Fake vaccination cards

Yesterday we saw yet another story of fake vaccination cards being sold.

In the early days, cards were sold in person for about $20. Now they are sold for as much as $200 on the internet.

With one vaccine now fully approved by the FDA, many employers are requiring employees to be vaccinated. It is safe to assume that some employees will attempt to circumvent this requirement by producing fake vaccination cards.

What should the discipline be in such cases? To find out, it helps to ask the question “Is this a breach of performance or a breach of trust?” A breach of performance is often easily remedied with training or a second chance. Not so for breaches of trust. In such cases, we need to ask ourselves “Can I trust this person again? Can I trust this person with the job I gave them? If they were willing to lie about this, what else could they be lying about? Am I allowing them to put others at risk?”

A breach of trust often leads to termination. Is your organization prepared to do so with fake vaccination card?

Service first

Zappos famously considers itself a service company that happens to sell shoes.

What if all companies sought to serve first?

What if all companies sought to serve ethically, with the product being secondary?

Imagine what your day would be like if your newspaper, your grocery store, your car mechanic, your lawyer, your mortgage broker and your clothe shop all sought to serve first.

Stuff happens

What is better than sending your teenager to a driving class? Also telling her what to do when she gets into a fender bender and gets a ticket. What’s better than that? Role-playing the incident two or three times until she gets it right.

Similarly in the workplace, we should not only teach employees about rules and values, we should also teach them what to do when they observe wrongdoing. Better yet, we should role-play the actual reporting process. It’s easy to say “If you see something, say something.” It’s a lot harder to actually do it, especially if you’ve never done it before.

Most drivers will get into a minor accidents. Most employees will observe wrongdoing. Why not prepare them?

HT to Seth Godin and Mary Gentile.

When companies contribute to employees’ wrongdoing

What are you looking for after you discover wrongdoing in your organization?

Are you just looking for who did it and how they did it? Or perhaps you even try to find out why they did it? But what about looking for all the factors that contributed to the why?

At Flex, those responsible for the new ethics scorecard are doing just that. Part of each investigation is to identify contributing factors over which they have some control. Factors such as defective air conditioning at a site, or poor cafeteria services. Some of us might disregard such factors and consider them irrelevant. But are they, really?

When wrongdoing occurs, we can lay the blame entirely on the employee. Or we can make room for contributing factors created by the company itself. The second option is more plausible, more empowering, and more likely to change the culture in a positive way.

Willful ignorance

Some people never conduct a risk assessment. Others do, but they ignore the findings.

The tragedy of Surfside, Florida could have been avoided. The problems and the solutions were clearly identified. Yet, action was unduly delayed.

If you are not getting your annual physical, if you don’t get your brakes checked, if you don’t have an estate plan, book your appointment today. And, at work, if you don’t conduct a risk assessment for your business, plan one immediately.

Then, perhaps more importantly, act on the findings.

It could save your life.

Send me to the future

If you had access to a time machine today, would you want to go back to the workplace of the ’60s?

What if you are a woman? Or Black? Or transgender?

In a recent interview, Neil deGrasse Tyson said (at 1:52:00) that if you are an oppressed minority and can time travel, there is no time in the past that was better for you than this moment, despite all the problems we are facing today. Go into the future, because the arc of history bends toward justice.

So our mandate is clear. We must work each day to create a world that is more just than yesterday. And by “we”, I mean everybody. Those in the majority just as much, if not more, than those in minorities. Let’s build a world where those born in the next ’60s have no desire to travel back to today.

Involvement is key to commitment

You’ve been asked to work on a project that will impact another function in your company (or more than one function).

You could go at it alone but you know that those impacted will resent your lack of cooperation after you launch your project.

A better approach is to ask them for feedback before you launch. The problem with this approach is that it may be difficult and costly for you to make necessary changes at the tail end.

Better yet is to involve the other functions from the start. Announce your nascent project by email and invite all interested functions to nominate a representative to work with you. Set some gates along the way to ensure that everyone is aligned. Assign key tasks to the functions most impacted by those tasks. These additional steps might appear to slow you down but remember: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. By involving the right people, you significantly reduce the risk of failure. More importantly, you make allies.

Nothing of significance is ever achieved by a single person.

Has the pandemic caused stress fractures or muscle growth for your company?

Trauma can lead a person to suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Or it can trigger post-traumatic growth.

Companies, being made of people, can also experience both.

The pandemic has been traumatic for many companies. What was its effect on the company you work for? How has it responded to the trauma? Are you bracing for PTSD, or are you poised to emerge stronger?

These questions are important because they can reveal the current state of your compliance culture. If the pandemic has weakened your compliance health, now is the time to take action.

Adapt or die

Do you work for a company that doesn’t give much thought to ethics & compliance? If so, it won’t last much longer.

The only way to change their posture is to change how they look at the world.

Read the homepage of a media outlet every day (I recommend npr.org for the US). Look for a story that points to a change in the world that could affect your company. Discuss this change with your supervisor or another leader, and show them why it would be best to adapt now instead of reacting later.

Do this consistently, and your company will naturally start focussing on ethics & compliance.

In the process, you will also save your company.

HT to Seth Godin