a life inspired by someone worth emulating.
1. Relationships are an ends, not merely a means
Throughout her career Barty was consistently clear how highly she valued relationships; not because they helped her achieve sporting success, but because they were important in and for themselves. They were a foundation for her to live a flourishing life, on and off the court.
Her opening exchange in her interview announcing her retirement with good friend Casey Dellacqua, spoke volumes for the power of relationships and friendships in particular. The refreshingly genuine and heartfelt connection that began the exchange with her good friend, who thanked Barty for ‘trusting me again’ to break the news was as refreshing as it was surprising. Less surprising when we remember that Barty, in a sport notorious for its individualism, referred continuously throughout her career and especially in winning, to the central role of her team, family, friends and community played in it – just as she did in her retirement announcement.
As all great leaders do, Barty skilfully and genuinely removed herself from the centre wherever possible – no mean feat in an individualistic sport like tennis. Relationships for Barty, as they are for the best leaders, are of intrinsic value in themselves. They are not a means to achieve an outcome, they are an end in themselves.
And no doubt just as they helped Barty get the best out of herself, she, in turn, enabled the best in the team around her.
2. Leave it all out there – but don’t lose yourself in the process
On the surface Barty lived the cliched sporting principle ‘leave it all out on the field.’ From her epic Wimbledon title win after coming back early from a serious hip injury to reach the final and then holding off Karolina Pliskovain in a four-set thriller through to her epic Australian Open win – which is now all the more astonishing now we know she was running on empty – she demonstrated the drive to give it her all.
However, the adage to ‘leave it all out there’ alone lacks a second balancing criterion, which any leader who has faced the invariable burnout that comes from shouldering the often self-imposed burden of trying to meet a heroic leadership ideal knows too well from harsh experience: ‘Don’t lose yourself in the process.’
Good leaders will extend as much compassion and care to themselves as they bestow upon others. Our legacy model of leadership is the heroic individual figure (typically male) who sacrifices all for the cause, including themselves. As we’ve now discovered, Barty had learnt the importance of the other side of the equation earlier in her career than most leaders. Despite having “given absolutely everything” to tennis, Barty had the emotional intelligence, belying her young age, to recognise the impact and effect on her physical and emotional well-being of what she strove so hard to achieve.
That this is not the first time she has walked away from the sport is testament to the fact that she has been acutely aware of the balance required in managing the physical and emotional limits of achieving success in the broader context of what she values in life and what and how to prioritise them.
3. Don’t mistake achievement for purpose
Barty’s many achievements on the court did not define her purpose. That she was ambitious and aimed high to achieve her goals is not in doubt; winning Wimbledon, her ‘one true dream,’ added along the way to her three-time grand slam championships. But individual successes were never achievements for their own sake. From her own account this was a realisation that occurred in her ‘perspective shift’ in this the ‘second phase of her career.’ Tennis and her achievements in the sport did not define her, just as professions, roles and achievements do no not define the best leaders. Barty was always a person first, player second. Almost to a person, those who had played against her referred to her qualities as friend as much as a player.
4. Make a virtue of a necessity
All too frequently we read of the latest controversy embroiling our sporting heroes. With most sport super charged by money and fuelled by the relentless chase for the fame and status that success brings, the rules of the game, let alone the spirit of the game, are often left behind in the clay (or grass) as players scramble to be the first to reach the top of the pile.
Exemplary individuals are exemplary by definition. While small in stature, Barty stood head and shoulders out from many of her tennis compatriots, male and female alike, through the virtues she displayed on and off the court.
For Aristotle, virtues provide the foundation for good actions. A virtue is a disposition or character trait to act, think and feel in certain ways. Bad actions display the opposite and are informed by vices. We are shaped by our actions just as much as we are shaped by the situations, we are in. Unfortunately those in professional sport, like those in other hyper-competitive industries, are often too easily shaped by the industry they are.
Barty, was exemplary in this world. While she had the virtues of courage and resilience – in overcoming injury and career set backs – they are the least interesting of her attributes. They are prerequisites for success in any endeavour.
Instead, she was exemplary because she chose to develop exceptional virtues that themselves required courage because they flew in the face of all known measures of success in the sport she excelled at. She chose humility over hubris, she chose self-effacement over self aggrandisement, and in a brutally competitive environment she chose wherever possible to play more as friend than foe. And ultimately, in announcing her ‘early’ retirement from the sport which gave her ‘all my dreams plus more,’ she chose those virtues more aligned to her purpose as, in her words, ‘Ash Barty the person, not as Ash Barty the athlete.’
5. How you live in the present will be your legacy for the future
The thousands of young kids, particularly girls, who looked on with admiration at those virtues on display and are now inspired to try and emulate her on and off the court may in the end be a more lasting legacy than any of her Grand Slam victories.
In living ethically one of the biggest challenges is to understand what motivates people to act in the best way. The narratives and stories we tell ourselves and each other, as Linda Zagzebski scholar of moral exemplarism argues, are powerful ways to inspire moral education and improvement because they engage human motives better than abstract ideas, rules or reasons.
Children, and adults alike, are motivated by emulation. Exemplars, like Barty, provoke admiration in us all and inspire us to strive to embody those same attributes. All leaders, whether on the tennis court, sporting field, shop floor or boardroom, have the capacity to inspire others to emulate the best aspects of themselves in demonstrating how to navigate the complexities we all face in life through the wisdom in their actions. In every, single moment.
Barty, like all great leaders, is exemplary in demonstrating practically, on and off the court, how to live a life that expresses purpose, that embodies the best values and virtues to realise that purpose, and the courage to hold true to them, especially when they fly in the face of other’s expectations and conventional wisdom.
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BY John Neil
John leads the Centre’s major consulting projects, leadership and culture programs and product development. Drawing on 20 years of experience, John has worked with Australia’s largest organisations in developing and delivering solutions to bring ethics to the centre of business design, culture development, and organisational decision making. Before joining us, John worked in the business school at the University of Technology Sydney. During his time there, he inspired students and colleagues alike through his research and teaching, and chaired the Ethics Working Group to develop an approach to embed ethics in the Bachelor of Business curriculum.
The business who cried ‘woke’: The ethics of corporate moral grandstanding
Consumer responses are crucial to holding businesses accountable for their social and environmental responsibilities.
As of this year, over half of the highest polluting companies in Australia have committed to net-zero emissions targets. Meanwhile, in the Twitter-verse, dating apps and chocolate bars proclaim an end to police brutality, sexism, and the Uighur genocide.
Out of nowhere, big business has seemingly grown a social consciousness – and an impressive marketing budget to match. From fast fashion to mining, you’d be hard-pressed to find a company that doesn’t claim to be doing the right thing by their employees and the environment.
Moral grandstanding: When businesses fail to put their money where their mouth is
Unfortunately, a lot of this moral messaging is nothing more than opportunistic marketing, designed to profit from a societal shift towards conscious consumption. As recent reporting by Greenpeace highlights, of those Australian companies that claim to be going green, only a small fraction are actually taking effective steps by switching to cleaner energy sources.
Likewise, many brands divert attention from dubious business operations by aligning themselves with the popular side of trending moral discourse, tweeting out support for social justice movements while simultaneously being accused of the very issues they rally against. As in the following advertisement, which seemingly suggests that the solution to America’s police brutality problem is drinking Pepsi, even at best case, such messaging can come across as offensively tone-deaf.
This phenomenon is what philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke describe as ‘moral grandstanding’ – the insincere use of principled arguments to self-promote or seek status. Similarly, the terms ‘virtue signalling’, ‘performative activism’, ‘green-washing’ and ‘woke capitalism’ describe how moral concerns can be deployed as a front for self-serving behaviour.
Ultimately, all these phrases describe the same thing, which is the failure of businesses to practice what they preach.
This hypocrisy is a problem because it prevents meaningful change from occurring while simultaneously misleading consumers into believing that we are well on the way to a better world when actually, progress flounders.
Doing something is better than doing nothing, except when it isn’t
Consequentialism asserts that actions are good if they cause more benefit than harm. Using this line of reasoning, many argue that insincerity is a small price to pay for having big business commit to less harmful commercial practices, which diminishes moral grandstanding to a largely trivial concern.
Yet, when we contemplate the opportunity cost of accepting such half-baked behaviour from those who have the most power to affect change, this argument quickly becomes self-defeating. Consider what would happen if businesses diverted the money and resources spent on advertising their moral character towards researching and enacting reforms that put substance behind these self-proclaimed progressive values.
As consumers, we cannot accept anything less than this because to do so would cause our planet and people to needlessly suffer – a harm that far outweighs any benefit gained from morally grandstanding promises to “do better”.
Additionally, from a deontological perspective, it can be argued that the intention behind moral actions is what truly determines their worth. Since morally grandstanding companies aren’t motivated by a principled duty, but rather, by a profit outcome, they can hardly be considered good (in a Kantian sense, anyway).
How to spot a moral grandstander
In the past half-decade, energy giant AGL has heavily advertised their pledge to decarbonise while simultaneously remaining Australia’s largest greenhouse emitter. Meanwhile, companies such as Woolworths, Coles and Telstra have quietly gotten on with transitioning to almost 100 per cent renewable energy.
Greenpeace campaign takes aim at AGL. Image by Monster Children Creative
Evidently, some businesses are being genuine with their environmental and social commitments. The problem with moral grandstanders is that they take the spotlight away from such efforts. As consumers, we can have a meaningful impact on our world by choosing to spend our money with the former, but the question remains of how to distinguish between the two:
- Consumers can start by asking themselves about the nature of the company which is making the moral appeal –are harmful business practices embedded in the industry they operate in? Does the business themselves have a poor social or environmental track record? If the answer to either of these questions is ‘yes’, then their claims should be viewed suspiciously.
- Be on the lookout for weasel words – buzz-wordy claims which are deliberately vague. Saying something is “green” or “eco-friendly” isn’t a qualifiable statement. Also, note that the validity of some credentials relating to fair trade and carbon emissions are being increasingly challenged.
- As with any investment, if you’re going to put your money into a business based on their moral claims, fact-checking is always a good idea. This can be done through a quick internet search or a skim through related news results.
Remember that in many countries (including Australia), consumer rights laws exist to ensure companies cannot get away with making false claims about their products. Holding businesses to account for their moral grandstanding is therefore not just an ethical imperative – but a legal one also.
Kendall Jenner advertisement and images courtesy of Pespi
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BY Isabella Vacaflores
Isabella is currently working as a research assistant at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. She has previously held research positions at Grattan Institute, Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet and the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. She has won multiple awards and scholarships, including recently being named the 2023 Australia New Zealand Boston Consulting Group Women’s Scholar, for her efforts to improve gender, racial and socio-economic equality in politics and education.
Ethics Explainer: Power
“If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. It’s not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.” – Stokely Carmichael
A central concern of justice is who has power and how they should be allowed to use it. A central concern of the rest of us is how people with power in fact do use it. Both questions have animated ethicists and activists for hundreds of years, and their insights may help us as we try to create a just society.
A classic formulation is given by the eminent sociologist Max Weber, for whom power is “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance”. Michel Foucault, one of the century’s most prominent theorists of power, seems to echo this view: “if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others”.
A rival view holds that instead of being a relation, power is a resource: like water, food, or money, power is a resource that a particular person or institution can accrue and it can therefore be justly or unjustly distributed. This view has been especially popular among feminist theorists who have used economic models of resource distribution to talk about gendered inequalities in social resources, including and especially power.
Susan Moller Okin is one prominent voice in this tradition:
“When we look seriously at the distribution of such critical social goods as power, self-esteem, opportunities for self-development … we find socially constructed inequalities between them, right down the list”.
What’s the difference between these two views? Why care? One answer is that our efforts to make power more just in society will depend on what kind of thing it is: if it’s a resource, such that problems of unfair power are problems of unequal distribution, we might be able to improve things by removing some power from some people – that way, they would no longer have more than others. This strategy would be less likely to work if power was a relation.
In addition to working out what power is, there are important moral questions about when it can be ethically used. This is a pressing question: As long as we live in societies, under democratic governments, or in states that use police forces and militaries to secure our goals, there will be at least one form of power to which everyone is subject: the power of the state.
The state is one of the only legitimate bearers of the power to use violence. If anyone else uses a weapon or a threat of imprisonment to secure their goals, we think they’re behaving illegitimately, but when the state does these things, we think it is – or can be – legitimate.
Since Plato, democracies have agreed that we need to allow and centralise some coercive power if we are to enforce our laws. Given the state’s unique power to use violence, it’s especially important that that power be just and fair. However, it’s challenging to spell what fair power is inside a democracy or how to design a system that will trend towards exemplifying it.
As Douglas Adams once wrote:
“The major problem with governing people – one of the major problems, for there are many – is that no-one capable of getting themselves elected should on any account be allowed to do the job”.
One recurring question for ‘fairness’ in political power is whether the people governed by the relevant political authority have a to obey that authority. When a state has the power to set laws and enforce them, for instance, does this issue a correlate duty for citizens to obey those laws? The state has duties to its people because it has so much power; but do people have reciprocal duties to their state, also rooted in its power?
Transposing this question into our personal lives, it’s sometimes thought that each of us has a kind of moral power to extract behaviour from others. If you don’t keep your promise, I can blame or sanction you into doing what you said you would. In other words, I can exercise my moral power to make claims of you. Does this sort of power work in the same way as political power? Is it possible for me to abuse my moral power over you; using it in ways that are unjust or unfair – and might you have a duty to obey that moral power?
Finally, we can ask valuable questions about what it is to be powerless. It’s certainly a site of complaint: many of us protest or object when we feel powerless. But how should we best understand it? Is powerlessness about actually being interfered with by others, or simply being susceptible to it, or vulnerable to it? For prominent philosopher Philip Pettit (AC), it’s the latter – to be “unfree” is to be vulnerable or susceptible to the other people’s whims, irrespective of whether they actually use their power against us.
If we want a more ethically ordered society, it’s important to understand how power works – and what goes wrong when it doesn’t.
Join us for the Ethics of Power on Thurs 14 March, 2024 at 6:30pm. Tickets available here.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Survivors are talking, but what’s changing?
At the Australia-wide March4Justice rallies in 2021, Brittany Higgins (a former Liberal Party staffer) and Grace Tame (Australian of the Year 2021) delivered speeches in Canberra and Hobart, respectively. Higgins was raped inside Parliament House. Tame is a survivor of child sex abuse. Both called for changes in Australian culture and our institutions to prevent “abuse culture” and to ensure the safety of those most vulnerable to sexual assault.
On Wednesday 9 February 2022, both women gave respective addresses at the National Press Club (NPC) in Canberra. Both criticised that too little had changed since they spoke at these rallies. (Though, the day prior to the addresses, Prime Minister Scott Morrison finally apologised to the survivors of sexual harassment and assault endured by employees in federal parliament.)
In her NPC address, Higgins explained her rationale for making her sexual assault public:
“I made my decision to speak out because the alternative was to be part of the culture of silence inside Parliament House. I spoke out because I wanted the next generation of staffers to work in a better place.”
She then lamented:
“I’m worried what too many people beyond the government and the media took out of the events of last year was that we need to be better at talking about the problem…. I’m not interested in words anymore. I want to see action.”
To clarify, the words Higgins is not interested in anymore are “weasel-words” – she is not advocating against free speech, nor rejecting the need for conversations on the prevalence of sexual abuse.
Tame and Higgins both believe we need institutional changes to address this issue. And if we are to take anything away from the NPC addresses – and we should – it is this: institutional change must be tackled actively – though not all institutions are formal; we must challenge abuse of power – though not all power is formally bestowed; and those who are in formal positions with considerable power must act effectively.
To that end, Tame explicitly identified three necessary steps that must be taken to progress social and institutional change.
- Take sexual violence seriously – this means taking proactive measures to prevent it.
- Provide adequate funding to actually implement the proactive measures we need.
- Create consistent legislative reforms. For example, sexual assault of a child should not be named “maintaining a relationship with a person under the age of 17,” which was the law Tame’s rapist contravened. All such forms of child sexual abuse should be named for what they are. Abuse.
And, according to Higgins’ response during NPC question time, a greater gender balance in Government would help immensely.
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Tame and Higgins have told Australia exactly what we need to do – so why isn’t Australia making adequate progress? Higgins clearly believes that the LNP Government, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison in particular, could be doing more to prevent such heinous acts. She explains:
“I wanted him to use his power as Prime Minister. I wanted him to wield the weight of his office and drive change in the Party and our Parliament, and out into the country”.
In spite of Morrison’s apology, and even in light of the 28 recommendations for change in parliament workplaces following an independent review headed by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner (AKA the Jenkins’ review), Higgins perceives too little action, reminding us:
“Last year wasn’t a march for acknowledgement and it wasn’t a march for coverage. It wasn’t a march for language. It was a march for justice, and that justice demands real change.”
It is time to hold power to account.
On the matter of power, note its informal use. During her NPC address, Tame revealed that she had received “a threatening phone call from a senior member of a government funded organisation” ‘asking’ her not to say anything negative about the Prime Minister because “you are influential”. But Tame did not have the power in this exchange – the caller did.
Then there is the press, another crucial institution with an immensely powerful role to play in shaping the attitudes of the populace.
But what media seem not to care about, says Tame, is how trauma is often reinforced through powerful institutions like the press.
Since being named Australian of the year in 2021, Tame reports being: “re-victimised, commodified, objectified, sensationalised, delegitimised, gaslit, and thrown under the bus by the mainstream media.”
Strikingly, in spite of Tame’s reprimanding of the press for their re-traumatising actions, the anonymous phone call to Tame became the centre of the mainstream media’s focus of the NPC addresses – with Higgins’ contribution essentially written out of the narrative. Suddenly it was necessary and urgent to find the identity of this mystery caller and for the Prime Minister to assert intent to discover which agency was responsible (and, in so doing, delicately removing himself from the realm of complicity in this abuse of power).
Then, on 14 February, the Daily Mail ran a photo of a teenage Tame seated with what appears to be a ‘bong’ (a device for smoking marijuana). One can only presume that the decision to publicise this photo, which implicates Tame in undertaking illegal behaviour, would have the effect of tarnishing her public image. Media are supposed to report neutrally, not run smear campaigns.
On 19 February, Tame responded publicly via Twitter to all media who published “that” photo, stating:
“At every point — on the national stage, I might add — I’ve been completely transparent about all the demons I’ve battled in the aftermath of child sexual abuse; drug addiction, self-harm, anorexia and PTSD, among others. You just clearly haven’t been listening.”
She then goes on to chastise the media:
“By point-mocking a symptom of a bigger picture, you’ve reinforced the imbalance of an already skewed culture. You’ve chosen to punish the product of an evil, not the evil itself. This is precisely why survivors don’t report. Congratulations.”
Inertia and smear campaigns are just two of the ways institutions can perpetuate abuse culture, also known as ‘rape culture’.
Philosopher Claudia Card has argued that ‘rape’ (here, meaning any and all sexual assault) is a terrorist institution. Sexual violence – a social practice – is gendered. We live in a world of “social norms that create and define a distribution of power among and between members of the sexes”. This is a type of social identity power – a power that is informally maintained through our actions and our assumptions about the way the world necessarily is. Women fear what men can do to them. Terror of this kind is manipulative. And terror is a shortcut to power.
Rape is also an institution (in an informal sense) insofar as it is “a form of social activity structured by rules that define roles and positions, powers and opportunities.” Cisgender men are usually the perpetrators of sexual assault, and women and children (including male children) are usually the targets of that assault. “For the most part,” says Card, “the rules become ‘second nature’, like the rules of grammar, and those guided need not be aware of the rules as learned norms”.
While I want to emphasise that not all – nor even most – cisgender men commit sexual assaults, that cisgender men can be victims of sexual assault, and typical targets (women and children) can be perpetrators, the constancy of this type of activity – in 2018–19, the majority of sexual assault offenders recorded by police were male (97%) – leads to the impression that sexual assault (tacitly: of women and children) is inevitable.
Since there is a social practice – an open secret – of women and children being sexually abused, women become socialised to fear sexual abuse. Women live in a state of apprehension, always on alert for signals of danger. Cisgender men (who have not experienced assault) do not have to live this way.
Thus, if ‘rape’ really is an informal terrorist institution in Australia, it would follow that one of the reasons Australia is yet to meet Tame’s first requirement – to take sexual violence seriously and to take proactive measures to prevent it – is because we have not yet disregarded the assumption that sexual abuse is inevitable. People may be working on changing such tacit assumptions, but on a mass scale we are yet to shift the dial.
This leads us to Tame’s second ask: adequate funding. Help the people who are doing the re-educating, who are running shelters, who need to access specialist legal services, who are training medical professionals in sexual assault cases, increasing access to psychologists, and improving the child welfare system. The list goes on. And, in Higgins’ view, if there were more women in Parliament, this issue would be taken more seriously – even though “quotas” is a “dirty word” to the Liberal Party, she revealed in question time.
Finally, we reach Tame’s third driver of change, to which her foundation has been working: creating consistent legislative reforms wherein, for instance, there is no reference to a sexual “relationship” between an adult and a child. However, one foundation can only achieve so much – we need a more proactive approach.
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Higgins and Tame both identified the barriers to overcoming trauma, while making suggestions on overcoming the abuse culture that has been absorbed into some of our most powerful institutions. Thus, institutions are not off the hook. They have their role to play in dispelling both rape culture and challenging the presumed inevitability of sexual abuse.
Given this, why did the media sensationalise Tame’s anonymous caller, why was Tame smeared, and why was Higgins cast out of the media spotlight? Why is the Government dragging its feet on reform? Why do people keep spreading “that” photo on social media?
One problem, it seems, is this: while Higgins and Tame were indeed given a platform from which to speak, what they said was not really ‘heard’ (that is, properly understood) by the media, by politicians, and even by the public. When one is not heard properly, one is effectively silent. Silence is exactly what Higgins was trying to escape. And yet, it seems that what is said too often makes little difference.
Being ‘effectively silenced’ does not necessarily mean that someone literally cannot speak, or that they have no platform. It means that when they speak, they are misunderstood (often wilfully). The message that should be taken from their words is not the message that media, politicians, and even the general public actually hear.
The media have acted as though that one singular instance of intimidation was the most important issue raised that day. But the point Tame was making is that there is no need to name the person nor agency because this sort of silencing tactic happens all the time to people trying to change the status quo. One must ask, are the media and LNP, even the public, purposefully missing the forest for the trees?
To fail to heed the wisdom of these women, as spokespeople for survivors, is an absolute ethical failing. They are gifting us with their situated knowledge and experience-based insights that would lead to successful reform, as well as the many insights that have been shared with them by other survivors who have sought them as confidantes. Tame literally lists what needs to happen: one, two, three. But it is clear that the press and the Parliament have not yet learnt how to actually listen to the intended overarching messages of these women – and, until they (and we ourselves) do, nothing will change.
We must pay attention and be proactive in destroying the terrorist institution of abuse culture.
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BY Louise Richardson-Self
Louise Richardson-Self is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Gender Studies at the University of Tasmania and an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Awardee (2019). Her current research focuses are the problem online hate speech, and the tension between LGBT+ non-discrimination and religious freedom. She is the author of Justifying Same-Sex Marriage: A Philosophical Investigation (2015) and her second book, Hate Speech Against Women Online: Concepts and Countermeasures is due for publication in 2021.
How a Shadow Values Review can improve your organisation
Michelle Bloom, Director of Consulting and Leadership at The Ethics Centre, discusses the results of Shadow Values Reviews she has conducted for Australian organisations, which reveal and unlock the hidden values that really guide an organisation’s culture.
Shadow Values and principles are an expression of the unstated operating culture of an organisation. Operating beneath the surface, they lie beneath the expressed values and associated behaviours of an organisation. Many organisations, for example state “collaboration” as one of their values which is an effective and positive way to ensure you get the best thinking and diverse perspectives. However, what The Ethics Centre’s Consulting and Leadership team have found is, the value of collaboration is operationalised as “co-operation”, leading to less diversity of thinking and curiosity to explore perspectives. Shadow Values can be even an organisation’s culture as they remain unspoken and out of awareness.
We spoke with Michelle Bloom of the Ethics Centre’s Consulting and Leadership team about the results of Shadow Values Assessments she has done for Australian organisations.
How does a Shadow Values Assessment differ from a traditional staff engagement or culture review?
Most large and medium sized organisations do engagement and culture reviews. Having completed many, with different organisations, we’ve found they’re useful up to a point, usually determined by people’s feeling of psychological safety – the point to which they feel safe to express their actual experience.
We’ve all experienced going through the motions with surveys and being less than forthcoming with our opinions when being asked for feedback, whether that’s because of apathy, fear of reprisal or any number of reasons.
What we’ve done is developed a range of methodologies and approaches to get below the surface of how people feel when they talk about work and build a climate of safety for employees to express their opinions freely without fear of retribution.
This is important because once the skeletons are out of the cupboard, the Shadow Values are all known – they’re understood, people feel a sense of relief and optimism that things can change and change for the better. It’s a different paradigm – this approach is more social science and anthropological, more qualitative than other, more standard culture pulses and staff surveys. It’s more about listening to how people express their experiences, which means they’re inherently more comfortable in having a conversation that’s focused on what matters to them and about how the organisation lives their values and where they don’t.
The approach explores people’s lived experience of the values, and the language people use to describe their perceptions gives you a different depth that you don’t find in other culture reviews. Our culture review provides rich insights into the shadow aspects of the culture which is particularly important is times of rapid change and uncertainty. It is not using benchmarks, often validated in a BAU environment, which give a partial view and less relevant in a VUCA context.
What sort of Shadow Values are exposed by these assessments?
We often find similarities in the Shadow Values raised across different organisations, for instance employees recounting their ability to raise issues, manage up, or quoting expressions such as, “keep your head down” and “don’t rock the boat”. These are very common manifestations of maintaining harmony, avoiding conflict, and just getting your job done.
Our insights provide an understanding of how the different Shadow Values constellate to form patterns of behaviour that support the implementation of strategy (or not). This allows you to see a systemic view of the organisational culture: how to shift, amplify and or re-enforce behaviours in service of living your values, implementing your strategy, and achieving your purpose as an organisation.
People join, stay, perform, or leave organisations based on their experience of the culture and what the organisation says it stands for. If there is a disconnect between the espoused values and purpose and the employees experience of them, it can lead to disengagement, resentment, poor performance and a cynicism impacting both the employee and customer experience.
These systemic insights are a bespoke part of the assessment and what we recommend to one organisation wouldn’t necessarily be the same as what we’d recommend to another. It’s about understanding the social system within the organisation, and each organisation will be quite different based on their shadow values.
How have you seen Shadow Values Assessments make an impact upon clients’ organisations?
Our clients have told us that Shadow Values Reviews have helped them to understand the drivers of behaviour and performance and guided them to intervene at a systemic level to shift these patterns and ways of working. The reviews also help them to understand the shadow values that are not formally codified but are having a very positive impact such as “entrepreneurialism” in one organisation.
Engagement surveys, 360 reviews and culture pulses deliver a very different set of quantitative data to the qualitative information about culture that comes from a Shadow Values Review. A recent client undertook both a traditional staff engagement and a Shadow Values survey to get insight into how to deliver on their strategy.
Another recent client had issues of psychological safety and allegations of harassment despite having policies and procedures in place to protect employees. As we have seen, all too much recently, that what is in the policy may not reflect how people actually behave. When organisations fail to address these Shadow Values, it can be a slippery slope, leading to unthinking practice, ethical failure, and moral injury. When we ignore, and unintentionally collude through fear, by not calling out and reporting behaviour we know are unacceptable.
What we were able to do was create safety for people to be able to discuss these very sensitive issues and share their experiences confidentially, and report back on themes and patterns of behaviour. People put a lot of trust in us and we have the credibility as we are independent and not for profit, which is a key differentiator of The Ethics Centre from other consulting firms.
We made a number of recommendations that the organisation implemented, and as a result the executive feels strongly that they’re able to deal with the issues sensitively and ethically, manage the systemic risk, implement structural changes and build capability to align their ways of working with their purpose, values and principles.
Have you uncovered and rectified any other examples of detrimental Shadow Values?
In another organisation, we identified significant Shadow Values that created internal systems of patronage, where positional power and influence led to unofficial relationships of quid pro quo. It incentivised fostering relationships with people who had positional power, leading to toxic politics and nepotism. It was inherently destabilising, undermining trust and ran contrary to the more formal systems of reward/recognition programs, performance management and remuneration.
As part of our Shadow Values culture review, we make a number of recommendations to support the organisation to transform their culture aligned to their values. Recently we did a follow-up review with an organisation who had implemented all of our recommendations and the feedback was that employees described it as a “new organisation” and a massive shift in their perceptions and experience of the culture. The performance of the organisation also reflects this shift having delivered on its strategy despite the challenging operating environment over the last 2 years and the quality of the relationships with its stakeholders has been key to delivering on this.
The quantitative measures had improved out of the park – some had improved by 300%. The reasons for that were multiple, but they included a focus on ethical leadership recognising and shifting the Shadow Values, and making formal changes to the organisation’s structure and reporting lines.”
What is the end purpose of a Shadow Values Review, as opposed to traditional engagement and culture surveys?
With a Shadow Values Assessment we’re really measuring an organisation against their espoused values – what they say they stand for and what they actually do. In the time of stress and greater complexity that we now find ourselves, recognising shadow values is becoming even more essential to managing, governing and leveraging culture, for greater employee wellbeing and performance.
If an organisation needs to become more agile or customer-centric, understanding its Shadow Values ensures that it really understands how it actually works and will be able to make informed, evidence-based decisions on what they want to do about their culture to change it. Just saying we value something is not enough. Understanding how to be more “agile or customer centric” is key. Simple, traditional approaches and solutions often fail to deliver as they don’t consider the complex social system of the organisation and the eco system in which it operates, that really determines what is valued and what is rewarded, despite what is espoused.
Some riskier elements of organisational culture have emerged recently, in the way values and behaviours are operationalised, often unintentionally but with disastrous impacts on customers, employees and organisational reputation – think Royal Commissions and recent corporate failures. What a Shadow Values Review delivers is a deep insight into your organisational culture, the values and behaviours that drive it, and a roadmap to help navigate in these complex and rapidly changing times.
The Ethics Centre is a thought leader in assessing organisational cultural health and building leadership capability to make good ethical decisions. To arrange a confidential conversation contact the team at consulting@ethics.org.au. Or visit our consulting page to learn more.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
The great resignation: Why quitting isn't a dirty word
More than 47 million Americans quit their jobs last year, a new record for the United States. While it is most obvious in North America, a form of ‘The Great Resignation’ phenomenon is showing up in Australia as well.
Recent surveys suggest that almost one in two Australian workers are currently looking to switch jobs, with more than one million people accepting new ones between September and November alone. That part matters, making the local trend more akin to a ‘Great Reshuffle’, in the words of Australia’s own Treasurer.
The fact is most people aren’t throwing off the shackles of capitalism and running from the workforce altogether. Rather an astounding number are simply searching for something better – and fast.
Workers are motivated to leave
The pandemic has understandably taken a toll. Exhausted frontline and public-facing workers have operated under heavy stress for two years. If they haven’t been locked down or quarantined then they have faced the genuine risk of contracting the virus. It’s no wonder then that the highest number of resignations have come from healthcare with retail not far behind. Meanwhile sectors like the arts have been quietly decimated.
Professionals fortunate enough to work from home have faced a different set of challenges, whether losing contact with colleagues or having the lines between their professional and personal lives blur.
Whether the pandemic led to burnout or gave workers time to reflect and reconsider their choices, much has changed since 2020. Whether they are fed up with the old or energised to start something new, the result is the same. They’re ready to move on.
It’s the economy, stupid
That’s not to say we lived in some kind of capitalist utopia before March 2020. Indeed since 2013, wages in Australia haven’t meaningfully grown across industries, placing increasing pressure on workers over the last decade to either demand or find their own pay rises.
Yet the record economic stimulus unleashed during the pandemic is changing that dynamic. Almost $300 billion in government spending helped expand the economy while JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments have kept households either in work or able to live without it.
Such was the level of support during the pandemic that overall Australians are actually, on average, better off now than they were before it to the point where we are collectively sitting on $260 billion in savings right now.
Meanwhile job openings are 45% higher now than they were pre-pandemic and unemployment has plummeted to its lowest level since 2008. Before that you’d have to go back to the 1970s to find anything comparable. Simply put, Australian workers are in hot demand at the same time they are in short supply.
This is an environment in which, for the first time in recent memory, workers have genuine bargaining power in their current role as well as when negotiating for their next one. As the recovery remains uneven, there’s certainly an incentive to jump from one industry to another with mid-career professionals currently the most likely to switch careers entirely.
But whether it’s asking for a raise, finding a new job or taking time out altogether, this period has largely been a coup for employees.
Don’t let guilt boss you around
Rather than celebrating or exploiting this new power dynamic, many feel uneasy however at the thought of demanding more, let alone quitting their job.
Economically speaking, this makes no sense. Resignations aren’t a sign of fickleness. Workers that can freely pursue their interests and abilities in a more productive way are instead part of a healthy and efficient economy.
‘The Great Reshuffle’ can be seen as much a consequence of an economy that wasn’t previously functioning as it is the emergence of meaningful choice for a workforce that has been long without it.
Yet despite these sound economic and personal rationales, there remains a stigma attached to separating from our workplaces and going our own way. The idea of quitting can conjure up feelings of guilt, failure and even betrayal despite what we may stand to gain from it.
This is perhaps inevitable. Our jobs absorb eight or more hours a day, or more time than most people spend with their loved ones. Whether or not we grumble about them, they are so embedded in our culture and language that we talk about our ‘work lives’ as if they were interchangeable with our ‘real lives’.
Then there is a certain dependence associated with work. Beyond simply a paycheck, a profession creates a sense of identity and purpose. Consider the refrain ‘I am a doctor/a hairdresser/a butcher’. We are our occupation, or, more specifically, we are our current job. Significantly, this desire for the personal value of work has only increased during the pandemic.
In combination these ties can bind. The responsibility of a role can naturally and subconsciously manifest as an unreasonable obligation to stay in one, no matter how uncomfortable, ill–suited or even toxic it may be.
All of these factors help to stoke a sense of loyalty that is impossible to ignore. The fact that our motivations for leaving are all our own, whether to pursue a raise, a promotion or some other desire, only amplifies this further as we inevitably place our own interests above those of our employer and colleagues.
As a consequence, a resignation can feel an awful lot like infidelity. Despite our acceptance into the tribe, it is ultimately our decision, and ours alone, to leave it behind.
Bite the bullet
Resignation however remains a valuable right and a vital avenue of self-empowerment and self-determination.
An autonomous individual has an obligation to themselves to pursue the opportunities that interest and suit them and to find work that is both fulfilling and sustainable, or to exit employment that is harmful or boring.
There is also nothing shameful about periods of unemployment should we demand or desire some time out of the workforce. There is fortunately a growing appreciation of our wellbeing as people beyond our status as workers.
Whereas once gaps in resumes may have been viewed as red flags for prospective employers, there is a deeper understanding of the challenges behind them, whether related to family obligations, mental and emotional health or the pursuit of study or other interests.
There are of course different ways to leave work.
How to quit ethically
First, reflect on what is driving your decision. Is it a boss that micromanages, substandard pay and conditions, an unfair workload or a lack of opportunities?
If it is a single issue in isolation, consider seriously whether there are any possible remedies. Sometimes a frank discussion with an employer or manager can drastically improve a situation but first they need to know what is wrong. Businesses, especially at the moment, are motivated to retain staff and often may simply be unaware of what they can do better.
If you’re certain that your employment has become untenable, then you can be comforted by the fact that there is no other solution and feel justified in your decision to depart.
To counter any ill feelings of guilt that may arise, we need to interrogate its source. Generally guilt is brought on by the knowledge that an action has or will harm someone else or be immoral. In the context of resigning, it’s helpful to zoom out and consider the real world ramifications.
This analysis should both appreciate the real benefits of leaving and recognise the often minor costs. For example, by changing roles you may be in a better position to find or accept fulfilling work, or a job that allows you the flexibility you need to lead a more contented life.
By leaving, your manager may have to recruit someone else to do your job. This may inconvenience them for a few hours but will the business collapse as a result? It’s highly unlikely. In fact, they may well find someone more fitting for the role. Resignations simply aren’t a zero-sum game.
Nor does your decision represent a moral transgression. We know that resignations are a natural feature of any workplace. Feelings to the contrary can be mitigated by instead focusing on resigning appropriately.
Again it’s helpful to articulate your reasons to yourself before sharing them with a manager. Plan out how you will do it rather than letting yourself crack under pressure. Practice how you might break the news to your workplace. Schedule a private meeting, talk through why you’re leaving respectfully and end on good terms.
If you’re worried about offending your boss, don’t be. It’s unhelpful and unnecessary to lie or deceive them in an attempt to mitigate guilt. Instead keep your head high. By voicing your concerns you may help improve the workplace for future staff on your way out.
Ultimately, if you’re ready to go then resigning is in everyone’s best interests. If your job isn’t working out for you, quit feeling conflicted and throw in the towel.
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BY Jack Derwin
Jack is a Sydney-based writer and journalist, specialising in business and economics. His reporting has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Financial Review, Business Insider and the Asahi Shimbun among others.
Why businesses need to have difficult conversations
Let’s step back to examine the ethical foundation for conversation as seen by Socrates, who engaged in dialogue to converse.
This process involved asking and answering questions with the intent of sharing views in pursuit of a common goal towards a common good. This would then create a mutually accepted direction preventing any one person from pursuing a self-interested good.
Socrates felt these conversations allowed each to hold the other to account if what was presented was untrue. This process of back and forth questioning and answering draws on qualities of friendship, such as sharing, and allowing equal and fair time to respond, all while acknowledging the value and importance of each other’s points of view.
But what if you’re not friends? Or what if you feel your view should be prioritised? Conversations become essential when there is an urgency to resolve disagreements and there is a complex array of relationships with stakeholders who could be harmed or could benefit from the decisions that need to be made.
We are seeing this play out in all parts of society in attempts to address climate change.
There was a time in the 1900s when mining was crucial to the colony, with steamships, railways and steam mills playing a vital role in developing Australia’s economy. Today we recognise that past behaviour has and continues to contribute to the climate crisis.
Different organisations will be at different maturity stages in their path to a net zero future. There will be unintended consequences and changes in trajectories. To trust this process so that we can feel confident in addressing the trade-offs, we need to better understand it and be comfortable having these conversations.
What is missing that is preventing discussions from being focused on the ‘common good’?
Currently there is a stalemate at the Resolution Copper mine in Arizona between two Australian mining companies, BHP and Rio Tinto, and the Native American activist group, Apache Stronghold, claiming the land is sacred and shouldn’t be mined. The copper is needed to produce renewable energy and electric vehicles. 11 federally recognised tribes are part of the formal consultation process and they all have differing views around the project. At this stage conversation has failed and they are waiting on the law to determine next moves.
In 2023 a windfarm in Kaban, 49km south of Mt Emerald, QLD is due to start operations powering 96,000 homes. The project area includes 129 hectares of threatened species habitat and is home to greater gliders and the brood frog. The work done to date has come under heavy criticism from local conservation groups who see destroying the rich biodiversity as a means for greater wind energy as a complete oxymoron.
The issue is polarising for the general community, though, with some people seeing the project as a positive opportunity for employment and making the most out of a situation they feel they have no control over.
Others, like traditional owner Joyce Bean, broke down and cried after seeing the destruction caused to the land, saying “we didn’t have a say in it”. Traditional owners don’t have veto rights over projects on lands they claim native title on.
The acknowledgment of people’s dignity and worth is a principal element of a conversation. Has a lack of power or recognition eventuated in the local community being omitted from the conversation?
A TED Countdown Summit in Edinburgh was a platform for a difficult and at times emotional conversation on the trajectory of decarbonisation. The guests included Royal Dutch Shell’s global CEO, Ben van Beurden; Chris James, founder of the activist fund Engine No. 1; and Lauren MacDonald, a Scottish climate activist. The platform was formatted in such a way that each speaker was asked to present their position in addressing decarbonisation and the other two could ask a question of them which would then be answered – much like the Socratic method of enquiry.
The conversation broke down when MacDonald passionately presented a statement and question to van Beurden but was unable to stay sharing the stage to hear the answer with the person she felt was responsible for a crisis situation in Scotland. The organisation had lost legitimacy in her eyes. The result was no conversation.
Greg Joiner, VP Renewables and Energy solutions at Shell, recognises how difficult it is to turn people’s views when trying to explain Shell’s corporate strategy to reach net zero by 2050. He explains that playing a significant role in transitioning the energy sector ‘is not linear, it’s dynamic and iterative and there are unintended consequences”. He says that often models need to be redesigned creating discontinuities which are challenging for everyone and leave an organisation open to greenwashing accusations.
Does this suggest the best way forward is to not have conversations but rather do the work, meet the targets and let the results speak for themselves?
What is the benefit of conversation? As much as the exchange of ideas and thoughts is important, the ability to listen may be more so. In conversations we learn about people’s values and principles and emotional investment. We also gain insight into how others interpret and evaluate our ideas. All of this helps to develop empathy and think of new ways to approach a complex situation.
If we want to embed ethics into our business and decision-making, we need to continuously encourage conversations that monitor the circumstances and be willing to change our minds.
Trying to change people’s views or omit them from the discussion hinders or prevents the conversation. As humans we are fallible and opening ourselves up to different perspectives, even those we disagree with, creates new possibilities. If we want to protect ourselves, the animals and biodiverse planet we live on, we need to have conversations.
A Socratic discussion shows that how we communicate is often more important than what we say. We don’t need to be friends, but if we start conversations from a place of curiosity and respect, sharing and providing equal opportunity for reciprocity, then the conversation can remain mutually supportive, and we can successfully pursue a ‘common good’.
This article was originally written for The Ethics Alliance. Find out more about this corporate membership program. Already a member? Log in to the membership portal for more content and tools here.
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BY The Ethics Alliance
The Ethics Alliance is a community of organisations sharing insights and learning together, to find a better way of doing business. The Alliance is an initiative of The Ethics Centre.
Can there be culture without contact?
COVID-19 has stripped offices everywhere of employees and disrupted and transformed workplace culture. Fiona Smith investigates if office conduct has suffered a COVID fall-out.
Human Resource executives all across Australia share one burning question: How can their companies lure employees back into the office?
In little more than 14 months, COVID-19 has overturned decades of corporate culture – one in which employees sat at their desks during work hours, communed in canteens and coffee shops and partied in pubs and wine bars before taking part in the traditional commute. Some thought the end of lockdown would bring them flocking back to the cities.
Instead, working from home has spawned a new world of options, brought families closer together, made life partners work partners and sparked the redesigning of our homes to permanently include everything needed to telecommute.
It’s a subject that’s dominating headlines and research reports, and the results of The Ethics Alliance Business Pulse confirm it – employees and leaders alike now place a high value on flexibility. Sixty-three per cent of survey respondents say they prefer a hybrid model that blends the benefits of working from home and face-to-face time.
41% of Australians with a job work from home at least once a week
16% of people working remotely say they struggling with loneliness
14% of global employees say they work for an organisation with a strong ethical culture
77% of people say that being able to work from home post-COVID-19 would make them happier
(2021 data from ABS, Buffer State of Remote Work survey, Ethics and Compliance Initiative, and Owl Labs)
The survey finding subverts the idea that executive teams are in favour of employees returning to the office over any other workplace model. Seventy-seven per cent of respondents hold senior roles from managerial to board director positions and only 14 per cent can be considered to be ‘workers’.
At stake is more than just the use of real estate – it’s how organisations can continue to provide a satisfying workplace for their employees and how they can lay the foundation for future success. Many believe workplace culture – the neurodiversity effect of being among many of different abilities and opinions – is an essential driving force that creates new initiatives, gives projects their impetus and is the petri dish of business ideas. Others say new management techniques are needed to respond to a pandemic generational change.
New management techniques are needed to respond to a pandemic generational change.
Business leaders are coming to terms with the fact that a sizeable proportion of their workforces now comprise ‘COVID hires’ – people recruited in the past 18 months who haven’t set foot in the office.
Consultancy firm and The Ethics Alliance member Accenture is a case in point. The firm replenishes its ranks by hiring 100,000 people worldwide every year, a number that amounts to almost 20 per cent of its total workforce. That’s a lot of people to integrate into a workplace culture over 12 months – especially when done remotely and in a time of crisis.
Each new hire is screened for their ‘cultural fit’ and receives an induction into Accenture’s workplace systems, as well as its code of conduct.
This onboarding process gets staff ready to work and aims to ensure that they undertake their work at Accenture in the right way. When workplace culture is designed around contact, how can it be maintained when 20 per cent of the workplace have never been face-to-face with their new colleagues? And does it matter?
“The only cultural reference framework for employees is a conversation over these virtual meetings.They do the training, but they don’t see it in action.”
Bob Easton, Chairman of Accenture Australia & New Zealand, says people are slowly coming back to the office in Australia, but there are still many new Accenture employees around the world who have never met a colleague or client face-to-face.
“The only cultural reference framework for them is a conversation over these virtual meetings,” he says. “They do the training, but they don’t see it in action.”
Leaders question whether it is possible to embed an organisational culture when people can’t meet face-to-face. Before and after physical meetings, employees engage in small talk that can help promote a sense of communal belonging. When Zoom meetings end, the screen goes dark.
Dr Marc Stigter, Associate Director at Melbourne Business School, says managers are warning that the pandemic has created a ‘pressure cooker’, particularly for top managers and middle managers who are dealing with isolation, ‘Zoom fatigue’ and job insecurity.
“They have many kinds of challenges, but they still need to mobilise their teams and take those people with them,” says Dr Stigter, an international strategist who recently completed research for the Australian Human Resources Institute on the impact of the pandemic. “The workforce, in general, is under pressure to demonstrate value all the time,” he says.
Elisabeth Shaw, CEO of Relationships Australia NSW, believes companies now have two workplace cultures. There’s one group of employees who know each other well from working in the office and can draw on their past work stories and continue to create certain rituals, like sharing Friday night drinks in person or on Zoom. And another group who only know each other online. As they have never met physically, they will have to draw on their virtual relationship and Zoom meetings to build a bank of group memories.
One way of bridging the two work cultures is to have a buddy from each group looking after and creating cultural learnings and rituals to hold the group together. She believes the days of working full-time in the office may well be over as more employees opt to work part-time in the office and the rest at home. Increasingly, employers will have to manage a hybrid work model and create a more flexible work culture.
“The pandemic lockdown which forced employees to work from home, has broken all the old rules,” she says. “The hybrid model of working part-time in the office and part-time at home is going to be more important. It has also benefited more people than expected as many employees do not feel torn or stressed, as they can have a better work-life balance. They can now pick up their kids from school as they are not spending so much time travelling to and from work.
“This will mean a more diverse workplace where employers will be able to employ interstate workers or people working remotely from the country region which they previously would not have considered.”
A hybrid model “will mean a more diverse workplace where employers will be able to employ interstate workers or people working remotely”.
Shaw, who is a clinical and counselling psychologist, also suggested the hybrid model may lead to more business savings as employers can downsize their office space and rent large conference rooms when staff are required to attend whole day seminars or meetings.
However, employers will have to build certain business rules so that staff do not take undue advantage of flexible working hours. “We will have to navigate the needs of our customers, employers and employees as we move to a more flexible workplace,” she said.
However, she admitted that a flexible workplace is not the ‘Holy Grail’ for everybody. Some people still prefer face-to-face meetings, especially when they have to discuss a difficult workplace situation. “For online workers, it is not easy to navigate and read the signs that some people are not connected,” she said.
The office as ‘honeypot’
Domino Risch, workplace designer and Principal at design studio Hassell, says it’s possible to create a cohesive workplace even while adopting a hybrid work-from-home/work-from-office model. She says an appealing workplace can renew workplace culture on those days that employees are back in the office.
Risch says workplaces need to become more like ‘collective clubhouses’ if they are to create the sense of belonging that humans have developed over millions of years as social, group-based creatures who almost always work better together than alone.
Aside from creating workplaces that have been designed with human wellbeing in mind – that cater to our biophilia (our tendency to seek connections with nature and other forms of life) and our need for sensory diversity – they also need to deal in intangibles that create a more human-centric environment.
“What we’ve all missed from working from home is not our office or desk chair,” says Risch. Surveys around the world have found “people have missed people. They’ve missed contact, incidental conversation, debriefs on the way out of a meeting, overheard conversations in corridors and the opportunity to talk to people without it needing to be scheduled or online.”
Surveys around the world have found “people have missed people”.
She says these findings give us a clue as to how workplaces need to shift in terms of their fundamental purpose. Attracting people back into the office means creating spaces for collaboration, co-creation, synchronous thinking and shared storytelling. It’s only the very best design firms that can take a client’s strategic aspiration and intent, and use them to create a humanistic design solution, she adds.
The alternative to the collective idea, says Risch, are “factories of individual productivity”. These are offices that are simply a property and accommodation tool, and which lack all the requisite human aspects of good workplace design.
“Many of the organisations we work for ask us to think about ways to test, experiment, plan for and strategise exactly what the ‘collective clubhouse’ idea means for them,” she says.
“It’s super important to note though, that there is no magic wand. There is no one-size-fits-all solution – every organisation is different, with different values, culture, leadership and capability (and appetite!) for change.”
One thing’s for certain, Risch says, “fifteen months of a pandemic is never going to reverse the desire we have for belonging and contact – if anything it’s stronger now than ever before”.
Reflection from John Neil, Director of Innovation, The Ethics Centre
The idea that employees should return to the office represents a watershed – our response to immediate post-COVID challenges will set a course for what the future of work itself will look like.
Leaders can start by embracing the opportunity to reimagine what a creative, adaptable and human-centred working world can look like. They should be mindful of the powerful sunk cost biases and status quo at play. Our formative ways of working during COVID helped to dispel many of these, such as the belief that productivity is tethered to surveillance and control and that trust between employees and their employees can only be maintained when sharing the same four walls.
Culture is a manifestation of the physical environment and human relationships. Regardless of the relative configuration of office versus remote hours, the ability to be adaptive and responsive, to innovate and effectively deliver value, is closely correlated to culture – and particularly to levels of psychological safety.
Leaders therefore can have the biggest immediate impact in responding to their post-COVID challenges by doing three things:
• Be consultative – seek input from their teams on issues that directly affect them
• Be supportive – show empathy and concern for their people as individuals, not simply as employees
• Be challenging – invite their teams to think differently by re-examining assumptions about their work and how they can best fulfil their potential.
This article was published as part of Matrix Magazine, an initiative of The Ethics Alliance.
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