When my kids were really young, they enjoyed going to religious school on the weekend.

Why would a child look forward to more schooling on the weekend? Mostly because it didn’t feel like school. Kids would learn ancient stories and wisdom by doing arts and crafts, learning songs, creating plays and making cookies. In other words, it felt like playtime.

It’s possible to do the same thing in the workplaces of adults. One such example showed up in my Givitas inbox today. One ethics officer at my organization is creating a game of multiple-choice questions to create awareness around our policies, trainings and controls. Rather than writing a bland newsletter article about a policy or sending a training-deadline reminder (threat?), she’s creating a game that will have the same educational effect with none of the corporate heaviness.

Is there room for such activities where you work?

There are questions that have been answered and acted on.

There are questions that have been answered and ignored.

There are questions that have no answer yet.

There are questions we dare not ask.

There are question we haven’t thought of asking.

---

If we looked at everything we worked on yesterday or last week, what would we see? We would see that our time was spent on activities related to questions that have been answered.

All of our time spent on one category of questions.

Time to make room for other categories?

Good question.

One of my favorite movie scenes is from Apollo 13 when NASA engineers are asked to fit a square filter in a round hole, using anything available in the lunar module, but nothing more. Putting some limits or restrictions on a project can spark creativity.

On the other hand, too many restrictions can kill creativity. Eventually, the goal becomes unachievable. Employees are often placed in situations where they must perform despite too many financial, quality, safety and ethical rules. In those situations, we often see them break any of these rules except for the financial ones.

Why do they choose to meet financial goals over others? Probably because they’ve seen examples of colleagues being let go for not making the numbers, and because they have rarely seen examples of colleagues being rewarded for upholding ethical standards at the cost of losing business.

What will it take for your employees to choose to uphold ethical, quality and safety standards over financial goals?

When you first talked about the importance of culture, people looked at you funny. They didn’t understand why it mattered.

When you talk about the importance of culture now, people are uncomfortable. They don’t know what to do about it.

In five years, they’ll wish they had listened to you ten years earlier.

Look at any employee survey and the lowest-scoring category will be “communications”.

Companies respond by tasking their communications group to share what the company does. So we end up with countless articles about big wins, trade shows and #nationalinternday. And, not surprisingly, all this activity does nothing to improve the score at the next survey.

What employees really want to know is how the company does what it does (we would know that if we asked the right questions in the survey). What leadership should do is identify what employees are suspicious about and set out to explain how things really work.

Clear the air. Build trust. Provide peace of mind. And watch productivity go up.

Along with your survey score.

What are you suspicious about?

A school district in Pennsylvania recently sent letters to families who had not paid for their kids’ school lunches and the letters essentially read: “Pay up or we’ll take your kids away.”

This story reminded me of all the managers who once told subordinates who were struggling to meet a business goal: “You better meet this goal or I’ll find someone else who can.”

In either case, the better move is to ask: “What can I do to help?”

Any leader would know this if they simply asked themselves: “Who do I want to be?”

“Expert networks” are organizations that connect companies to academics, corporate executives and government officials to provide valuable, hard-to-get information.

Anyone trying to learn about an industry can save a lot of time by using an expert network. With just a few meetings, we can understand the market, the players, the risks and the opportunities.

But what if an expert network contacts one of your employees for information about your business? How prepared are they against sharing information that could put your intellectual property at risk, or violate privacy laws, or drag them into an insider trading probe? After all, many hedge funds use such networks to gather intelligence and your employees could be offered $1,000 for an hour of their time.

Most employees don’t know what an expert network is or what it looks like (did you, before reading this?). The email invitation they receive will be flattering, painting them as experts in their field. Their natural inclination to help could make them agree to a call and the promise of a nice payout might break some of their defenses.

Are you doing enough to guard against this risk?

After 15 years in ethics & compliance, I love to hear a story of bad behavior that I’ve never head before.

I know it sounds weird. Clearly, I’m not rooting for the bad guy. It’s just that when you’ve heard a thousand stories about stealing from the petty cash or failing to disclose a conflict of interest, anything new… well… spices up your day.

So I was tickled a couple of weeks ago when a colleague from a different company told me about a case she was investigating. It turns out that a manager at a small, remote location, wrote a fake policy manual to help him accomplish his evil plan. He wrote a number of policies that contradicted the Big Corporate Policies and told his team that these were the new policies from Corporate. The team didn’t like the policies but they were accustomed to following the rules so they just complied.

I have to admit that this was a bit clever. Why try to convince a bunch of people to help you violate existing policies, or try to do it on you own undetected, when you can simply change the policies and steal in broad daylight?!

This story reminded me of the importance of ethics in an organization. Being ethical can sometimes mean that we have to resist unjust laws or policies. It’s not because Corporate wrote a policy that it’s automatically a good policy. If something is wrong with it, employees must speak up.

I can’t help but wonder if something like this is happening in my own organization. Have we done enough to foil such a scheme? Are we communicating enough about our real policies so that employees can recognize a fake one? Do we have reporting channels that employees feel comfortable using? Is our culture such that a manager would never dream of doing such a thing?

How about in your organization?